Here’s our Nathalie. Nathalie Hazan has been in our workshop for over a year. She wowed us with a story at our last Writers’ Read party and then blew us away with what she created at our three day Writers’ Revival. Last Spring she asked us to edit a story with her and voila! Venu Magazine loved it. You can find it in their current issue on page. 88.

Some background: Nathalie was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and as a young child immigrated with her family to the US where she spoke French, celebrated Jewish holidays, and ate Middle Eastern cuisine in a tiny Queens apartment she shared with her parents and two younger siblings.  Nathalie attended Bronx High School of Science and then went on to Cornell University.  Her love for creative writing began at the age of five, when she began writing a series of journals exploring her fascination with identity. Nathalie has written a novel, Beguiling Rose and is currently working on her second, Punchbowl Drive. She lives in Westport, Ct with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

Here is the first paragraph from, “A Trojan Horse.”

Hadn’t she eaten enough organic fruit during her pregnancy? Had her husband mutated his chromosomes by texting and talking at the same time?  Had stress rotted the very last of her 30-something eggs?  Or had it been the belly machine she’d worn everyday around her waist guaranteed to produce a “Buddha baby” which had thumped

too hard into Jakey’s developing ears?  What if her son’s inability to sit still was as uncontrollable as her husband’s and she’d been cursed by a pattern of taking care of inattentive, moody men for the rest of her life?   Her son’s pediatrician, an ex-triathelete with a crew cut, and four sons of his own, was fond of telling her, “Criselda, boys are a different species.”  After many nights spent burying herself online in medical research, C. decided that she and Jakey deserved each other somehow; that he must be her karma for her lifelong desire to fit in.