My, my, my. I am super excited to share that my essay collection in-progress, COSMIC FRUIT, won an award from City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). I began this project in 2013 with inklings of wanting to write about food, producing a long lyric essay about plums. I enjoyed the process and results so much I had to keep going and make a book exploring food and cultural memory, food as a source of wonder, danger, salve, and delight. Other pieces tackle pumpkins, strawberries, dill, boots (that is, the intergenerational trauma of starvation), and more—stay tuned for a long essay about marzipan (and erasure) this fall. The award supports my trip to Ragdale to focus intently on the project, among other project-related expenses. I am grateful to have this support from the City of Chicago!
I'm happy to have a new lyric essay out in Orion Magazine's summer issue, "A Dill in Every Soup." The essay spans the personal, gastronomical, and ethnopharmacological, leaping from Sappho to the Talmud to Spenser's Faerie Queene, and more. Here's how the essay begins:
While we wait for issues to hit mailboxes and newsstands, and in honor of strawberry season, here is my first essay to be published in Orion, "Cosmic Fruit," from their Summer 2019 issue. Yum!
ETA: "A Dill in Every Soup" is now online, right over here!
Back in December, holding a bunch of dill.
I'm thrilled to have my essay "Cosmic Fruit" in the gorgeous summer issue of Orion Magazine. It's part of a collection of lyric essays on food and cultural memory that I've been slowly pecking away at for several years now, which includes "Dark Fruit: A Cultural and Personal History of the Plum" in Los Angeles Review of Books and "Used to be Schwartz" in The Rumpus. You can subscribe to Orion Magazine or pick up a copy at your favorite bookstore or newsstand. Here's a taste of "Cosmic Fruit":
UPDATE (7/9): You can also read the essay online here.
I'm back from a family trip to Orcas Island. Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, we spotted skittering kingfishers and a great blue heron in flight--its path strangely loping. Then, in Orcas, there were the requisite cows, sheep, and horses; a buck crunching on dead leaves; and sweet doe eating dandelions. We went to the old strawberry barreling plant in the hamlet of Olga, where there are no longer any strawberry fields. And M & I baked our bones in a sauna that may have been close to 200° F. How refreshing!
Now I'm in back-to-school mode. A few tidbits of note:
- On Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a free one-day class on contemporary fairy tales at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library.
- On Saturday, October 22, I will be one of 40+ featured artists at Artist Trust's 30th Birthday Party. Tickets are $25 and proceeds support this amazing organization and all the hard work it does in Washington State. I have felt their impact profoundly as a recipient of their inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. But they have been a helpful resource for me long before that; I attended a number of their grant writing workshops and compiled some of my notes in a post here.
- Finally, I'm pleased to be offering one-on-one writing coaching via Hugo House's new manuscript consultation program. You can learn all about here.
In other news, I have a few pieces forthcoming--a collage essay about a fruit (in the meantime here's a post I wrote about nectarines), a short story inspired by my recent trip to the Netherlands, and two short-short fairy tales. I'll be sure to post links to these pieces as they become available.