Word Citizen: Uncommon Thoughts on Writing, Motherhood, and Life in Jerusalem

I tell tales that would never make it into coffee table books, KJ Hannah Greenberg declares in her latest book of essays, My words are covered in forests that glow at night or seek paths among the guts of aliens’ thinking machines. In forty-eight unapologetic and sometimes hilarious compositions incorporating Jerusalem cabbies, lizards, and communication theory, Greenberg configures and reconfigures the layers of her identity–successful professional writer, wife, mother, and American-born Orthodox Jew living in Israel–while providing surreally frank, sometimes painful insights into what it takes to reconcile those roles.

At once challenging, exuberant, and defiantly strange, these wry reports from the front lines of postmillennial freelancing joyously recount the hormonal roller-coaster of teaching modern rhetoric to college students while pregnant, the unforeseen pitfalls of instructing therapists in creative writing, and the trials and tribulations of dragooning sometimes reluctant children into the editing process. Yet Greenberg’s writings are also unsettling and coded, hinting between the lines at the complex, sometimes tense intersections between career, family, and the creative life.