Good Art Friends
By Jason Prokowiew
This month I spent a week at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at U-Mass, in workshop with eleven other writers, led by T Kira Māhealani Madden. One of the other workshop participants was the writer Lorena Hernández Leonard, who’d been my peer in a year-long intensive (and intense) memoir incubator program from 2021-2022.
Hernández Leonard’s memoir-in-progress, Salsipuedes: Leave if You Can , tells of her childhood in Medellin, Columbia at a time it was plagued by a drug war and also captures her love for a country wrapped in political and armed conflict. My own book, War Boys , looks at what it was to be raised by a Russian father who grew up in World War II, adopted by the same Nazis who’d murdered his family. Hernández Leonard’s and my book both delve deep into the traumas of war, and the legacy of trauma left for future generations.
I sat near Hernández Leonard the day her piece was workshopped at the Juniper Institute, feeling her nerves about sharing her trauma with strangers. In time, I felt my friend finally exhale, as the other participants did their jobs—focused on the writing, how the artist was conveying the story, without judgment of the content. They let her know what was working, and what wasn’t.
Hernández Leonard and I have read each other’s drafts numerous times, expressing our familial pain in the drafts, sitting with each other’s stories. At some point during workshop at Juniper, she had cause to say to the group, “I know Jason’s stories intimately, but I couldn’t tell you his favorite color.”
It’s true. And I don’t know hers.
When we talked outside workshop, we exchanged ideas on how to make more time to write, how to navigate the terrain of memoirists who also work other jobs—I am a disability attorney, she is the editor-in-chief at Solstice literary magazine. We both have husbands, she has two daughters. We, like many (most) writers, are juggling full lives while also scrimping for time and space to make our art. We had little time to chat, so these are the challenges we talked about. My favorite color never came up.
Recently I reconnected with an old friend, the writer Sara Faith Alterman, who was two years behind me in high school. We hadn’t talked in 25 years but I’ve watched her writing career, and cheered when her memoir Let’s Never Talk About This Again hit the shelves. Through our Zoom reunion, we jumped back into a decades-old dynamic, sweetened with age. We exchanged ideas about residencies for Alterman, and agents for me, both relying on the other’s hard-earned expertise.
Because Sara and I have always infused our friendship with harsh honesty, when she told me she had plenty of friends with which to talk about her two kids, and wanted more friends to talk to about her art, I said, “Great, because I don’t care about your kids.” (I do care about them. I hope they thrive, succeed, and are healthy and happy for the rest of their lives, but I don’t need to hear about them. Alterman doesn’t need me to tell me about them. She’s got people for that.)
What she needs from me is something else, and vice versa. My good art friends make me laugh. We share bottles of wine and fashion impromptu salons when we’re together to share our work. We listen, knowing the hours lost and exhaustion gained from the work. When I get stuck for inspiration or how to start the next page, they often guide me where I need to go, sometimes just by nodding and commiserating. Their work makes me think differently, and I want to know all about it. We cheer for the occasional victories, whine about the ubiquitous rejections, and convince one another again and again not to give up.
When I returned home from Juniper, my husband Dave and I watched the latest episode of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and as we paused the show on a group of drag queens standing across a stage, waiting to be judged for the garments they’d hand-sewn for that week’s challenge, I told Dave the Queen in the blue dress was my favorite, and that “anyone in blue anything starts with a leg up with me.” He knows this because he knows my favorite color, and has talked me down from making every wall, pillow, and chair in our home some shade of blue. That night we hardly talked about Juniper, or my new writing (though to be fair to Dave, I know if I wanted to share, he’d listen).
But I’ve got friends for that.
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Jason Prokowiew is the winner of the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History for War Boys, his braided memoir about his Russian father’s adoption by Nazis during World War II and the trauma his father carried into parenthood. His writing’s appeared in Salon , WBUR’s Cognoscenti, on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage, and is forthcoming in Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, The Audacity. He’s received support from Bread Loaf, Monson Arts, and Hambidge. He runs his own law office dedicated to disability advocacy and lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband.
