*Writing from Memory | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 6.2.2026*
Let me tell you a story. For several months now, I have been holding live writing sessions every Sunday with a large community of hundreds of writers. Most of the time we write and learn and read and give feedback. But sometimes, between sessions, I stop to ask questions. Because I am curious about the people in front of me in those small Zoom windows. In a small group, it is easy to know one another. In a large community, it is a whole other story.
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So I send a Google form with my curious questions. Whoever wants, answers, and the responses gather.
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That is how, for example, I learned that what worked for everyone during the war: very short meetings from bomb shelters, needs to stretch out in days of routine. I also learned that even in a large community, small groups are necessary. In any case, I want to tell you something that happened today when I sent out the last questionnaire.
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“Tell me anything you want,” I suggested, and in response I received hundreds of very short letters. Among them came this note: “I am here because I have a mission in life, to write to my granddaughter about her father who is no longer here. Every time I tried, I could not bring myself to write. I only watched time pass, month after month, as my granddaughter kept growing. And now, here I am, simply doing it, week by week.”
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When I come across letters like these, I immediately forward them to the administrators who work with me, Maya and Yonat, so we can be moved together. But then I kept reading and came across this as well: “I am writing with youin order to write about my son, who left home two years ago and did not return. Only his belongings were returned. Every time I log into Zoom, only I appear on the screen, but I wanted to tell you that I am not alone. We are actually two. He is with us in every meeting.”
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I read this and froze for a moment.
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These are just two messages out of many, and my thoughts began to spin. How little any of us know what the people in front of us are carrying from week to week. How many losses and memories, and also excitements and loves and joys. How much pain. And I also thought about the term “body of texts,” which refers to texts that accumulate together. But when you write about someone who has left their body, the collected texts become the body.
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And this body lives in its own way. Pulses in its own way. Holds something you can always return to.
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I know this well from my own life. For an entire year after my mother’s death, I sat every day and wrote to her in the second person, insisting on preserving the dialogue between us, refusing to loosen my grip, refusing to let her slip away from me and go. Writing about someone who has died is not always nostalgic. Sometimes it is an insistence on forcefully continuing someone who, just a moment ago, was alive and present. Alive and present.
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I had no framework then. I did not even know to look for such a framework. And in retrospect, I do not believe I would have gone to write in a small group at that time. It still felt raw and secret, between me and my mother. Every time a memory stabbed me, I sat down to write it. It was a private act, but also a very lonely one. To remain alone with those poems. And so I understood the two bereaved mothers who wrote to me this week, each separately. I imagined them opening our Zoom space without even turning on their cameras. Sitting in a space that allows and asks nothing in return. With themselves, but also with all of us.
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Then I remembered an article my mother herself wrote in the last year of her life. She called it “The Neighbors on Shimon Haterasi Street.” She moved apartment by apartment through the building of her childhood in Tel Aviv and told the story of each neighbor and family who lived there, from her perspective as a child. It was an astonishing text. Why did she write it? Because she missed those years? Or the fleeting composition of people and women and men and children and noises and smells? Or perhaps she wanted to bring that building back to life. As life knocked on its end, she returned to the beginning.
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In retrospect, it was a lesson in itself, how to write from memory. And so, when I wrote Feminism as I Taught My Daughters, I began with questions rooted in memory. How was I raised as a girl? What did women and men say to me? What did I see around me? About money, about love, about the body? Only then did I begin to think, if so, what am I saying now and showing my daughters and others?
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And because I wrote feminism from memory, I found myself telling about how my grandmother got her first period. And how money was discussed in my family. Meaning, how it was not discussed. And also what the women of my lineage thought about their own bodies. From that body, and from their conversations about it, a body of feminist texts grew in me.
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I wrote that book for myself, but in the end I dedicated it to my daughters. Just as my mother left us the text she wrote first and foremost for herself.
Because first of all, we write for ourselves.
In order to feel something again, or to understand who we have become from a distance of time.
And then, sometimes, we write it for others as well.
For a granddaughter who must one day know her father. Because there is no other option. And that is the story. That is the story I wanted to tell you today.
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This is also how I understood that in the coming writing season, which begins in March, we will make extensive use of our memory. Writing knows how to pull from memory things we have completely forgotten, things we may not have thought about for decades. Stories, and places, and people, and years. We will use all of these to write about our experience of life now, as women and as men, who we have become and how we became who we are. We will also read poems that do this in a truly brilliant way. We all have memories asking for a body. And present experiences asking for language. I invite all of you to join me in writing all of this, the meetings will be held in hebrew, with great love.
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Wishing all of us a Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*