11 minute read
The Good Word
An interview with Emily Jaeger ’03
Ask Emily Jaeger, When did you realize you wanted to be a writer? and she responds with a recollection from her childhood. “I have been a writer since before I could even write. When I was two, I would sit with my Abah at the computer and I would tell him, ‘This is a poem!’ and he would transcribe what I said. I don’t even know how I knew what a poem was.”
All these years later, Emily’s preternatural ability to render everyday life in a poem or to find a story in need of telling, or retelling, has remained a powerful constant and a deeply rooted calling. Emily indeed works as a fulltime professional writer whose sprawling oeuvre ranges from poems to opinion pieces, newspaper articles and content writing to social commentary and letters to the editor, on top of which she tutors and teaches writing classes.
Even when Emily has not worked expressly as a writer, putting pen to paper professionally and personally has risen to the fore. “I was afraid that I could not figure out how to make writing a career. There were definitely moments when I would try to step away from it, to try to find something else that would make more sense, but, ultimately, nothing else makes more sense. A lot of writers to whom I speak say, ‘This is the only thing I can do.’ I would say, ‘I can do a lot of things, so maybe I should try those first, but writing always pulled me back.’”
From the start, Emily loved Jewish Studies at school. “The creativity was really happening in Judaic Studies. The curriculum had to be invented, so there was a lot of warmth, nurture and cultural sharing, and all that stuff that I love.” She laughs when she recounts lugging her beloved BDB (Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament by Brown, Driver and Briggs) from Gann Academy to Brandeis University in her freshman crate of books. “Clearly that was where I should be if I had my BDB with me in a forced triple!” At Brandeis, she majored in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies which she describes as “the archaeology of language.” Emily adds that it “[w]as a type of writing from a different perspective.” Unsurprisingly, she eventually gravitated towards creative writing courses, tacking on a minor in Creative Writing as well.
Following graduation, Emily found herself underwhelmed by job opportunities in the humanities, and opted for two years in the Peace Corps. While traveling and working in Paraguay, she was writing every day, and began to envision writing more seriously. “It’s an important part of who I am, what I want to do. After the Peace Corps, I got my M.A. in Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston and immediately began a fellowship at Colgate University teaching poetry.”
Without the backing of an academic position, however, Emily found the challenge of being a full-time, financially solvent writer to be unsettling, yet working as a freelance writer tempted and gnawed at her. “I knew a freelance writer who was a good friend and a cantorial soloist at my wife’s last pulpit, and she offered to help me. I was interested in getting paid to write, but it just seemed so risky without a full-time contract. I couldn’t fathom how it would work.” At the time, Emily was steadily submitting poems to magazines, but the staggering rejection rate was unbearable. “To get a poem into a magazine takes months, even a year. At my best submission rate, I would get one of 20 pieces accepted and not get paid for it. So, I stepped back a little bit. I had written a book and it got finalist five or six times from different presses out of thousands of entries, which is almost more painful. Close but not quite. I was hitting a wall and it was hurting me. I had to find a different way in.”
The “way in” revealed itself somewhat perversely amidst the mix of teaching virtually during COVID, a hard drive crash that destroyed all of Emily’s curricula, and the fragile balance of new motherhood, childcare woes and a need for more flexibility.
Emily and her wife, Rabbi Chaya Bender, welcomed their daughter, Shlomtzion Miryam Dvora—Shlomi for short—in March 2021. “I was teaching remotely. Shlomi would get sick or the babysitter would get sick, and I would be scrambling to figure out how to teach my classes on time. I wasn’t super happy. So, I thought, maybe if I try freelance writing, I’ll have more flexibility.” Emily was further intrigued by the opportunity to voice some of her opinions about parenting. “Shlomi is very inspiring!” she laughs.
The first month exclusively freelancing, Emily oscillated between terror and excitement. “As an LGBTQ parent, having a child is a very intentional process. As a fallible human being and first-time mom, it is very important for me to be the best I can be for Shlomi, since I chose to bring her into this world. The risk and stress of taking a career leap was more intense having a child and feeling fiscally responsible for her. I am so aware that who I am—my emotional state, my career and motherhood choices—all have a great deal of effect on her. Who did I want to be in her eyes? I realized that I didn't want to be a person who loved writing, but gave up on it. I didn't want to be bitter around her. I needed to take the leap, scary as it was, to become a person she would want to be around and grow up with. I also want her to learn from my example about cherishing and realizing dreams.”
By February 2022, Emily was authoring articles about important, timely subjects, pitching the pieces and getting a lot of acceptances. She explains that editors have “[huge] stacks of articles and basically have to figure out if you’ve landed on the right flavor, but they’re not coming up with story ideas.” Emily was producing and being paid at a clip more akin to writers who had been freelancing for years. She quickly got to a desirable, and financially sustainable, sweet spot. “I could show my expertise with clips that I had written and just pitch a paragraph for each story. When you do that, if the editor doesn’t want it, you don’t write it. If it gets accepted, you have to figure out how to write it.”
Emily’s career pivot to freelance writing, once as fraught as it was exhilarating, has proven to be the perfect admixture. Regular clients such as Cardinal & Pine, the North Carolina branch of News Courier and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency look to Emily for local and Jewish arts and culture pieces, respectively. She has other clients who turn to her for content creation for podcasts or rebranding. Five of Emily’s regulars are professionals with learning differences. “I help them get the brilliance on the page,” she says of her work with them. She also partners with a number of rabbis throughout the year or for High Holidays speeches, specifically. All the while, Emily conducts interviews and continues to keep her eyes and ears open to stay on top of trending topics and human interest stories to determine if she has her own “take.”
Though the core of journalistic writing is unbiased reporting, Emily inverts the medium, using it as a type of activism to tell stories that are normally overlooked. During the summer, she penned a quirky piece, best described as cultural travel, on the graveyards of North Carolina. “It was important to me to research diverse graveyards and talk about what it means to be a North Carolinian beyond the Confederate or Civil War or Revolutionary War.” Emily’s original inspiration was the 19th-century Jewish graveyard at the Bnai Israel Congregation in Wilmington where Chaya is the rabbi, but she expanded her research to include Scottish, Black and First Nation graveyards, many of the latter having been forgotten, overgrown or hidden and devalued in some way. “To write for News Courier, a mainstream place, and use it as a vehicle to talk about the story of people or groups of people who might have been discounted or not even thought about in North Carolina is exactly how I reconcile my activism with journalism. I am honest and unbiased, but I choose to put stories like that front and center.”
Likewise, Emily recently shined a spotlight on the Gullah Geechee community who are the descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and brought to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia to work on rice, cotton and indigo plantations. Emily explains, “During the 1700s, European colonists wanted to cultivate rice in this area, but they didn’t know how to do it, so their solution was to kidnap and steal people and their labor. European colonists brought people over who were technologically advanced rice farmers and forced them to make the foundation of the economy here. Working here required specific skill and the region is also somewhat isolated, so the Gullah Geechee maintained their own culture.” In 2006, the United States government recognized the Gullah Geechee Heritage Quarter that runs from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida.
“I am writing an article about what North Carolinians are doing to preserve Gullah Geechee sites and how they try to fund these projects. It’s interesting in the face of all these plantations and mansions that have federal funding. The Gullah Geechee perspective is important. The people who are trying to bring these sites to life are not historians or archaeologists, but just local people who feel a calling to do this.” These are hardly the first examples, though, of Emily’s using her eloquent voice to speak up about a weighty issue.
Emily thinks back to her freshman year at Gann Academy. “It was around the time that same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts. Two of my previous Schechter teachers got married to their partners. My family had a subscription to a local newspaper, and I read a letter to the editor that criticized our Head of School at the time, Arnold Zar-Kessler, for publicly congratulating these teachers in Schechter’s weekly newsletter, The Shavuon.” Emily was outraged. “This was before I was fully conscious of my own sexuality or even ‘out’ to myself,” she says. “It brought me back to Pirkei Avot and what Judaism has to say about human dignity which is something we had learned about at Schechter. Mr. ZarKessler wasn’t making a political statement. He was treating human beings with respect and that is a Jewish value that is as important as anything else.”
At just 14 years old, Emily sent a rebuttal to the newspaper. “The idea that I had something important to say, a unique perspective, and that I had the ability to mobilize any talent of mine to make my teachers’ lives better meant a lot to me and to them. I think it was very powerful to be able to use my writing for that.”
When Emily talks about writing, she is really referring to a throughline in her life. “The words are always there,” she says. Words are a reservoir for her that is filled with equal parts artistry, advocacy, profession, and, of course, love. “When I was in eighth grade, everyone would always be bugging Ruti Peled, our Hebrew teacher: ‘When are we having the vocab test?! When’s the vocab test going to be?!’ Ruti would smile and answer in her thick Israeli accent, ‘Every day is a test.’” With fondness and appreciation, Emily looks back and says, “She was being playful with us, but I always take that with me. As a journalist, it means not falling asleep at different moments of your life.”
In the end, being a writer is as much about technical skill as it is about recognizing moments, large and small, whose stories must be told. Emily isn’t missing a thing.
