Dina Paul

Dina Paul writes literary nonfiction shaped by ordinary life — family, friends, and the body's long memory. Her work is attentive to rooms, records, ordinary objects, and the private consequences of public systems. Her first book is THE ROOM THEY GAVE ME.

THE ROOM THEY GAVE ME

A Memoir of Care

At twenty-three, Dina Paul arrived at her grandparents' Central Park West apartment with one suitcase.

They did not offer rescue as a speech. They made a room. They folded a towel on the bed. They fed her, gave her subway fare and work clothes, and made a place for her at the table. That room became the measure for THE ROOM THEY GAVE ME, a literary memoir about what it takes to hold a person in the world.

The book moves through child welfare, motherhood, foster and respite care, psychiatric crisis work, emergency departments, and nursing-home therapy. It is organized not by career chronology but by rooms: the ones Dina was given, the ones she tried to make, the ones she entered under institutional authority, and the ones she could no longer reach.

In these rooms, care is never only feeling. It is a car seat, a coat, a chart, a signature, a court report, a locked door, a ride home, a place at the table. It is also the authority to enter — and the moment that authority disappears.

The final movement centers on Buddy, a nursing-home resident Dina knew through his hats, his songs, his pauses, and the bench outside his room. When her company lost its contract, Buddy remained in the building. Dina's permission to enter ended. Years later, she learned he was still there and had no visitors. She has not been inside.

The manuscript is complete and currently on submission.

ABOUT DINA

Dina Paul grew up in New York City and went west young, first to San Francisco and then to Sacramento. At Sacramento State, she discovered social work almost by accident, when a minor became a calling. She later earned her Masters of Social Work at Columbia University.

A retired Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Dina worked for more than thirty years across child welfare, foster care, psychiatric crisis work, emergency departments, medical settings, and nursing homes. Her work involved finding people, assessing them, sitting with them, and recording what could be known. She loved the people more than the systems, the rooms more than the files.

Dina lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, Brian. She bakes forty-eight-hour chocolate chip cookies and makes jewelry, a craft she began the year her son was born.

Her Belgian grandfather followed his father and grandfather into the diamond trade, and Dina remembers holding his hand on Fifth Avenue as he pointed out pieces in the windows at Tiffany & Co. set with diamonds he had supplied.

SELECTED WORK

Dina's nonfiction has appeared in Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine.

Essays from and beyond the memoir are currently on submission to literary journals.

Links will appear here as they are published.

For a lighter turn, read her Jasper essay below.