We recently had the chance to connect with Jennifer Lang and have shared our conversation below.
Good morning Jennifer, we’re so happy to have you here with us and we’d love to explore your story and how you think about life and legacy and so much more. So let’s start with a question we often ask: What makes you lose track of time—and find yourself again?
Like many others, I started doing puzzles during covid, something I hadn’t done since childhood, something I hadn’t empasized during my children’s childhoods. In the past few years, I’ve finished a scene from a village in southwest France, hundreds of different colored doors, various shapes and sizes of butterflies. My ideal puzzle is 1000 pieces on the thicker side so they don’t bend and incorrect pieces can’t connect.
Each time I start a new one, I am both giddy and methodical. First, I separate the edges from the insides and then divide them by color or pattern on my coffee table with an understanding that the space will be unusable and dust will accumulate for a month or more. At the end of a work day (from home), I either sit on the sofa and lean forward, straining my neck, or sit cross-legged on the carpet, cramping my legs. Despite any physical discomfort, I lose myself: 30 minutes, an hour, even longer. I enter a zone. In the quiet of the house, I wonder if I have an obsessive personality.
When I teach creative writing, I often tell my students that the revision stage is like putting together a puzzle, moving pieces around until they fit. The outcome, when it works, can be thrilling and fulfilling.
Both the writing and the puzzling help control the chaos that is life.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Brief is not my strong suit (and yet, my first book is abnormally succinct and sparse).
Alas, a wife and a mother, a writer and a yogini, I am so many other things. After recently releasing two unconventional books (Places We Left Behind in 2023 and Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses in 2024), I had to think about brand for the first time. Is mine Jennifer Lang, the person I am, or Israel Writers Studio, the place I created?
A San Francisco Bay Arean, I live in the heart of Tel Aviv, where I teach creative writing in English (in a non-English speaking country) and yoga. Thanks to covid, my classes and workshops are fully hybrid. In Write Your Heart Out, Your Emotional Truth, one woman zooms from France. In JUST WRITE!, someone zooms from Florida. My private yoga student sits in Manhattan.
Brand aside, I am all about community. Whenever I gather people in a room–for writing workshops, for book events, even for Friday night dinner at our dining room table–I ask them to introduce themselves, say where they were born, where they live, why they came (if relevant) and some goofy ice-breaker question like their favorite body of water in the world. If there’s one thing that makes me uncomfortable, it’s attending an intimate event and not knowing who is sitting on either side of me.
I am grateful for doing what I do, for doing what I love, and for planning exciting projects ahead. This January, another American writer in Israel and I are co-leading a Memoir Writers Retreat in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus. Our greatest hope is to make this annual.
With memoir behind me, I am pivoting. My work-in-progress is historical fiction-ish based loosely on my late grandfather’s arrival in San Francisco from Russia in 1921. I am deep in the research phase and spent time at the SF Public Library History Center and at the Bancroft Library archives at UC Berkeley on a recent visit to see my parents.
Now, the fun begins.
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What did you believe about yourself as a child that you no longer believe?
Throughout my childhood, my mother and brother constantly made puns or used sarcasm to poke fun in a way that did not make me laugh. “Oh, you’re no fun,” my mother would say. Or, “You have no sense of humor.” Or, “You and your father don’t get our punnies.”
By the time I left for college, I had a sense of humor crisis. New friends taught me jokes, made me memorize them, and encouraged me to recite them. Sometimes I delivered with no issues; other times, I froze just before the punchline, unable to remember the last line. Forty years later, I cannot remember if they dragged me to the infamous Second City in downtown Chicago or not.
What I do remember is meeting a single and oh so sexy Frenchman in the hills outside of Jerusalem two years after college graduation, between a job in Paris and graduate school in the US. Tall, slender, and quiet, Philippe had a guarded smile. When he said something pithy or funny or self-deprecating, he kept a straight face. His eyes twinkled. I laughed.
Two months later, I moved in with him. A year and a half later, we wed. And for the next 17 years, I struggled to laugh sometimes with three young kids and countless international moves in search of home.
One Friday afternoon, during our semi-sabbatical year in a suburb of Tel Aviv, my father called from California to tell me something urgent since my mom and my brother already knew. He called to confess his 25-year romantic relationship with his secretary.
I hung up the phone and crumbled. Philippe found me with puffy eyes and snot dripping down my chin. He rubbed my back, asked what happened.
After I finished retelling him the saga, he said, “Jennifer, you’re so lucky.”
I looked at his dark chocolate eyes and asked why.
“Because I’ll never have a secretary.”
And in that dramatic, intense moment, I cackled. My shoulders shook. My laugh echoed down the stairs. A full-body symphony.
And I knew that while I didn’t share my mother’s or my brother’s sense of humor and sarcasm, I had my very own.
Is there something you miss that no one else knows about?
My first born son: 32 years old, married and a father of one with another on the way.
As a friend said, when a woman gets married, her father walks her down the aisle and gives her away. But with mothers and sons, there is no ritual or tradition. Nothing to mark that transition and that feeling of loss.
My adult son lives a few miles away, in the same city, and I miss our once-upon-a-time closeness and ease of being together.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What’s a belief you used to hold tightly but now think was naive or wrong?
If we spoke each other’s language–Hebrew and Arabic–we could coexist in peace.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
I loathe small talk. If I can’t get past the hi-how-are-you with someone, I won’t pursue the relationship.
For me, the only way to have meaningful relationships is to make myself vulnerable and to trust the person on the receiving end will do the same. To open up. To show our underbelly. To reveal our flaws. To share our humanity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://israelwriterstudio.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenlangwrites/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-lang-880234175/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenlangwrites
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaRPVyAMtnSIFzFdagbL3lw
Image Credits
Paper store: Marcia Pompan
Me with large group at table: Karli Sherwinter
Me in Tree pose in Boulder, CO: Karli Sherwinter
Me in conversation in front of a large room: Devon Conway
Me in Athens, Greece: stranger
Me in aquarium: Marcia Pompan
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
