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Rochelle Jewel Shapiro’s Essay “Mourning” Appears in Adelaide Literary Magazine
by Writing Workshops Staff
5 hours ago
“…the fire of your writing comes from writing what you can’t forget.”
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro, in The Wombwell Rainbow, 2019
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro's “Mourning” appears in the November 2026 issue of Adelaide Literary Magazine, an independent journal now eleven years and ninety-five issues into publishing poems, stories, and essays. Its subject is appetite. Shapiro, widowed, describes planning the next meal before she has finished this one, then goes looking for where that hunger started. She finds it at her childhood table, where her father, who had known starvation in Russia, speared food off his daughters’ plates if they slowed down to talk. She finds it again in her marriage, in a kitchen where a cake never lasted the night. When her daughter asks why a friend’s family can keep one on a stand for days, the essay gives the moment a single sentence: “Shame like hot borscht rose in me.”
Shapiro's first novel, Miriam the Medium, came out from Simon & Schuster in 2005 and was nominated for the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. A second novel, Kaylee’s Ghost, followed. Her essays have run in The New York Times (Lives) and Newsweek, her poems and stories in The Iowa Review and The MacGuffin, and she has two Pushcart nominations. Her poetry collection, Death, Please Wait (Box Turtle Press, 2023), follows a marriage from teenage romance to her husband’s dementia and death. She has taught writing at UCLA Extension. She is also, by her own account, a working phone psychic, like the heroine of that first novel. She says the two jobs draw on the same faculty: you see and hear and smell a thing in the imagination before you can say it.
Shapiro has been writing with us since 2023, though she was an accomplished author long before she ever found us. In March she took Writing From the Body with Shze-Hui Tjoa, a class that close-reads writers who work from the body’s point of view. She spent four weeks on endings in Shannon K. Winston’s How Does It End? The Art of Poetic Closure. In August, she was back with Tjoa for The Insider Guide to Lit Mag Submissions.
Then, in September, she joined Diana Spechler’s Advanced Personal Essay workshop. The format is blunt. No lectures, no assigned reading, four prompts a week. You pick one, write an essay, and get notes from Spechler and from everyone else in the room. Shapiro told us “Mourning” was developed there. A month after the class began, it was in print.
You can see what the essay knows. It stays in the body from the first line: a stomach stretched tight, the pacing at night, a white scar on one wrist from a macaroon tin she got into at age five. And it ends by circling back, which happens to be the first move Winston’s closure class teaches. The macaroons a five-year-old climbed for return as the almonds an eighty-year-old will not climb for. Same high shelf, seventy-five years apart. The image does what a paragraph of reflection would have done worse.
Asked in a 2019 interview with The Wombwell Rainbow how a person becomes a writer, Shapiro said to read, widely and well, and passed along a novelist’s remark that students who read a few good books a year would need fewer writing classes. Her own routine, by that account: a pocket notebook all day, typed up each night into a running file she calls Epic. When Rogue Agent nominated one of her poems for Best of the Net this fall, she wrote, “I work VERY hard on my craft, and it is so wonderful to be acknowledged.”
Rochelle keeps signing up because the next piece keeps asking for something she hasn’t tried yet. If yours is asking too, our upcoming workshops and seminars in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are all in one place.
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