Ellen Levine (edit name/settings)

I grew up in New York City and live here now. But I also love country and have hiked a fair amount in wilderness areas including Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and Norway's Jutenheimen National Park ("Home of the Giants" with some of highest mountains in that country). But I know that crowded streets, jay-walking, fire engine sirens (we call them our urban coyotes) are part of my DNA. That's just to give you my real life "setting."

Writing, though, is a different matter. As a kid I wrote lots of stories, none of them with a city setting. You know how "they" tell you to write about what you know – well, I say phooey. Write about what interests you, tickles your fancy, tunes your piano as my friend Phyllis says. So I wrote stories about kids in the California gold rush and traveling in covered wagons headed for Oregon. Another story was about a boy in Spain who lived on a farm. His dream was to be a woodcarver, and so his first goal was to get a carving knife. His mother let him take the farm's eggs to market and keep some of the money. Now, I knew nothing about farms or chickens or woodcarving or knives or Spain, but I loved my story.

And I just realized as I'm writing this that without ever thinking about that story again I myself became a woodcarver. I've taken some not very good pics of carvings, but I'll post them anyway.

I grew up in a house with lots of books. My mother had written book and theater reviews for two magazines before she retired to have me and my sisters, and she had an extensive library. One of our jobs as kids was to dust all the books. There were novels and nonfiction, books with illustrations, oversized books and pocket books. And as soon as I and my two sisters could write our names, we got library cards.

I was the oldest, and I went every week with my mother to the library. You could take out four books on a card. And we brought home books on the pyramids for my dad, fairy tales for my middle sister, and the storybook of the week for my little sister. My mother and I would wander off and pulled whatever we wanted from the shelves.

Around the dinner table there was always talk about what was happening in the world. I remember hearing my mother make the argument that although we didn't have a car, she thought it was appropriate that some of her tax money go for roads and highways. We pay taxes she said because we are all part of this larger society. Our world is not just about us as individuals, but us as part of the social group.

I don't remember why she told me one day about the great jazz singer Bessie Smith. But I learned at an early age that Bessie Smith had died because a hospital she was brought to wouldn't treat a black person. And I also learned there were places that turned away Jews. One summer day we rode in a hired taxi to a country hotel in New York's Catskill mountains. We passed a billboard advertizing a hotel, not ours. Across the bottom were words I can see as if it were yesterday: No Jews, Negroes, or dogs.

So I grew up knowing there were battles to be fought, worlds to change. I majored in political science at Brandeis University. It was a unique and exhilarating time. Physicists talked with politics majors and shared meals with those in theater arts. I took the next step, performing in reviews and hanging out with the theater crowd. I spread political news and they taught me how to operate the light board, among other things.

I got my M.A. in political science from the University of Chicago and then went out to Berkeley as a teaching assistant grad student. I left after two years convinced I wanted to make documentary films. Came back to New York and got a job with Public Television and then CBS where I worked on documentaries and even got to do research for Walter Cronkite.

I realized so many of the stories I worked on for TV raised legal questions, and so I decided to go to law school. NYU School of Law became home for three years. And then I moved to Philadelphia for a year to clerk for a federal judge. Now that was fascinating! All kinds of cases – Muslim prisoners challenging restrictions on their rights to practice their religion, corporations battling over how much they have to reveal to stockholders, big drug lords taking pleas before my judge. That was a scary moment: the judge was behind a bullet-proof shield, while I sat at a little unprotected desk in front of the judge and facing the mob guy. But, as the Sondheim song goes, "I'm still here!"

Still here and wanting to tell tales. We all write from a well of our own experience, from what we consciously know and what moves us on that deep subterranean level. Who knows why we’re drawn to subjects. No doubt in part imprints from early years. But whatever we write, I continue to believe the best work comes from the heart.

I grew up with the story that my parents took anxious turns as one went down on a Saturday afternoon to hear the pro-Hitler Christian Front speakers and the other stood crib-watch. And it seeped in: I wrote my college honors thesis on Father Coughlin, the "Radio Priest" who filled the airwaves weekly with vicious antisemitic rants. I sat in the NY public library and listened to old tapes of his broadcasts, read his poisonous newspaper called of all things "Social Justice."

And so that caring about fairness is a big part of the well I dip into, my writing "setting" as it were. And I wonder and still have only bits of an answer for why some people live on the dark side. And why some risk everything to fight the darkness. Here's to fighting the darkness!