Welcome!
OCTOBER 2023
Once again, by paying US taxes
I am complicit in war crimes.
This hardly seems like the time to babble on about my writing, but this excerpt from Out of Place seems pertinent.
It's how Emine Albaz, Turkish Jewish and working in the US, reacts to 9/11:
It Was a Normal Reaction.
That’s why Emine didn’t want to hear it. Round them up, torture them, kill them. Make them suffer. It’s what she’d thought when she was fourteen, though felt would express it better, such an overwhelming surge of fear and hate, it overtook her without conscious thought. She hadn’t been in the synagogue, her family never went, but her brain generated its own scenes, flashes of light, explosion, bodies blown to bits, washes of blood, the terrorists with machine guns and hand grenades who slaughtered Jews before blowing themselves up in Neve Şalom, the great synagogue of Istanbul.
Why don’t we do something? If we killed and killed maybe the world would change back, maybe she’d be sure again that when she walked, her feet would touch ground, that the earth would be there, secure, to hold her up. Now the only certainty was this fear and rage, more solid and real than the world itself. It was an attack not only on Turkish Jews, but on Turkey itself, on everything she loved about her homeland. These outsiders—Islamic Jihad from Iran, the evil dogs from Syria, the Palestinians we’ve made welcome here—they hate us. They hate our secular freedoms. Round them up. Kill them all. Attack their nests in Iran and Libya. To protect us. To have revenge for all those bodies.
There were arrests. So what? Prosecution. Diplomats expelled. Her parents said the way to fight back was by strengthening ties with Europe—the rest of Europe—for Turkey to be a European country. During school vacations she went to London to improve her English, to Switzerland to learn French. While her country with its dangerous borders handled things quietly and she was powerless and it enraged her that her country’s power had such limits.
Thank God we couldn’t act on our rage is what she thinks now. Thank God, and as the Muslims say, Mashallah.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Peace, justice, liberty for all remain a wish, not a reality.
I appreciate your interest and wish you a good year as we all do what we can.
Older posts:
It's June and I'm happy to have a story in Stickman Review.
Stories kept springing up. In May, in Collateral, a journal dedicated to exploring the effects of war and violence on people far from the combat zone.
www.collateraljournal.com/fiction/a-person-like-you
So many publications at once - this has never happened before.
Matthew Tasaka-Mejia published me in The Waiting Room, but sorry - print only! and thank you, Daniela Ochoa Bravo, for including me in the Fall issue of Colectivo Tabú (starting on page 63) And a flash in Well Read Magazine.
I send a shoutout to Randall Brown who had the vision of publishing Healing Visions and for including me among the many contributors who wrote microprose - exactly 100 words each piece and each paired with fine art photography. All proceeds go to organizations that fight for women's rights.
Out of Place remains my most recent novel.
You can checkout reviews and Events here (and though time has passed, new reviews are always appreciated!)
Please look below for links to other books or see the Fiction page for my other novels and story collections. My short stories keep making their way into print and online. When a story is available, free, online, you'll find links at the bottom of the Fiction page.
About Out of Place:
When a research institute in the Mojave Desert falls under suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11, a Turkish hydrogeologist is “in the wind”; the American office manager is detained as a material witness; a Mexican herpetologist needs to find a place of safety; a US college dropout bicycles across Iran trying to decide if violence is the answer; DIY citizen-scientists conduct unconventional experiments; and an FBI specialist, born in a refugee camp in Africa, proves his loyalty to his adopted country.
For me, it was a strange experience correcting proofs of this novel set in the years 2000-03. After everything that's happened more recently, I had almost forgotten: how the Bush administration violated democratic norms, undermined science, disseminated lies, and attacked immigrants. As I continue to work on behalf of asylum seekers and for immigrant rights, we need to remember.
I often turn for relief to non-human animals when the way people treat each other gets to be too much, so I shouldn't have been surprised in rereading my own work to find rattlesnakes and bears and vultures and monkeys and goats and, of course, lots of cats. (And of course it's a pleasure to be included in the Among Animals anthology, published April 2022 by Ashland Creek, publishers of ecolit. Here's a link to the interview about my story and info about the book.)
In the run-up to the Out of Place pub date, every Monday, I posted another image giving a hint about the novel's contents. (You can find all the Monday images collected here.) The final week's image:
Once again, by paying US taxes
I am complicit in war crimes.
This hardly seems like the time to babble on about my writing, but this excerpt from Out of Place seems pertinent.
It's how Emine Albaz, Turkish Jewish and working in the US, reacts to 9/11:
It Was a Normal Reaction.
That’s why Emine didn’t want to hear it. Round them up, torture them, kill them. Make them suffer. It’s what she’d thought when she was fourteen, though felt would express it better, such an overwhelming surge of fear and hate, it overtook her without conscious thought. She hadn’t been in the synagogue, her family never went, but her brain generated its own scenes, flashes of light, explosion, bodies blown to bits, washes of blood, the terrorists with machine guns and hand grenades who slaughtered Jews before blowing themselves up in Neve Şalom, the great synagogue of Istanbul.
Why don’t we do something? If we killed and killed maybe the world would change back, maybe she’d be sure again that when she walked, her feet would touch ground, that the earth would be there, secure, to hold her up. Now the only certainty was this fear and rage, more solid and real than the world itself. It was an attack not only on Turkish Jews, but on Turkey itself, on everything she loved about her homeland. These outsiders—Islamic Jihad from Iran, the evil dogs from Syria, the Palestinians we’ve made welcome here—they hate us. They hate our secular freedoms. Round them up. Kill them all. Attack their nests in Iran and Libya. To protect us. To have revenge for all those bodies.
There were arrests. So what? Prosecution. Diplomats expelled. Her parents said the way to fight back was by strengthening ties with Europe—the rest of Europe—for Turkey to be a European country. During school vacations she went to London to improve her English, to Switzerland to learn French. While her country with its dangerous borders handled things quietly and she was powerless and it enraged her that her country’s power had such limits.
Thank God we couldn’t act on our rage is what she thinks now. Thank God, and as the Muslims say, Mashallah.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Peace, justice, liberty for all remain a wish, not a reality.
I appreciate your interest and wish you a good year as we all do what we can.
Older posts:
It's June and I'm happy to have a story in Stickman Review.
Stories kept springing up. In May, in Collateral, a journal dedicated to exploring the effects of war and violence on people far from the combat zone.
www.collateraljournal.com/fiction/a-person-like-you
So many publications at once - this has never happened before.
Matthew Tasaka-Mejia published me in The Waiting Room, but sorry - print only! and thank you, Daniela Ochoa Bravo, for including me in the Fall issue of Colectivo Tabú (starting on page 63) And a flash in Well Read Magazine.
I send a shoutout to Randall Brown who had the vision of publishing Healing Visions and for including me among the many contributors who wrote microprose - exactly 100 words each piece and each paired with fine art photography. All proceeds go to organizations that fight for women's rights.
Out of Place remains my most recent novel.
You can checkout reviews and Events here (and though time has passed, new reviews are always appreciated!)
Please look below for links to other books or see the Fiction page for my other novels and story collections. My short stories keep making their way into print and online. When a story is available, free, online, you'll find links at the bottom of the Fiction page.
About Out of Place:
When a research institute in the Mojave Desert falls under suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11, a Turkish hydrogeologist is “in the wind”; the American office manager is detained as a material witness; a Mexican herpetologist needs to find a place of safety; a US college dropout bicycles across Iran trying to decide if violence is the answer; DIY citizen-scientists conduct unconventional experiments; and an FBI specialist, born in a refugee camp in Africa, proves his loyalty to his adopted country.
For me, it was a strange experience correcting proofs of this novel set in the years 2000-03. After everything that's happened more recently, I had almost forgotten: how the Bush administration violated democratic norms, undermined science, disseminated lies, and attacked immigrants. As I continue to work on behalf of asylum seekers and for immigrant rights, we need to remember.
I often turn for relief to non-human animals when the way people treat each other gets to be too much, so I shouldn't have been surprised in rereading my own work to find rattlesnakes and bears and vultures and monkeys and goats and, of course, lots of cats. (And of course it's a pleasure to be included in the Among Animals anthology, published April 2022 by Ashland Creek, publishers of ecolit. Here's a link to the interview about my story and info about the book.)
In the run-up to the Out of Place pub date, every Monday, I posted another image giving a hint about the novel's contents. (You can find all the Monday images collected here.) The final week's image:
Also by Diane Lefer
Confessions of a Carnivore"I haven't read a novel in ages with so much packed into every sentence--Confessions is romp, satire, stand-up schtick, Restoration comedy. All about: gorilla/guerrilla theater, sex and love, driving in LA, standing up for those who have no one else to bother, Buddhism, the Church of Neoproctology (colonics and LA seem to go, well, hand in glove), vivisection, life on the Rez, murder in Tijuana...Diane Lefer has stories to tell, and she's clearly lived on the edges of things and thoughts that most people only read about." - George Ovitt
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California TransitAwarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
The stories in the collection are "smart, well written and have that most elusive of qualities: vitality. They take on difficult issues — immigration, racism, torture, animal suffering, environmental degradation. That makes her stories sound humorless; they aren't. A vein of wry wit runs through them." - Judith Freeman in the Los Angeles Times.
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For more books and stories, please check out Fiction page. For Nonfiction books and essays, please go here. |