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Reflections on the private MFA, year 1 (part 3): the reading list

Here are a few of the books I read this year, during the life of the blog so far, in no particular order. Happy to answer questions or comments about any of these, as always.

Nonfiction:

  • The Brief Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks*, Rebecca Skloot
  • Switch, Chip and Dan Heath
  • One Person/Multiple Careers, Marci Alboher
  • My Reading Life, Pat Conroy
  • The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown
  • The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp
  • On Writing, Stephen King*
  • The Writing Life, Annie Dillard

Fiction:

  • Honoring Juanita, Hans Ostrom
  • The Atlas of Love, Laurie Frankel
  • Big Machine, Victor LaValle
  • Great House, Nicole Krauss
  • Pictures of You, Caroline Leavitt
  • Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay
  • Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans
  • A Thread Of Sky, Deanna Fei
  • Take Me Home, Brian Leung
  • Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
  • The Calligrapher’s Daughter, Eugenia Kim
  • Edinburgh, Alexander Chee
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

And there are a number of books I love to reread, too. Here are a few:

  • Three Junes, Julia Glass
  • Straight Man and Empire Falls, Richard Russo
  • Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbon
  • I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
  • The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary ventolin pills Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
  • A Homemade Life, Molly Wizenberg
  • Most books by Guy Gavriel Kay
  • The Sum of Our Days, Isabel Allende
  • The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants quartet, Ann Brashares
  • A Severed Wasp, Madeleine L’Engle
  • Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
  • Tender at the Bone and other food memoirs, Ruth Reichl

And by request, a few of the writerly sites I’ve been reading.

  • Koreanish, by Alexander Chee (check out his entry on the novel!). He doesn’t post very often, but when he does….ah. My model for blog entries as well-written essays.
  • Tea and Cookies, by Tara Austen Weaver (love her description of her writing process)
  • Occasionally, I check in at Advice to Writers for inspiration, a sort of kick-in-the pants to suck it up and get going.
  • Dear Sugar at The Rumpus’s advice column”Write Like A MF” is already a classic.
  • New Twitterquaintance Christine Lee Zilka already has an MFA, and is writing her novel at 80,000 Words.

Look for the “others’ private MFA” series, coming right up!

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Reflections on the private MFA, year 1 (part 2)

(In which I continue to reflect on Year 1 of the “private MFA.”)

Have you submitted anything for publication?
Yes! And happily, it was accepted, by a kind editor with very encouraging words. I know this is not how submissions usually happen, but it helped. I will post more details when the piece comes out.

What writing projects are next?
Well, the memoir. I’m in a strange place with it right now, because it’s about grief. And while I turned to it as a way to process grief, I have found that I don’t need it in the same way at the moment. Or, perhaps there’s too much grieving to do in this moment. Or, both. There are ten pieces altogether so far, all in different stages of being.

I’m beginning to study other memoirs which are not quite so linear, such as Kim Severson’s wonderful read Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life. I just finished Caroline Leavitt’s novel Pictures of You, partly about the death of a parent. I think I will need to read Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir The Long Goodbye, as difficult as it sounds, because it is close to the market that I want to reach. And I would like to read Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, for its work on memory.

I think I want to begin to write some longer essays next, ones that I can send out to other literary magazines as excerpts. I plan to create a work timeline by the end of this week.

Aaaand, I’ve got a historical novel in mind, or a series of linked novellas. It is a teeny seedling of a novel, scarcely more than an idea, a sketched outline and a hundred words, but it is incredibly exciting to me because I have never written fiction before (unless you count the fictional territory of some of my poems). I am not even sure what I am doing yet. Because it’s a historical novel, there’s a ton of research that I’ll need to do. But I am happy to be moving into this unknown territory. That’s the ultimate challenge, where I will feel the most stretched, and perhaps I would never have arrived at this space if I was in the tracks that a traditional program would have provided (moving from nonfiction to fiction).

Writing a novel strikes me as the ultimate leap of faith for me and my sense of my writing self. I look forward to being a memoirist, don’t get me wrong. But because I read ventolin over the counter novels and they nourish me like nothing else, I want to be a novelist. Alexander Chee, a former student of Annie Dillard’s, writes beautifully about one of her pieces of writing advice: go to the bookstore, and find the place where your book would go, and place your finger on the shelf to mark the place for your own book. I’ve done this a couple of times. It’s exhilarating, and terrifying. But that’s as closest to the heart of what I want to do as I’ve ever come. Where do I go? I go to the fiction section, the literature section, of the bookstore.

What would you like to see happen with this blog?
I never quite know who’s been reading the blog, except my husband, and my mom, and maybe the one or two kind friends who have subscribed via RSS. And I don’t want to become the person who always assumes that others have read her or contacted her or tried to keep in touch via the blog (e.g., “Oh, well, then. I thought you already read this week’s post.”).

Nevertheless, some of the best blogs that I read, that take advantage of the blog format (rather than a private journal) are also spaces to create community. So I’d like to see more dialogue here. It’s a “private” MFA, but of course it is also public and in the ether. It can be a lonely space—sometimes you feel as though you are speaking to an entirely dark theater, and you have no idea what or who’s in the audience—and since I’m venturing into the unknown with my career, I’d like to hear more from and about the folks reading here. Some company, if you will.

I’d also like to ask others what their own private MFA would look like, or has looked like. (I have asked a few kind writer friends, who have already agreed to do this. I’ve received my first set of responses already, so look for that soon! I’m very excited about this feature.)

And I’d like to post more frequently, creating a more consistent space for readers, and a clearer throughline for the stories that are here.

Readers: your turn!
Who are you? What draws you back to this space? And, what would you like to see happen here? Anything else you’d like to say, constructively? Comments, as always, are open.

(Part 3 will be a partial reading and rereading list for the year.)

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Assignment #5

If you went to college or received an advanced degree, write a (love? hate?) letter to your major field of study.

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Assignment #4: How I eat (A letter to E)

Dear E,
How do you eat? you asked in an e-mail message last week. How do you establish a form for this part of your life?

I have written versions and drafts of this to you in my head, upon waking in the middle of the night, on the mat at yoga class, during my run along the grassy median in my neighborhood. Places where spring’s starting to poke out of the ground in crocuses, swell the budding tips of branches, blossom in the cherry and plum trees. And I have written it at my laptop, which is usually next to the kitchen.

I have to begin, I think, with our neighborhood grocery store. It’s less than a mile up the road from our house, and it is our version of Cheers: everybody knows our names, or at least our faces. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that we go there almost every day. We get our double iced Americanos and caramel macchiatos there, our daughters have had birthday serenades and we’ve eaten family cups of gelato there. We’ve made friends there. So it is partly a place where we find community.

Sometimes we do plan our meals for the week, but more often it’s a day or two in advance. Partly because of the store, and because of its proximity, planning what we’re going to have for dinner is one of my everyday pleasures. It is where most of our disposable income goes. We don’t go out to movies very often anymore, we don’t even go to bookstores and music stores very often. But we do allow ourselves the pleasure of our grocery store. And, though we don’t have a year-round farmers market in our city, we do live within five miles of three farmers markets when the season begins. We try to go there even in the rain and cold.

Breakfasts are usually staples on hand. My latest breakfast obsession is peanut butter granola. (Before this it was toast with jam; before that it was peanut butter and jelly toasted sandwiches; before that it was smoothies.). Homemade peanut butter olive oil granola, Greek honey vanilla yogurt, sometimes with a spoonful of homemade rhubarb compote, blackberry jam, or cinnamon-vanilla applesauce. Usually in a glass ramekin, sometimes layered in a jam jar and smuggled in my backpack to school.

Lunches for me are usually leftovers from the day before. Sometimes I will pick up a bagel and cream cheese, or a salad, from one of the campus cafes.

Dinners, it must be said, mostly involve my cravings, and I usually crave some sort of Asian or Italian meal. Sometimes I’ll read about a recipe, and want to make it (parmesan-squash cakes). Sometimes I’ll think about what we have on hand already, and should use up soon (French toast for dinner, or Greek salad because of that stack of pitas in the fridge). Some days I’ll think that we need to have a vegetarian meal (spinach-feta lasagna), because we’ve had a lot of meat lately (kalbi) or that we need something warm because it’s been cold outside (minestrone) or something soothing because one of us has been sick (sinigang). Or something very quick that’s both savory and comforting (adobo).

It’s funny that you mention diet restrictions because we do have them, but I haven’t thought about them in a long time. Josh and C and M are lactose-sensitive, so nothing with cream or cow milk. We try to eat things that taste good to us, and are good for us. We’re not always successful with that balance, but we try to balance it out over a week.

But most of the time, it is about craving. And time: what can I make in a half hour, an hour, sometimes two hours, that will fit my mood and the contents of our refrigerator and the constraints of bathtime for our little girls and our workload for the evening?

I’ve been thinking about your questions, for other reasons, as well. Like you, I have experienced a difficult event recently, though I hope you understand that I am not trying to equate them. I have thought about why you would ask your questions: how do you eat? what enables you to eat? What kind of control do you exert over this part of your life, and why? And I think you might be asking, at some level, how do you find the appetite? In the churning wake of trauma, how do we reach for the hunger that is, by definition, an urge towards life?

And I can tell you about weeks when I ate purely for fuel: a handful of almonds behind my closed office door, a circle of leftover crust from the girls’ morning toast, a few pieces of cold pasta at dinner. I know that I am lucky that I had eating options. But most of my energy went towards getting out of bed, walking down certain hallways, stubbornly clutching the cool mask of a normality that I hope I never have to forge again. How the hell to reach for anything else?

Miraculously, appetite returned: at first as tentative as the signs of spring, then inexorable as the tide, luminous as the full moon, seductive as the inside of a peach. If we ever get to spend more time together, I hope I can tell you how. Maybe I’ll have figured it out by then.

See, my mind keeps circling back to your very first question. You asked how I eat. I’ve talked about how I prepare to eat, and what I eat. All of that pales compared to the family that shares my table nearly every night. With them, I eat gratefully.

And I think you know something about this.  Where and how and why I eat are actually the same…with love, with love, with love.

Hugs, Tamiko

Readers: how do you eat? (See my previous post for more of E’s questions to get you going.) E and I would love to hear from you.

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(Approximately) Five Questions About Writing, History, & Technology: Hans Ostrom

With the shift in new routines, I’m missing a few things that I know the non-private MFA would offer: externally-imposed structure and accountability. But! I’m a Capricorn, as I’ve said, and usually good with internally-imposed deadlines.

So with the beginning of a new school year, it’s time for a new assignment. To help with more regular posts, I’m introducing a new occasional feature here: a series of short interviews with writers, historians, and anyone else who’s interested in questions of writing, history, technology, and memory.

Today’s inaugural series post is a short interview with my good friend and colleague, Hans Ostrom. One of my favorite stories about Hans is our very first meeting. I’d done some research before we met, and saw that we’d gone to the same high school. I realized that my high school principal also had the same last name, and so I asked Hans if they were related. Hans raised his eyebrows, dropped his jaw, turned slightly paler, and actually dropped the paper he was holding. My high school principal was (is) Hans’s older brother. Hans and I have worked together now for almost seven years.

*****

KikuGirl (KG): In the “customary” Google/Wikipedia search, I couldn’t find any interviews with you! Are you that reclusive? Has anyone called you the J.D. Salinger of Tacoma, or Sierra City, where you grew up?

Hans Ostrom (HO): Ah, this one is easy. There are no interviews because no one has been interested in interviewing me.  I like the interview as a genre, and I don’t mind being interviewed.  One problem, if it’s a problem, is that I have written in a bunch of genres—poetry, fiction, scholarship, criticism, journalism, textbooks, encyclopedias, blogging, etc.  I think if I’d decided on one thing early on, I might be better known as a writer of that thing—be it poetry or mystery novels or whatever.  But I love to try different kinds of writing. I would say I’m solitary—writing-groups, for instance, have not worked for me, and I’m terrible at literary politics—rubbing elbows, going to the right conferences, etc.  So by default, not really design, I’m a lone wolf and a contrarian. But I’m not reclusive, and  always thought Salinger was simply bizarre.  Whereas I’m simply obscure.  I think bizarre pays better.

KG: Speaking of all of that writing: you write and publish more, both in hard-copy print and online, than just about anyone I know. (Maybe you’re the Joyce Carol Oates of the West Coast.) In addition to the multiple, regularly-updated blogs, there’s the edited encyclopedia of African American literature, there’s the poetry collection, the textbooks about creative writing, the scholarly studies, the detective novel, and probably a whole other set of writings I haven’t discovered yet. How do you produce so much, so consistently?

HO: I’m probably a compulsive writer.  Not an obsessive one, but a compulsive one.  I just love to write, so I write more or less all the time—in waiting rooms, in bed, sometimes while watching TV.  I do very well with deadlines, which are a kind of drug for compulsive writers.  This all may have started at community college, where I had a full-time academic schedule, worked as an R.A., and wrote sports articles for local newspapers.  This required multitasking and writing quickly.  So I just tend to plunge in and write and then see what I have later, as opposed to a lot of planning, outlining, etc.—although these are often necessary, too.  And one genre tends to carom off the other, so in the midst of an  encyclopedia entry, you might get an idea for a poem.  [KG: I love this idea.] Writing is probably also my way of processing the world, perhaps of coping.

KG: In your historical novel Honoring Juanita, there are several metaphors for history. There’s the standard history as “the dusty, distant past”; history as the recurring, haunting Juanita; history as the origin of objects (the ventolin buy online trees that the main character, Mary, uses in her woodcarvings); history as sedimented levels of trees and nature. What did writing historical fiction do for you that reading written histories might not have?

Mary is a kind of poet, and I think poets are mad to make history “real”: palpable, something you can touch and smell.  Of course, this is impossible, as history is past, is gone.  Its effects aren’t gone, but it is, so it always exists once or twice removed. Perhaps my favorite metaphor is the sediment/compost one, history as a slow building up, an accumulation, something that feeds the present, for better or worse—good compost vs. unhealthy compost. A woodcarver, Mary wants to get her hands on Juanita, but of course she can’t.

KG: Elsewhere, you’ve written about the Kindle and e-books, and you (like I) have lived from dial phones to IPhones. How do you think these forms of digital technologies will impact our reading habits, and our memories?

HO: I think they are revolutionizing reading and writing—right now.  And this will only accelerate.  There’s something called “Moore’s law,” which is that micro-chip storage capacity doubles every 12-24 months.  I think you’re seeing an erosion, even a collapse, of publishing hierarchies.  Vested interests need to try to prevent this from happening, but I don’t know if they can. We could be witnessing a vast democratization of writing and publishing, and I love it.  The old way depended upon an economy of false scarcity, which is reinforced by rigid ideas of “genius,” by making art mysterious (“it can’t be taught”), a fixed canon, only so many slots open for “great” writers, etc.  Many people are nostalgic for this setup, but I’m not.  Interestingly, you can archive books with Amazon  after you’ve read them on Kindle, so there is a chance that people will leave their Kindles to their children—a library of hundreds of books, maybe thousands, if we go by Moore’s number.  Few saw this coming.  Huge personal libraries owned by everyday folk.  At the same time, we may also be entering an era in which most people don’t have the patience to read for a long time or to read complex things.  Don’t get me wrong—I love books as books, as artifacts, but I also love these new developments.  It’s not an either/or question for me.

KG: What’s your favorite metaphor for history, or your favorite quotation about it, and why?

HO: The compost one I mentioned. I think maybe another expression would be “a necessary illusion.”  That is, history represents what is gone, but we need an illusion of its still being there, so we continually create  illusions of past—in our personal lives, in history books, in the media (“founding fathers,” “the greatest generation”).

Where history is still alive is its effects, and oddly enough, people are often reticent to accept that reality; thus the U.S. has never fully come to terms with the effects of  slavery, for example (just one example—there are many).  A kind of deep denial festers, therefore—and you see it coming out in the overreaction to Obama’s being elected.  He is as moderate as Eisenhower, but confused racist reactions drive people to make him some kind of Other—socialist, Kenyan, proto-dictator.

I can’t think of a favorite quotation, but I’m sure it would be something  ironic, something to let the pretentious steam out of history.  There’s probably one from Wilde or Twain.

*****

I’m honored—and frankly, surprised—to note that this is Hans’s first interview. And it’s my first written interview, too. Many thanks to Hans for being the first contestant, and for playing along.

Writing, history, and technology are going to be important in my book, so these interviews are also a form of research. If you know anyone who would be interested in being interviewed for this series, please send me a message at kikugirl (at) kikugirl dot net.

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Revision of Assignment #1 (Tell a story in lists)

On Becoming a Writer (Again): A Progress Report of Habits

Clean desk.
Hours to complete: about 4.

Renew library card. Check out library books.

First checkout from the library: 2 books. Second checkout from the library: 1 book. Latest checkout from the library: about 14 books.

Read more fiction for pleasure.

  • Read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a few stories from Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You. Laughed over one, puzzled over the other (perhaps am not hip enough? a high probability).
  • Tried to read Sonya Chung’s Long for this World, but had to return it to the library. Want other people to read this book—it looks like it will be important, transnational, historically relevant. But early in the book, had this terrible feeling that a feverish child was going to die. Couldn’t go on.

Read nonfiction writing.
Just finished Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France. An inspiration.

Resurrect the quote journal for inspiration.
Taste these from My Life in France:
• “the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite” (302)
• “how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly” (66)
• “I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.” (67)

Carry several notebooks and pens around with you.

  • Saw my writer friend R’s clothbound journal a few weeks ago: the cover soft, lovely, well-worn like an heirloom quilt. Want my notebook to be like that: used, not reserved for special occasions, like fancy china behind glass cabinet doors.
  • Using one of those hardbound blank journals that had been a Christmas gift. Having that notebook is like having a camera: not only are moments and thoughts that much easier to document, but having the journal is itself a lens and a mandate.

Read books on writing.

  • Started Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. It’s been recommended reading for writers, but all can think about, at least in this early part of the memoir, is “No wonder he writes horror novels.”
  • Started worrying about some of the different neuroses associated with writers: the sullen solitary, the competitive wit, the narcissistic venom, the icicle-forming insecurity. (Note to self: do not confuse writers with anonymous YouTube or newspaper commenters.) Thought about the writer who reads other writers and always loses in self-judged beauty writing contests. Always the bikini round, not the interview, that wins the day.
  • Wondered if this worrying about worrying is a writer’s characteristic.

Write.

  • Blog posts: 19
  • Status updates on Facebook and Twitter: probably too many.
  • Typed letter to a friend: 1

Revise.

  • Posted first drafts on the blog, then second and third and fourth drafts.
  • Reflected more on earlier entries, such as the one about the act of loaning out and returning library books. Although still struggling to love abundantly, wonder if my love of owning books may be actually less about generosity and more about the idea of hoarding something. You hoard something that you love because you worry that it will be taken away from you.
  • Tried to remove as many “I”’s from this post as possible.

Grades:
1. Collaged the lists, wrote, revised the first assignment into a linear story.

2. Oldest daughter commandeered one notebook from my purse, while we were waiting at the airport. She’s started to write and illustrate her first narrative book.

3. Opened my dad’s manuscript; had been scared to reread it; haven’t read it in over 25 years.

4. Woke up with a filmic ending of a story. Had never met the boy and girl characters, though had seen that particular off-ramp to downtown Seattle many times over. Two balloon releases. Not sure why. Wanted to know how the characters got to that image. Started to dream in fiction.

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More death, and sandwiches (First thing I ever cooked)

1.
The first meal I ever cooked? If we’re talking about assembly, I probably made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a while before this memory. In a rare early-foodie moment, I remember explaining to my little sister that open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were “my way” of making them. When I made lunch one day, she got to choose which style of sandwich she wanted: my way, or the regular way. To be fair, my way had more peanut butter and more jelly.

But when I first read Gluten-Free Girl‘s Twitter assignment (“write about the first thing you ever cooked”), I knew that it was heat, change, and alchemy that meant cooking for me. The first meal I remember cooking was a grilled cheese sandwich on a coffee can.

I learned how to make this sandwich as a Brownie (get it?), so I must have been in second or third grade. Come to think of it, my best Brownie memories involve food and open fires: “dough boys” (crescent rolls wrapped around a stick, toasted over an open fire) and toasted marshmallows in order to make s’mores. And the grilled cheese, cooked over an inverted coffee can.

Here’s how we made the sandwiches: A grownup cut a ventilation door in a clean Folgers coffee can. Then we turned the coffee can over an open fire, placing the already-assembled, buttered sandwich on top. We’d learned how to build a fire, after all: we were Girl Scouts in the making.

The sandwich itself: what I remember is the netting of perfectly caramelized whole-wheat bread, wrapped around a bed of sharp orange cheddar. The grains in the bread were toasted and nutty, and while I had never liked sharp cheddar before, it was just right for this sandwich.In an age of spongy Roman Meal, the whole-grain toasted bread was especially lovely. I remember sitting in my troop leader’s backyard, sitting on her wooden deck, waiting for the sandwiches to finish.

2.

For some reason, today I wanted to resist a nostalgic urge towards my childhood sandwich. Don’t get me wrong: it was a great sandwich. But nostalgia can tint all our memories sepia and soft-focus-camera every moment, creating those gorgeous auras around inaccessible women in Hitchcock movies. I wanted to go somewhere else. Heat, change, alchemy.

3.

I wish I could say that my first grilled cheese sandwich opened up a lifetime of cooking, but I didn’t begin cooking full meals for myself until years later. I wish I could say that this sandwich opened the doors to adventurous eating, but I’m still a picky eater. (Subject for a later post: is a foodie a once-picky eater all grown up?). I do know that I made a lot more grilled cheese sandwiches in our large deep cast-iron skillet, standing on a stool next to our avocado-green stove. (It was the late 70’s, after all.)

Instead, I think the sandwich represented one dish in a line of comfort foods for me. While comfort foods are important for everyone, I think comfort foods for picky eaters are especially important. Picky eaters get panicky when we scan the menus and chalkboards and don’t see any foods that we think we’ll like. Our itch is for the familiar: I know that, I’ve liked that before, and I’ll like it again. In our defense, it may be the fearful urge for easy pleasure in the face of too much uncertainty.

And so I come to the source of the uncertainty and the need for comfort.

I made many more grilled cheese sandwiches during what my sister and I call “the “scrounge for yourself years”: the years right after my dad died. I remember meals out at Sizzlers, buffet houses, and Mongolian barbecues; frozen dinners (some company made an amazing, if incredibly fattening chicken fettucine Alfredo); thinly sliced frozen Philly cheesesteaks called Steak-Umm. I’m not telling you this in order to blame my mother for these memories: she was a single mother supporting two young daughters, and she’d just lost the love of her life. My dad had taught her how to cook many of the dishes she brought to our dinner table.

In response to my dad’s death, my younger sister moved towards adventurous eating: trying whatever was offered to her, wherever it was offered to her, perhaps in order to reach out towards life more. She’s a visual artist and a sculptor now, so maybe trying new foods even helped develop her senses of taste and touch. Part of my response was to become an even pickier eater: to move towards comfort food for its predictability and familiarity in a world that, for a long while, felt like it had lost both. And when I finally realized that “scrounging for yourself” could mean “cooking,” I came to the kitchen with so much more energy.

I’ve wondered how to explain more about how the loss of my dad has defined my life, especially at a relatively early age, 10 years old. I know that it’s one of those statements that will take a long time to unpack. But for now, there are sandwiches.

P.S. If you’re on Twitter, you can search for other bloggers’ posts by using the hash tag firstthingicooked. Sometime this (Monday) evening, you can also check out Shauna’s roundup of the posts here.

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Now, contemplate death

A few years ago I asked a group of students, bless their hearts, to write their own obituaries.

Now, of course there was a reason. It was a course which introduced students to the English major, and I thought that writing their own obituaries would help them to articulate their life goals, even if in a surprising fashion. Or rather, I hoped that the surprise of the assignment would propel them to unexpected insights, to help them answer that eternal question: “What are you going to do with an English major?”

And yes, it was a morbid assignment; I’m not sure that it worked for everyone.  Confessing further, it might not have been the best idea to ask them to write it on, um, the first day of class. In class. Oh, my. “Welcome to the class: now, contemplate death.”

(Then again, many great works of literature have said the same thing, if much more poetically. Maybe not on the first page, however.)

Nevertheless, I didn’t expect that my own response to the assignment would startle me.

While my students wrote, I wrote quickly too, scribbling notes and sentences down the page of my teaching journal. I envisioned what I would do when I retired from teaching, and I envisioned what others would say. I even found myself picturing what my daughters would say, and this sentence emerged from my fictionally-grown-up eldest daughter:

“She really loved all the ways that the written word could bring people together.”

Today I’ve been thinking about what this sentence means. This morning, my husband said that in itself, it’s a blog post, or a longer essay. And one of my failings as a writer is that I can be too elliptical: too often, readers will have to ask me to explain further about what a statement means, or to give an example. I discovered a few years ago that I’m an under-writer, rather than an over-writer. I suspect this is why I’m more of a poet than a novelist. I expect very little to say a great deal.

Exhibit A: my short paragraphs.

Exhibit B: “Say more,” urged one of my early graduate school professors. Still terrified of speaking in class, I stumbled when so pressed. I said something! Now you want me to say more?

And of course, I know there are exceptions to my rule: there are many wonderful novelists whose prose conveys a great deal with very little. But what does this sentence from my own fictional obituary mean? I’ve got just over half an hour left of power on my computer, so I’ll use that time pressure (raging against the dying of the long-overdue Northwest sunlight) to see where it takes me. All right:

• I love how intimately the written word can bring two individuals together. In one of my favorite moments from the film Before Sunrise, Julie Delpy’s character says something like, “If there was a God, it wouldn’t be in you and it wouldn’t be in me. Just in the space in between.” I feel that way about writing: at its very best, the space between writer and reader holds the potential for the divine: for the transcendent. I can travel far from my self, see unexpected reflections of myself—and return, forever changed.

• I also love how the written word can bring large groups of people together. I love how having a common buy ventolin online no prescription reading (if not a common reading experience) can open spaces for conversation. A few summers ago, I led a book group discussion for faculty and staff members on my campus. It was a relatively rare and relatively frank discussion about issues of race and privilege, particularly among faculty and staff. There are far more people of color on staff than there are among the faculty. While I know a common reading did not level the playing field, I loved how so many moments in the reading provided so many resonant spaces for people to speak.

• I love how the written word makes me imagine and makes me empathize, even and perhaps especially when it costs me something to do so. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

• And—how do I say this without irony? I’ll risk it—I love how the written word makes my light shine. When I am passionate about a book, or a story, or a play, I want you to read it, and I want to talk about it with you and I want this experience to texturize the connection that we have with each other. Through sheer enthusiasm, I can bully you into reading whatever I’ve loved lately, or for a long time. (Don’t be afraid. I do take your preferences into account before I recommend anything.) Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Li-Young Lee’s first chapbook, Rose, the first and last stories in Nam Le’s collection The Boat, Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. Just to start. Few things make me as happy as talking about a book that I love.

I am taking some time this summer to rethink what I’ll do professionally in a couple of years. So far, all I know is that I want my life to reflect that obituary sentence: “She really loved all the ways that the written word could bring people together.” I want it to be a sentence that could easily describe me, and not just by someone who knows me really well.

I’ve wandered a bit this week, trying to depressurize from a difficult year (see post below: 2-hour nap!). I reached some solid ground in the stacks of my public library, and, once I recognized it, laughed at myself. Oh, right: the written word. As I think and rethink, I’m calling on the wisdom of Baby Suggs from Toni Morrison’s epic novel Beloved: “She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”

If I don’t know what I’ll be doing in a couple of years just yet, I’ve got a compass direction.

P.S. For Monday’s post, blogger Shauna James Ahern (aka Gluten-Free Girl) has invited everyone to write about the first thing you cooked, and how it made you feel. She’ll be collecting responses, so you could send a message to glutenfreegirl at gmail dot com., or post a link in your comments on Monday. (Though the invitation was on Twitter, I don’t think she’ll mind if it’s over 140 characters or not.) I’ll be participating. I hope you will, too.

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Assignment #3, draft 3.5 (Chicken adobo)

Chicken adobo, for my mama

(I have written this essay for my mom. If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning, somewhere down the page you may have picked up that I’m half Japanese American—not to mention the Japanese word “kiku” above. But I’m also half Filipina American, and throughout my life I haven’t written very much about that part of my heritage. I want to write more about that omission, perhaps another time.

Before I go any farther, you should know that this essay is not one of those nostalgic tributes to my mom’s cooking. I mean no disrespect to my mom’s cooking; it’s just that there are a million tributes-to-mom’s-cooking, which are bunny-multiplying on the Internet as I type. And despite the bunny metaphor, I mean no disrespect there, either.  A few weeks ago, I surprised myself by confessing to a friend that I’m constantly auditioning to be a food writer. See exhibits #3-355: the majority of my Facebook status updates.

So, insert a literal and metaphoric gulp here.  And a nod to the food. This piece is a dress rehearsal for that audition. )

I wonder if Filipino cuisine is one that slips through the “all-Asians/Asian foods look alike” cracks. Lumpia’s a close cousin to Chinese eggrolls; pancit dresses an awful lot like chow mein, maybe with a few more vegetable accessories. You can find lechon (roast pig) in Asian grocery stores with a butcher counter, but you might never order it there by using that word. There may be other forms of confusion at work, as well. Spain occupied the Philippines for a long time, so one of the latter nation’s main languages, Tagalog, bears a close resemblance to Spanish. Adobo is Spanish for sauce, and so there are a number of “adobo-style” seasonings and marinades in the “Hispanic” sections of supermarkets. If you like spicy Mexican food, you may have bought a can of chipotles in adobo sauce. I bought my first can of those a few years ago and was genuinely confused by the contents.

I know there are lots of societal and cultural reasons why Filipino food hasn’t caught on in the culinary American mainstream, the way sushi has. And as a picky-eater-turned-foodie (don’t laugh! I know I’m not the only one), I have to confess that I’m still learning to appreciate Filipino food, partly for my Filipina mom.

To eat certain foods with my mom is a way to bond with her: sipping from a cold watermelon on an oven-hot Sacramento summer afternoon; wiping our fingers after eating chunks of lechon from a styrofoam takeout box; scraping the last of a hot fudge sundae from the glass dishes at Leatherby’s, our longtime ice cream parlor. While my mom and I are close, and we love trips to both thrift stores and Asian grocery stores, we’re not always on the same page about food. I love most fruit, for example, but I don’t like watermelon, my mom’s favorite fruit. And when I lived in the Bay Area, I used to take my mom to visit her favorite Filipino cafeteria-style restaurant chain, Goldilocks. And none of the food at Goldilocks looked terribly appealing, to be honest. I felt a little bad that I didn’t want to eat more of it, to make my mom happy.

Growing up, most of the time I saw Filipino food at my grandma’s house, or at parties with her friends. My mom cooked a little bit of it at home, but not very often. Either way, I never ate very much of it. I was too picky, and for that picky child, Filipino food was far too weird. In my defense, here’s one memory that turned me off of most Filipino food for a long time. My grandma had made dinuguan, a dish with a dark, thick, muddy sauce. Maybe my grandma knew how much I loved chocolate, so she told me it was “chocolate meat.”

Dinuguan is made with, um, pig’s blood, which is what turns the sauce so dark. It is spicy and garlicky, from what I have heard. Maybe I’d like it now. But chocolate meat, it is not. (Lesson learned: when I practice “creative food labeling” for my almost-5-year old daughter, I try to make sure the label will mostly fit her expectations. Spanakopita today? I called it “spinach pie.” She loved it. At least for today.)

Adobo, however, is the national dish of the Philippines, and with good reason. It is chicken, or pork, or sometimes both, stewed in a sauce that’s a little sweet and very garlicky, peppery and vinegary. I love the audacity and scale of the butcher paper recipe at the Filipino place (Oriental Market) across from Seattle’s Pike Place Market, which begins by calling for “6 whole chickens.” However, I think it may be difficult to make adobo on a large scale and make it taste good. The rendered fat from the meat can be overwhelming and unmanageable, but the sauce needs to be really strong, not watered down. I have seen adobo swimming in too much grease in the chafing dishes of Filipino restaurants. I can’t blame someone who’s tasted it at a restaurant before and not liked it.

But if you’re not vegetarian, and have never made this dish before, I want you to make Filipino chicken adobo. (If you are vegetarian and have made it heroically past the dinuguan, apologies: I’ve conferred unscientifically with a vegetarian Filipino friend, and we agreed that tofu adobo is just not the same. In fact, I think we agreed that tofu adobo is just plain wrong.)  Because now that I can make chicken adobo at home, my culinary Pinay heart will return to marinate in its garlicky vinegary peppery sauce, for always.

You too can make it at home, and it can become one of your weeknight go-to dishes, as it is for me. Picture it! You can 1) bring home some chicken; 2) start your rice cooker; 3) use seven pantry staples to make the sauce in one pot, 4) throw in the chicken, and 5) wait, paying your bills or doing the dishes, for about an hour. College students, or anyone who likes simple home cooking with vibrant flavors, should love this dish.

And my mom? She used to make chicken adobo when I was growing up, too. It’s probably one of the 2 Filipino dishes I ate. Funny, though: I think she likes my version better now. (“You add sugar to yours?” she asked, sipping from the cooking spoon a few years ago.) I’m learning to cook and like more Filipino foods, Mom, a dish at a time. Salamat for teaching me to love my daughters abundantly and generously. Here’s my recipe.

Chicken Adobo

Liberally adapted from, ahem, The Garlic Lovers’ Cookbook (Gilroy Garlic Festival)

I’d tried to make adobo on my own for years after I moved away from home, but the sauce proportions never seemed quite right (garlic: soy sauce: sugar: vinegar, etc). Adapting this recipe did the trick. So if you read carefully, you’ll see that the sauce is everything in this dish. I like it pretty strong.

Some regions in the Philippines use coconut milk, though I’ve never tried that version. Most descriptions I’ve found agree that adobo is a personalized taste, which means that it’s very much about the adobo you grew up with, rather than, say, the adobo you adopted through peer pressure. What you have here might not be the most authentic version, then, but it’s my personal taste. You should feel free to adapt it to your palate.

This recipe makes just enough sauce for the amount of meat mentioned. However, I like to double the sauce ingredients so I have enough to serve over rice. Four secrets that I’ve discovered, through tragic trial and error:

  1. Do not let the chicken boil, because then the meat will be tough.
  2. Do not cover the pot; otherwise, the steam will drip back into the sauce and it will taste watered down. You don’t want the sauce to reduce into caramel (although I did that by accident recently, and it wasn’t all that bad!), but you do want it to retain its strong flavor. This is another reason why I like to double the proportions.
  3. More apologies to the vegetarians: you really need some chicken fat for the right flavor. (Remember the Age of Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts? I made adobo during that Age, and they just don’t do the trick. “What’s missing?” I asked my Filipina roommate, one night. We mused for a while, and then nodded in unison: “Fat.”) I like to use chicken thighs, or a mix of thighs and drumsticks. Either way, make sure that some of the meat has some skin on it, and don’t trim away all of the fat.
  4. If you are really unhappy with the amount of chicken fat in the dish, you can make it, let it sit overnight, and then skim and discard the fat off the top.
  5. You can serve adobo over hot white rice, which is how it’s typically served. I like to serve it with a mixture of white rice and quinoa, both thrown into my rice cooker. So, before you start the adobo, start by cooking your grain of choice.

Ingredients:

  • 3 lbs chicken (dark/light meat combo, or just dark, with skin) OR pork, cut into 2” cubes (Honestly, I’ve never tried the pork, I love the chicken version so much. And yes, if you used pork, it would be called pork adobo.)
  • 3-5 cloves fresh garlic, minced
  • Fresh ground black pepper to taste (start with about 1 tbsp), or 15 whole black peppercorns
  • 1 bay leaf (optional)
  • ½ cup cider vinegar (or a mix of cider vinegar and white vinegar, whatever’s handy)
  • 6 tbsp soy sauce (I use Kikkoman low-sodium soy sauce)*
  • 2 tbsp sugar (white or brown), or a bit more to taste

Method:

Put all ingredients into a pot and simmer, gently bubbling but not boiling, for about an hour. Check occasionally to make sure that each piece of chicken has its turn in the sauce. When the meat is beginning to pull away from the bones, it is probably finished. My husband, who’s deathly afraid of raw chicken (get it?), would want me to advise you to double-check the chicken near the bone and make sure that the meat is cooked.

*The entire dish can be made gluten-free with gluten-free tamari instead of soy sauce.

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Assignment #3

All over the Internet, these kinds of posts are bunny-multiplying as I type, but…

Write about food. Include a recipe.

(A preview of my next post: Filipino chicken adobo.)