The Artful Life Questionnaire: Temim Fruchter (Brooklyn, NY)

What we know for sure: We all have a story, and engaging with the arts helps all of us to tell our own stories on our own terms. We also know that there are ways to engage with the arts other than in formal cultural venues, and that sometimes it is more about the process of art making than it is about the end product. We also know that living an artful life, which is to say, living a life in which the arts and arts engagement are a priority means different things to different people based on their own interests, their communities, and many other factors, including equitable access. The Artful Life Questionnaire celebrates the diversity of ways we can make the arts a part of our lives, and, hopefully, inspires and encourages us to live our own unique versions of an artful life. In today’s edition of the questionnaire, we’re speaking with writer and debut novelist Temim Fruchter.

NEA: Please introduce yourself.

TEMIM FRUCHTER: Hi! My name is Temim Fruchter, and I’m a queer, non-binary femme Jewish anti-zionist prose writer living in Brooklyn. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, which means my ancestors are Eastern European, and this heritage figures prominently into my debut novel, City of Laughter, which I call the speculative queer history of an Eastern European Jewish family—loosely and fictionally my own.

I grew up in a religious Jewish household, and attended traditional Modern Orthodox schools and synagogues, so traditional Jewish observance was a big part of what formed me, even though I’m no longer observant in any traditional way. Jewish text, folklore, liturgy, and ritual still mean the world to me, and a lot of my work is rooted in both these rich resources, and also in what I like to call queer imagination. A sense of queer possibility and folkloric logic that insists the world is bigger and fuller than it seems, even if late capitalism and our everyday lives like to insist it isn’t.

NEA: Do you have a current art practice or a way of regularly engaging with the arts?

FRUCHTER: I think of my current art practice as collaborative, even as being a novelist is quite a solitary pursuit. A lot of my stories and ideas are born in conversation—with the people I love most, with total strangers, and with the world more broadly, and all of the art and story it contains. I’m an external processor, so a good conversation or an encounter with something outside of myself and outside of the page—be it an image, a photograph, or a song that helps me time-travel—is essential to my writing process.

NEA: What are five words that come to mind when you think about the idea of living an artful life?

FRUCHTER: Play, curiosity, integrity, flirtation, expansiveness.

NEA: Pick just one of those words and expand on how you see it as part of living an artful life.

FRUCHTER: I think about making new work as akin to flirtation with somebody new. I think we need to be willing to lean into the erotics of the process, and its pleasures. Or at least, this feels important to me. Sometimes, writing is challenging, or even boring; but its pleasures can also be abundant, if we’re attuned to them. For me, cultivating a sense of play, flirtation, and the profound pleasure writing can, at least at times be, is essential.

NEA: Where do you currently live, and what are some of the ways that your community tells its story through the arts or through creative expression?

FRUCHTER: I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I feel lucky to live in a place so rife with art. On any given evening, I’m faced with an embarrassment of book launches and readings and performances, and my biggest dilemma is having to choose just one.

I’m also lucky to get to co-host one of Brooklyn’s longest-running and most beloved reading series, Pete’s Reading Series, where I get to be in one of my favorite rooms in town, listening to writers whose work I love, many of whom are also, unbelievably, my friends. I’m forever in awe, getting to be a part of New York's literary community, which I have found to be largely kind and generous. Specifically, the writerly solidarity and transparency I've found—both of which are sometimes hard to come by in the industry writ large—is very meaningful to me, particularly since I've both witnessed and benefited from the ways in which writers of all levels of publishing experience, from debuts to very established authors, support one another.

New York is, of course, synonymous with rich and plentiful cultural and creative life, but I’m always dazzled by how people continue to build new ways to convene around art and story. Tables of Contents is a favorite—a community-oriented reading series where the work of local authors is paired with beautifully crafted food and cocktails, and that always winds up being a little bit magical.

NEA: How do you think that living an artful life can improve the well-being of your community?

FRUCHTER: Last year, I started hosting a very occasional salon in my living room for writers I knew and their friends to come together, build community, and share work in a festive and informal way. I love to host dinner parties and party parties but there is something about gathering around creative work or creative process—whatever that may be for a given person—that feels like it has really generative potential. Generative, that is, in the way that conversations with another writer or artist can lead to revelations in one’s own work; but also in the way that when writers and artists gather, there can be a kind of accumulation of energy, and that energy feels like a life force for me, and I’m sure for others, when we go back to our desks and studios and kitchen tables. Sometimes art-making can be deeply connective, and sometimes, it can be a really lonely process, so being in the company of other artists in all kinds of shapes and ways feels important.

I will also say that I’ve been grounding in the movement for solidarity with Palestine right now, as we witness a genocide unfolding in Gaza. As a Jewish anti-Zionist writer, and as someone for whom radical imagination and solidarity feel central in my own community-building and practice, I am deeply moved and inspired by the way artists, writers, musicians, and theater-makers are using their platforms and art works and community spaces not only to talk about Gaza, but to provide opportunities for all of those engaging with that art to deepen their solidarity practice. Art, critically, is an open window through which people can peer and eventually climb, when it comes to reckoning with state violence or colonialism, or other subjects that might feel daunting to begin to talk about otherwise. I’m especially grateful, in this moment, for artists and writers expanding the existing space for all of us to think, and talk, and imagine a world truly built on liberation, and where everyone is free.

NEA: Is there a particular place in your neighborhood that is a creative touchstone for you?

FRUCHTER: Not one particular place, but I do adore my neighborhood Ditmas Park. It’s a pretty special pocket of the city, thick with trees and Victorian houses with porch swings. It’s a beautiful place for walking and people-watching and talking with strangers. Lots of writers and artists live in the neighborhood. Also, lots of cats. I take long walks around the neighborhood and always notice something new—some flower I’ve never seen, or a tree, or an ornament in the shape of a squirrel or a duck or a skeleton—and it feels, sometimes, like the best kind of perpetual treasure hunt.

In the summertime, Operation Gig does concerts on various neighborhood porches, so it’s easy to accidentally attend a tiny concert around the block from where you live. We also have The Parlor, which is an interdisciplinary reading series; Taylor & Co., a Black-owned, family run neighborhood bookstore; Lofty Pigeon Books, a community-focused neighborhood bookstore; and Ditmas Lit, a beloved local reading series.

NEA: What’s your favorite informal way or space to engage with arts and culture?

FRUCHTER: Honestly? I love a good singalong. Get together a group of people with a few instruments, a few lyric sheets, and a bottle of whiskey, and break out those harmonies.

NEA: You’re known as a writer. Is there a form of creative expression that's really important to you that we don't know about?

FRUCHTER: Well, I have a musical past. For many years, I played drums in a band called The Shondes, and I come from a very musical family—my father is a singer and guitarist, my brother is a composer and a multi-instrumentalist, and all of us love to sing. Music is absolutely essential to me, not only in the ways I move through the world, but also in the ways I get closest to feeling. To articulate that feeling in writing, for me, requires music, to bring me right up to that edge.

I taught myself to play the drums at age 26, and while I maintain there was something fiercely punk about that, and while I remain proud of myself, I am now, squarely, a retired drummer. I did a good job, but drumming, as cathartic and fun as it was, was never really something my body got fully comfortable with. But to have had that experience performing, viscerally banging and screaming and singing onstage, was life-changing for me as an artist. I love reading from my work because of that singular energy you can only find in the presence of an audience—the sense of mutuality; that it’s a conversation, and not just a performance. I still sing and play my acoustic guitar, and belt out classic rock numbers at karaoke—music is a kind of sustenance for me, and I always need to keep it close. I’m working on a novel now that is heavily rooted in my love of music, and this has been particularly delightful so far.

NEA: Can you share an arts experience or moment of arts engagement that has had an identifiable impact on your life?

FRUCHTER: One of my favorite experiences on earth is picking up a book and thinking “oh, this sounded good,” and finishing it only to realize my entire paradigm has shifted, and my experience of the world, altered. There are so many of these, but a very few significant examples for me: Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion, and Marie-Helene Bertino’s 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas. Books I fell into, unexpectedly, and from which I emerged either wanting to be a writer or, more recently, wanting to write better, harder, wider, more deeply.