By Jackelin Orellana

Memoirist Jennifer Lang first appeared in The Coachella Review earlier this year, when we published her essay “Head, Heart, Belly” in our Summer 2024 issue. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and now living in Israel, Lang is busy these days promoting her second book, Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses, a series of flash essays that explore the complications of finding oneself while trying to balance life and family. Lang opens a window into the most intimate parts of her life, exploring how to become a stronger person by embracing who she is and not who the world wants her to be. Lang chatted with TCR to reflect on her relationships and feelings of otherness through meditative yoga poses, describing how she created a narrative that is both vulnerable and relatable.

The Coachella Review: I am not well-versed in yoga practices and would like to know if you can elaborate on what chakras are and how they affect our lives. What is something we can do in everyday life to make sure we stay in alignment?

 Jennifer Lang: Chakras are the energetic channels that run from the pelvis to the crown of the head, and there are seven spiritual energetic channels. They are not physical things, so if you don’t believe in the practice, it will sound kind of woo-woo, and I’m ok with that. It would be like me stepping into another spiritual practice, hearing their vocabulary, and not connecting. Every person has their own beliefs, and this is just what worked for me. I started learning about chakras when I first stepped on a [yoga] mat in the 1990s. I had just turned thirty, and I had lost my connection to the Jewish religion. I didn’t want a religious framework, but I did feel like I needed something. Yoga became that something for me, but I never practiced it like a religion. It took me ten years to open my mouth to chant Om comfortably. Regarding practical application, can you do anything daily to activate the chakras without practicing yoga? No. You really have to step in and embrace it.

 TCR: Landed is your second book, and it is deeply rooted in looking at your relationship as it relates to chakras. Yoga also played a minor role in your first book. What inspired you to look at your relationship through yoga and chakra alignment?

 JL: This concept emerged as I worked with a developmental editor. The first iterations of this book had a lot less yoga. The editor I hired was not a yogi, and after reading the book, they suggested that I tell the story in poses. That was the lightbulb for me; I spent so much of my life immersed in yoga that it made sense to tell the story that way.

 TCR: Your recent piece in The Coachella Review serves as a window into parts of both of your books, yet it is a vastly different standalone essay. You linked some beautiful moments in your life through food instead of yoga. Can you talk about your inspiration and your process of taking something that already existed and creating something new out of it?

 JL: I love this question. Food has played a huge part in my relationship. You could say [my husband] and I are foodies, but it’s much more than that. I grew up in Northern California in the seventies. It was around the time the food revolution started. My parents taught us the concept of eat-well live-well, and they modeled it for us. We didn’t have cereal for breakfast because we were not allowed to start our day with sugar. My dad was very athletic, and we would exercise as a family. He would jog while my mother and I fast-walked. Fast forward to the eighties. I meet a Frenchman in the hills of Jerusalem, and food very shortly into our relationship becomes an issue. Occasionally, I would just eat a bowl of cereal for dinner, and he would ask me why. He’d say, “That’s not a real meal.” I have memories of him from the ’89-’90 period when he would buy phyllo dough and teach me how to work with it. We would make apple strudel and serve this homemade strudel to our friends. He is an excellent cook, and his cooking has become more varied with age. When we first met, I thought I was a bit superior, because when I was in Chicago watching people put salt on their meat and potatoes, I was eating salads. Dating the Frenchman was a big culture shock for me, and the fact that we kept kosher made things even more complicated. We had to have separate sets of dishes and silverware for meat and dairy, and we changed the dishes again at Passover. I didn’t care about it, but kosher makes you slow down and think about what you’re eating. Food has been a big part of our marriage, but I didn’t feel like it belonged in the book, and that’s the part of the story you got at The Coachella Review.

 TCR: One of the unique qualities of this book is the graphics you use in the chapters, from thought bubbles to diagrams; they provide the reader with a visual break that keeps them rooted in the story. What was your inspiration for using these visuals in your book?

 JL: It started when I entered my first book, Places We Left Behind, into contests. I was entering it into Flash Prose, Flash Creative Nonfiction Prose, and Chapbook competitions, and when I was reading the guidelines, many said “open to experimental prose.” It piqued my curiosity. I don’t know that I can say with certainty that this is experimental prose, because I’m still not sure what that means, but I can say with certitude that I made this up as I went, and it felt like a very organic thing. The publisher at Vine Leaves Press loves what I have done. For me, the visuals do three things. One, its playful, experimental nature lessens the drama. The text is weighty, and the images help to reduce that. The second thing is that [the] playfulness mirrors my relationship. We have a very playful marriage. The third thing I have embraced about it is that I have created something new, which is really cool. Two books that have shaped my writing are Belonging by Nora Krug, an illustrated journal, and Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. These books showed me that when you write differently and do something unique, you really create something.

 TCR: In the book, you talk about moving around the world. When it is time to move to Israel, you face an internal conflict regarding living and raising children in the country. You mentioned wanting to return home [to America] a few times. Do you think that there will ever come a time when you return to the States, or has Israel become home?

 JL: Seven was the big number because we had only stayed anywhere for six years. It was in that seventh year that the rooting and anchoring happened. It was after that seventh year in Israel that everything began to blossom, my yoga studio and my writing classes. I really started to feel in my element in a way I had not experienced anywhere else. In that year, I stopped seeing myself as American, French, or Israeli because my identity isn’t one or the other, but all.

 TCR: One of the challenges of non-fiction/memoir is that you are not telling a singular story. You are writing about the people around you. Your first book caused some conflict within your family. What was your experience as you moved into writing this second book, and have you been able to move past these challenges?

 JL: Around six or seven years ago, my oldest asked me to stop using his name. I had been writing about him and his sisters since he was a child. Their names have been on everything I have written; some essays have even won prizes. In his early twenties, my son came to me. He didn’t ask me to stop writing about him; he just asked if I could stop using his name. That was when I thought to myself, My poor kids, I never asked their permission. This is also pertinent to parents who post pictures of their children online. Did you ask their permission to do that? It was eye-opening for me because I realized he was going out into the adult world with his identity, personality, and name, and I had to honor that. So, in the book, I call my husband Mari, French for husband; I call my brother Sib; my son, Son; and my daughters, Daughter1 and Daughter2.

 TCR: Is there any advice you would give to aspiring memoirists?

 JL: Read, read, read. Read memoirs, specifically. I just started leading a four-week memoir class in Tel Aviv. I have a group of nine women, and when I asked them to bring their favorite memoir to the first class to share a sentence about why it was their favorite, one of them told me she had never read any. I had a stack of memoirs on the table to share that day, and she had read some of them and had no idea they were memoirs. So, know your genre, read it widely first, and then read everything else. Then, when you sit down to write, put everything aside, including the family members who threaten to sue, the fears, and everything, and just write it all down. You will eventually figure out what stays in and what goes out and how to deal with names and characters that can be easily identified. Don’t let the voice inside your head stop you from writing things down. Take classes, create a community, and join a writing group.

 TCR: There is a lot of Hebrew woven into the narrative. The use of what would be considered a foreign language is something that many writers struggle with, but often it adds a level of authenticity to the work. Was this a hard choice for you to make, or did you go into your books knowing it was going to happen?

 JL: It was not a hard choice. It’s something I have been doing for years. I live a multilingual life, so it seemed obvious to me. However, while we are on this topic, I want to thank The Coachella Review editors because you were a source of inspiration. When you published my last piece, I asked why the Hebrew was not italicized during the editing process, and your response was that it was because italicizing foreign words others them rather than emphasizes them. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the familiarity of the languages used by the people. When I was working with an editor on my manuscript, the woman went wild on the text. This woman had italicized everything from modus operandi to status quo, along with the Hebrew and French; even my husband’s name was italicized. She othered everything in the text by putting [these words] in italics, and I felt like, wait a minute, that’s the opposite of what I want. I have lived so much of my life being othered that after some reflection, I asked the publisher if we could go back and un-italicize everything, and that’s what we did. And it was all because of The Coachella Review and your inspiration.

 TCR: In the book, you disclose that you felt like you had lost all sense of who you were because you were lost in the demands of marriage and motherhood. This feeling is shared by many women. Do you think you are at a point in your life where you feel authentic, or is authenticity ever-evolving?

 JL: I think women who become mothers, regardless of age, often lose a part of their identity. It could have something to do with age, but it could [also] be a fact of motherhood. I don’t know; I’m no motherhood expert, but it’s what happens. I think the answer to this question is both, because I feel great about where I am, but as people, we constantly evolve. If we stop evolving, relationships, friendships, and professional lives can get stale.

TCR: What do you hope readers will take away after reading this book?

JL: Ultimately, we need to stay true to ourselves. It’s easy to lose yourself when you bend too much in relationships or friendships. I didn’t start reclaiming myself until I got to Israel, and even then it took me almost six years to really find myself again. And here’s the thing. I’m happier now than I’ve been in all my years of marriage, and our marriage is stronger now because I am myself.

---

Jackelin Orellana is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at UC Riverside Palm Desert. She currently serves as the nonfiction editor for The Coachella Review. Her work has been previously published in the Los Angeles Times.