By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Four years ago, during an interview with JTNews while waiting for the post office to finally deliver the boxes filled with copies of the first edition of Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Wendy Marcus mused she was happy just to get it finished.
“I was only thinking about getting the first issue to the printer,” Marcus, Drash’s founder and editor, says four years later. With the ink now dry on the fifth edition of this decidedly Northwest Jewish literary journal, she hoped to make it this far, but didn’t necessarily anticipate it.
“How many literary journals actually make it to five years?” she muses. “Especially our kind of literary journal. It’s such a niche.”
Yes, it’s a niche. But Marcus had to whittle down from 500 submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography from as far away as Massachusetts to the 44 contributors in this year’s edition. And while the theme has that Northwest vibe — “we want that sense of place to radiate through the book,” Marcus says — not all of its contributors live here.
She points to Rhonda Pettit, who wrote “Meditation on Useless Bay.” Pettit, it turns out, lives in Ohio, but she spent three weeks at the Hedgebrook Women’s Writers Retreat on Whidbey Island and was moved by the feeling of place she got there.
“Emotionally and artistically and creatively, it lives on in their hearts,” Marcus says.
Marcus also noted a story by James Goldberg, called “Sojourners.”
“It’s a little difficult to read, but very, very powerful,” Marcus says. Goldberg, who is Jewish, Mormon, and East Indian, “takes the Jewish calendar, the holidays, and he inserts a little story about each element of those people, the East Indians, Mormons and Jews, and how their lives kind of intersect in the course of the calendar year.”
Marcus said she would likely submit it for a Pushcart Prize, which honors literary projects from small presses. The funny thing, Marcus says, was that Goldberg had tried in vain to get the essay published in other journals around the country and nobody else would touch it.
“It’s fun to find gems like that and present them to the public,” Marcus says.
Her favorite, however, is a short story by David H. Fuks, who wrote about his pursuit as a teen of a girl named Leila Lipschitz, titled “This Will Never Work Out.” Put the star-crossed couple’s names together and you’ll get why, but that’s not half the story.
“It’s really fun to have something light so that we’re not all about the Holocaust and dancing at Birkenau,” Marcus says.
The public part of the project — readings and gatherings — has been slimmed down from past years, but a party, called “Drash Under the Stars,” is scheduled for July 30 and will feature writers from all five editions of the journal. Four other readings will take place throughout the summer, the first of which is scheduled for Sun., June 5. Copies are available at Temple Beth Am, where Marcus is music director, and several local bookstores. Visit www.templebetham.org/music/drash for locations.