The Literary Review
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Lehman Weichselbaum
Reviews
MAGICAL HATS: A Tribute to Tsaurah Litzky
Poet, writer of fiction, nonfiction prose, memoir, erotica and commentary. Tsaurah Litzky creates with open-walled imagination and an unflagging grace of craft.
She lives on the Brooklyn waterfront where she can see the Statue of Liberty from her kitchen window (and where, it is rumored, Hart Crane lived in her building and wrote his epic poem “The Bridge”). She believes in spitting in the face of hypocrisy.
Here is a sample of Tsaurah’s words, on herself and in verse.
I wanted to be a writer ever since I was seven. That’s when I wrote my first poem. It was about a kachina doll I saw at the Brooklyn Museum. My mother and grandmother were natural storytellers. When I was eight my mother gave me a special blank book for a journal. I keep journals to this day.
My mother kept a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her nightstand drawer. When I was eleven I fastened and took to heart a quote from D. H. Lawrence that I inscribed in my journal, “A woman has to live her life or else regret having lived it.”
The librarian at the local Brooklyn branch noticed me spending a lot of time there and recruited me to write about the books I was reading for the children’s newsletter. My first choice was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. This was my first job as a writer.
In my early forties I went to the Monday open readings at St. Mark’s and the marvelous Sunday open readings at ABC No Rio led by the excellent Matthew Courtney. I met other readers I could relate to and got over my shyness. A few years later I took over the reading series at the Right Bank Bar in Williamsburg from Carl Watson.
From 1993 to 1998 I wrote a column for the newspaper Downtown titled “Eros and Existence.” I published a story in Pink Pages, Joe Maynard’s erotic zine in 1993. Without telling me, Joe sent the issue to Susie Bright, editor of the annual Best American Erotica series from Simon and Schuster. One day I found a check in the mail for three hundred fifty dollars. Susie had picked the story for Best American Erotica 1993. I went on to be published in that series eight more times, more than any other contributor.
In 2004 she published my erotic novella The Motion of the Ocean in her anthology Three the Hard Way for Simon and Schuster. This book stayed on the Amazon best seller list for twenty-five weeks.
Long Shot, the great literary arts journal published by Danny Shot and Elliot Katz, began to publish my work regularly. Long Shot published my first major poetry collection Baby on the Water. My second poetry collection, Cleaning the Duck, was published by Bowery Books. Flasher: A Memoir was published by Autonomedia. I’m working on a new poetry collection titled We Shake It.
I cannot speak for my fellow artists. In my own life and work the erotic is quite vital. As Schopenhauer said: “Sex is the will to live.” I want to see as much as I can….
Like many writers, I believe the work is not complete unless it is shared. I have performed my writing in over seventy venues. I feel my best work is ahead of me.
Things happen to me, as they happen to all of us, as a result of choices I’ve made. I am curious about life…