Lev Raphael: Essays

Essays

I fell in love with storytelling way back in second grade but it wasn't until I started on my first book tour in 1990 that I began telling stories about my life, real stories, not stories shaped by my fiction. And audiences enjoyed them. So being asked to write about my suburb of Okemos in Michigan for the anthology Hometowns was both exciting and a bit daunting. Would it be as much fun "sticking to the facts" as re-shaping them for the short stories I'd been publishing for over a decade?

As a writer friend once said, "If you didn't have doubts about your craft, you'd be a jerk." That essay was successful and admired, which opened another door for me. I've continued to enjoy working in this form as much as all the other genres I've published in, exploring a wide array of subjects. It's also deeply rewarding to teach memoir and essay writing at writers' conferences, in master classes, at Michigan State University, and via my coaching and mentoring website for writers, writewithoutborders.

You can find many of my essays in the collections Writing a Jewish Life, Book Lust! & Writer's Block is Bunk.  

These are links to my most recently published essays, from August 2021 to the present:

"My Mother's Secret Memoirs"	"Staring at Wheelchairs in the Airport"
"Cold Marble/Hot Memories"	"Me and My Migraines"
"Health Club Blues"	"Another Day, Another Migraine"
"Passager Pandemic Diary"	"The Bells"
"Panic in Michigan"	"Rushing to Berlin"
"Finding My Voice at Sixty" (PDF)	"Night Words"
"The Tangled History of My Beard"	"Out/Write Memories" (PDF)
"What Do Writers Need?  Sitzfleisch!"	"London Healing" (PDF)
"Bike Shame/Bike Love/Bike Joy"	"Portrait of a Lady"
"The Bells" (reprint)	"Unexpected Journey"
"House of Pain"	"Mother Museum" (PDF)
"My Jesus Hair" (PDF)	"Henry James Told Me Who I Was"
"Good Morning, Migraine"	"Bridge of Dreams" (PDF)
"Why Not Reject Your Rejections?"	"If I Were Straight, I Would Never Have Learned How to Swim" (PDF)
"Teaching at a Toxic University"	"On Fire"
"Two Worlds" (PDF)	"Musketeer"
"Rendezvous in Bruxelles"	"My Mother's Abortion"
"How to Do a Killer Reading"	"It's All Relative" (PDF)
"So You've Been Invited to Do a Reading...."	"My Jesus Hair" (reprint)
"Me and the Musketeers"	"How to Handle Q&A at Your Reading"
"Voyages"	"Free Man in London"

Forthcoming:
"My Brother is Toast"; "Words & Music"; "Pancake Fantasy"