As I sit reading the essay collection Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness (ELJ Editions; October 2023), I attempt to maneuver my left leg into a position where my knee isn’t retaliating with pain. I wonder if my younger years as a softball shortstop have finally caught up to me, or if the knee doesn’t like the…

Awakenings with Diane Gottlieb and Nina Lichtenstein Interview by Michelle Redo in Daring To Tell Listen to Interview  

No red or orange leaves litter the road. No wild, fierce autumn storm. No tree limb tears through the convertible’s cloth. Read more  

Today on One Life Radio, we welcomed Diane Gottlieb on the air for the first time to hear about her inspiration and the importance of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness. Diane is an MSW, or Master of Social Work, MEd, Master of Education and a MFA, Master of Fine Arts and is the editor…

“Memory can be fickle and can be misleading—either way, however lacking it can be, in its dearth there is a truth that leads to multiple sensations, spanning spectrums of a universe found in a mind,” writes Shome Dasgupta in “In the Shadow of a Bird,” just one of the gorgeous pieces in his collection of…

A chorus of voices sing the body—in its parts, its fullness, and all of its glorious imperfections—in the electric anthology Awakenings: Stories of Body and Consciousness (ELJ Editions, 2023). Curated by editor and author Diane Gottlieb, this collection of essays examines and celebrates our human body from many points of view. Read more

In this month’s column, we double down on fun as we sit down with Editor Diane Gottlieb to discuss an online literary journal “and” an exciting small press dedicated to elevating emerging writers for more than ten years. What does emerging mean? Here’s how the small press, ELJ Editions, and its affiliated journal, Emerge Literary…

In her stunning essay “On Excellence,” Cynthia Ozick pays tribute to her mother, a woman with a big heart and many gifts and passions. Ozick recalls how her mother used to make her laugh, for she was “so varied, like a tree on which lemons, pomegranates, and prickly pears absurdly all hang together,” and she…

In Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness, you bring together 49 brilliant, diverse voices writing short essays about inhabiting the body. There are moments of intense self-awareness, such as when Maureen Aitken asks, “What if your body is glorious now, and you are about to miss it for the ritual of beating yourself with a scale?” …

Flash Fiction by Diane Gottlieb Ironing Out the Creases        Friday mornings before Joe went to school and after his father left for work, his mother would start the wash. She would bundle the clothes into the baskets and Joe would help her carry them to the elevator of their WWII brick building. He’d press the button…