About Me, Rhoda Rabinowitz Green
author of Moon Over Mandalay.
I once took part in an exercise at an education workshop to demonstrate right brain/left brain function and its implications for teaching and learning. Most, if not all in the class found they were right or left. I was "and."
As early as five I knew I wanted to be a pianist. A "right brainer." I spent so many hours at the piano, practising, that my parents needed to beg me to go outside with the neighbourhood children to play! I earned a B.S.Music Supervision from Temple University, Philadelphia; studied under scholarship with concert artist Maryan Filar, protégé of Walter Gieseking; completed a M.Music in Performance and Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, under pianist Menahem Pressler of the renowned Beaux Arts trio. Subsequently, I spent a number of years performing and teaching, levels from elementary through high school, conservatory, and university.
Now here's where the "and," as in "right and left brain," came in. The other side — the left, language side — fought for primacy from high school Quill and Quire days to the time when it claimed my full attention upon our family's move to Toronto in 1968. I began teaching kindergarten (the start of the early childhood language-education process); then English as a Second Language. My interest in the process of acquiring language soon expanded to using it as a means of creativity, a medium of self-expression. Consequently, I studied creative writing at York University; at Queens University in Kingston, in an intensive workshop with novelist Janette Turner Hospital; and with Governor Generals' Award novelist Helen Weinzweig, who became a mentor.
My first short story, Dear Doctor was published in 1994 by Fireweed, followed by stories inDandelion, Parchment and The Fiddlehead in Canada; Sistersong, Jewish Currents and The Louisville Review in the U.S. Aspects of Nature (The Louisville Review) placed as a finalist inThe Writers' Union of Canada 1994 Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. The Day of the Gorgon (Jewish Currents) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The large number of characters who people my books and stories — provide a context — is a natural outcome, I believe, of having grown up in a small town neighborhood, surrounded by a close-knit family of nine maternal aunts, uncles, their spouses and many many cousins, and a c—ontinuous flow of magicians, acrobats, comedians, tap dancers and pit musicians who played the movie-vaudeville house where my father worked as a projectionist/spotlight operator. My first book, Slowly I Turn, a bildungsroman, and the second, a romantic comedy, Moon Over Mandalay, both number a cast of characters worthy of a Russian novel.
It was the early years spent in Bloomington as a student at the university and teaching in rural southern Indiana that provided, decades later, the characters, plot and setting for Moon Over Mandalay (BuskerBooks, Toronto, 2008).