Eleanor Lerman
| Eleanor Lerman | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 (age 64–65) United States |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Genres | Poetry, fiction |
Eleanor Lerman (born 1952) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
Lerman was born in the Bronx, and raised there and in Far Rockaway. She is a lifelong New Yorker, and is of Jewish heritage.
Lerman wrote poetry while in high school, with the encouragement of a sympathetic teacher:
As a writer, I have been rescued more than once in my life. The first time was by a high school English teacher who told me, that I'd better not read my poetry to the rest of the class (a bit too much East Village raunch, I guess, for my classmates) but encouraged me to be a writer, because while my work wasn't his taste, it was good.
At age 18 she left home and moved from the Bronx to Greenwich Village, where she found an unusual job:
Person wanted to sweep up in harpsichord factory. That was the ad in the Village Voice that I answered in 1970 when I was eighteen years old and looking for a job so I could support myself in the city, where I was headed to join the revolution. ...
Lerman's job was in a workshop, founded by Wolfgang Zuckermann, that produced and shipped kits from which amateurs built harpsichords, at the time a minor cultural phenomenon.
It was the harpsichord kit factory where I worked, the long-lost Greenwich Village of artists and gay bars and roller-skating queens, along with my neighbor, a film producer, who introduced me to a community of writers, and my boss, Michael Zuckermann [Wolfgang's younger brother], who gave me the job because he said I had soulful eyes (I hope I still do!), which in the psychedelic days was the only qualification you needed, I guess, to make harpsichord kit parts (I graduated from the sweeping up part pretty quickly) that made me believe it was possible to actually live the life of a writer. ... At the time, Zuckermann Harpsichords was housed in the first floor of a small, quirky 19th century building on Charles Street. Michael not only gave me a job, he gave me a tiny apartment upstairs. The whole operation employed about five girls, who drilled pin blocks, used a table saw and a lathe, but also worked on eccentric machines that Michael had made himself out of sewing machine parts ... Sometimes we ran out of parts and I was supposed to write what we needed on a blackboard. Instead, ... I used the blackboard to write poems.
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