Overheard At Gotham

I have a recording of Josie and me talking. It’s about a month before she died. There are parts where we talk about what we think happens after we die, but I’ll admit, in those parts, it’s mostly me talking. The parts I like best are where we are reading through a Seamless menu laughing about the garbage some people will put on a hotdog, especially in Brooklyn—like baked beans and Doritos—because a hot dog is what Josie felt like eating for lunch. “I already feel like crap,” she mused, “so I figure the hotdog isn’t going to hurt me.”

Josie was the kind of person who thought that dry January was dumb and that diets that deny you of pleasure were also dumb. Don’t hurt yourself, but also, don’t deny yourself was a conversation we had often.

At one point she started showing me all the weird things she wanted to order off Amazon for her birthday/Halloween party. Dry ice for the punch. Black lights. At one point we were laughing about these blood bags she planned to fill with vodka-cranberry. I suggested Bloody Mary. Then we just started going back and forth about whether it was too gross or morbid to put Bloody Mary into blood bags at the party of a woman planning to enter hospice right after the party.

At least, at the time, that’s what I thought we’d been talking about. But as I listened, I realized Josie hadn’t been worried about grossing anyone out or making anyone feel sad or weird. She’d been worried that the blood bag would get stopped up. They wouldn’t be able get the drink out of the blood bag. It was an issue of alcohol-conveyance.  

 She didn’t correct me. I never realized my mistake until four years later—four years and four months after Josie died at the age of 42.

Josie and I knew each other for a long time before we became good friends. I was closer with her former boyfriend, the guy who left her right when she got her terminal diagnosis, the one she wrote her brilliant, hilarious New York Times article about. But after he left her, Josie and I scheduled a daily “check in” phone call. We probably spoke more often than that. I invited her every time I went out, and she did the same.

Josie was a professional writer. At the end of her life, she was the editor for the Guggenheim’s website. She and I wrote a blog together for the company that produces Fiji Water. I got the job through her. In fact, Josie got me a lot of my first writing jobs. But it was Josie who enrolled as a student in my first ever writing class at Gotham. She wanted to write about dying from cancer, but mostly she wanted to shame her boyfriend publicly.

Josie’s class grew close in large part due to Josie’s energy and spirit. Now, I am not one of those people who deify the dead. Maybe it’s because I’m a memoir teacher. I spend a lot of time trying to convince writers that there are no villains in memoir and there are, likewise, no angels either.

But it’s hard not to think of Josie as practically perfect. She was generous as a writer and a person. She was funny and she was smart. But mostly, she was kind. She was the type of friend who didn’t correct you for misunderstanding that a conversation about the best way to drink booze at a Halloween party wasn’t a conversation about her impending death. Josie loved being alive. She wanted her life to matter.

I love that Josie’s class makes the Josie Rubio Scholarship available every year. It’s a wonderful tribute to Josie, but also a reminder that when you are alive, you should feel alive. Write because it’s important to tell stories, it reminds us that we are alive, it helps us delineate why and how our lives matter.

Even at the end of her life, Josie didn’t like to talk about dying. She liked to talk about living. She loved planning that Birthday/Halloween party. She had two costume changes that night because she couldn’t decide if she wanted to be Little Bo Peep or an insomniac. So she was both. She didn’t buy the blood bags to drink out of in the end. But she did put dry ice in the punch.

No one felt weird. No one felt sad. We all just felt more alive around her. 

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To enter the Josie Rubio Scholarship Contest, please submit a one-paragraph story, in the style of the New York Times’ Tiny Love Stories, no more than 100 words long.

Deadline is midnight, EST, on Friday April 14th, 2023.

Winners will be announced in late May, and will receive a tuition-free class of their choice at Gotham Writers Workshop (subject to class availability).

Send submissions to the Josie Rubio Scholarship Committee at josierubioscholarship@gmail.com.

You can read examples of entries by previous winners here.

On Wednesday, January 16^th 2019, I walked into my first ever Gotham class. Well, technically it was my second—I’d been a Gotham student ten years earlier. This time, however, I would be the teacher.

I had never taught writing before. So facing this room of writers, some new to the craft, some not-so-new, the intimidation I felt was real.

But, I figured, I’d had a lot of other teachers over the years. So really, how hard could this be? Plus, I’d written a lot of books. Nine to be exact. I had most recently published a memoir. And anyway, If Snape from Harry Potter and Miss Minchin from The Little Princess could get away with it, so could I. Right? Right?!?

When I was a Gotham student, my instructor was author and teacher Alex Mindt. He offered up both wisdom and kindness in equal measure. His goal was to motivate us to write. He understood that writing more made better writers. I wanted to do that too.

One of the students in that first class was already my friend, Josie Rubio. On the subway ride home after the first class, Josie insisted I had done a good job. “Although, you might have apologized too much,” she said.

I measured her face to gauge how honest she was being. Josie wanted the class to be worth her time: She was dying of cancer, and every moment she had left mattered.

The truth was, I was already a fan of Gotham’s instructional method—positive reinforcement; building tools for reading critically; gentle guidance toward better practice; and most importantly building a writing community. Truth be told, I had been trying to get them to hire me for years.

Right then, I vowed internally to offer Josie, not just an opportunity to get better at writing, but ten three-hour classes that would not waste a single minute of the hours she had left.  

The first few weeks of class felt like a whirlwind. Then it was Josie’s turn to submit work for the Booth. She turned in a piece about her long-term relationship ending the same week she was given a terminal diagnosis.

“What kind of monster takes all the dental floss with him when he moves?!” Josie wrote, with her unparalleled ability to voice vibrant humor in the face of excruciating pain.

As we began Josie’s Booth, we all struggled to keep our emotions in check. The material was heartbreaking. We had all come face to face with the understanding that this vigorous, beautiful human, was dying. That’s when something magical happened: One of the students broke out a bag full of dental floss and passed it around the room. When it landed in Josie’s hands, her smile was genuine. Everyone laughed and clapped. In that moment, I knew that this class was going to exceed every one of my hopes and expectations. 

The essay Josie submitted for her first Booth, later became her piece Dating While Dying, published in the New York Times. It went viral. Several more writers from that class later also published in the Times, then after that, in one of their anthologies. 

After Josie’s death in December 2019, her Gotham classmates came together to organize twenty scholarships for Gotham Writers Workshop courses in Josie Rubio’s name.

This year, in 2022, they are planning to do it again.

The members of my first class at Gotham have achieved so much more than I could have hoped for them. But who could have guessed that I would have been the one to learn the most?

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Please submit one paragraph of up to 100 words in a format similar to The New York Times Tiny Love Stories–by April 1st. Winners will be announced by May 15th.

Send submissions to the Josie Rubio Scholarship Committee at  josierubioscholarship@gmail.com