This week we are pleased to have Ada Molinoff reading her short story “From White Space to Black Letter: Taking My Place in the Women’s Torah.”
Ada Molinoff earned her MFA in nonfiction from Pacific University. Her poems have been published in literary journals, newspapers, and anthologies. This is her first published memoir piece, and it will appear in Calyx’s 40th Anniversary Anthology. A retired clinical psychologist, she writes from Salem, Oregon.
Her favorite place to write is her study, where she feels freed by its hot pink and bright blue hangings, photos and poems tacked to the walls, and piles of papers bordering the floor. The rest of her home is neat, and is decorated in neutral tones with calm art.
Ada currently works on a series of brief memoirs generated by her first trip to Israel in 2014, the pieces aiming to capture setting, relationship, and identity. Periodically, she revises a poem for her first poetry chapbook. She feels blessed to be a member both of a prose- and a poetry-critique group, supportive places she takes her work.
When she’s writing, Ada doesn’t like to read, not wanting to risk an author’s voice quieting her own. Inspiration has come from the memoirs of Judy Blunt and Bernard Cooper, and from the poems of Naomi Shihab Nye, narrators who convey emotions in word-pictures of sensory experience.
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