Dick Cheney needs your help

Just kidding. Not really.

Dick Cheney just signed a contract for the publication of his memoir, and while the Bush years will be a big chunk of it, the memoir will span his entire career in public, uh, service.

The Washington Post is running a contest for submissions of the first chapter of Cheney's memoir. The sample, on the Post's website, reads as follows: Undisclosed Location, Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009: Well, the baton is passed. Our work is finally done. Eight years, one devastating terrorist attack, two wars and one recession later, it's finally time to relax. It's been an amazing ride.

Submit your one-paragraph draft by July 2 to pagethree@washpost.com. The best entries will be published. Further details can be found at the contest entry page. Best of luck!

Seattle's Pilot Books

Seattle has a new independent book store, tucked away in a second floor story of a shopping plaza off Broadway and specializing in poetry and small press releases. Pilot Books doesn't sell all the latest bestsellers, and it probably won't change that anytime soon. If you're looking for chapbooks, local zines or small press novels you'll be well suited to stop by. The store is open 12-8 every day except Wednesday.

The owner, Summer, is a friendly and knowledgeable book lover with a rockin tattoo of mastadons on her arms. "I’m always saying Pilot Books is for the now, the new, authors writing and publishing in times such as these," writes Summer on the bookstore's blog.

Don't fear that you'll have a hard time browsing just because you don't see the latest Dave Eggers or Jhumpa Lahiri. Handmade signs bearing slogans like "new" and "local artist" stick out of books. I'm sure Summer would be happy to discuss any of the titles in detail with you.

The tiny upstairs features a lending library and armchairs. According to the Pilot Books blog, Summer's planning on hosting weekly themed writing workshops and possibly reading groups in the future, too. During my visit the store was crowded with curious shopper and well-wishers, and was getting ready to welcome its first reading later that week. Not bad for a shop that had been open three weeks.

Pilot claims to be Seattle's Most Secretive bookstore. If you're in the area give it a shout-out and maybe we can change that reputation.

Forage Oakland Anthology CFS

You don't have to live in the east bay to participate in this project! Forage Oakland is a neighborhood bartering food underground, allowing those with extra fruit trees to share with their neighbors. Those on the east coast might not understand that the streets of Berkeley and Oakland are LITTERED with free fruit for the taking...meyer lemon trees, orange trees, persimmons, figs, plums. Not to mention the rose geranium, lavender and rosemary that substitute for shrubbery.

You can find out more about the Forage Oakland project here, but if you write about the intersection of food and comunity, please consider submitting.

social networking in modern times: or, what happens when your folks join facebook

A couple weeks ago, my roommate was lamenting that her mother had joined MySpace. Worsesaid my roommate, she wants to friend me. I'm going to have to reject her. I don't want to be friends with my mom on MySpace.

Years ago, employers were apt to fire people for talking about work on social networking sites such as MySpace. Today, for better or worse, your boss is more apt to be signing up for such sites. So are Mom and Dad. And underage siblings.

I keep tabs on my mother, aunts and little brothers via Facebook, and though none of them read my blog they could certainly find it with little difficulty. Yes, there are all sorts of awkward negotiations that go along with this kind of family sharing. My mother tends to ask me what Every Single Status Update means.

While my mother employs Facebook primarily for its social uses, she also uses LinkedIn, the business-oriented networking site that allows you to "tag" personal and professional connections, and recommend past employees. LinkedIn is refreshingly professional, a form of social networking that's focused on sharing less, not more. Or rather, on sharing only job-specific accomplishments.

Recently I accepted a consulting gig from an older gentleman (78, to be precise) looking to take advantage of social networking for his business. He asked if he should join LinkedIn. Then Facebook. Then Twitter. When I mentioned MySpace, he said sure, why not? If it's valuable

I almost wanted to laugh...I'd spent maybe fifteen hours with this man and knew he'd either be really frustrated by Twitter or incredibly, exhaustedly addicted to it. Then, seriously, I told him he should only join LinkedIn, and Facebook if he wanted to keep in touch with far-flung relatives or colleagues.

More and more, it will be people my age and younger inviting people past a certain age into the technological wilderness of blogging, social networking, and new-media marketing. Inasmuch as we may owe it to them (to anyone, really) to give them skills they'll find useful, what specifically should we be teaching them? Should we make the judgment over what we think they would understand and enjoy? Should we invite them to share in our own digitized lives? Who is welcome at the party?

papercut zine library to leave harvard square?

image courtesy of gruntzooki


I saw a note in the Phoenix a couple of weeks back that the Papercut Zine Library would likely be moving out of its location on Mt. Auburn to a soon-to-be-determined location. Cynical person--ahem, old-school masshole--that I am, my first thought was that Harvard owned the building, and the zine library would be forced out to make room for some student organization. My second thought was that the landlord wanted to attract another sandwich shop or chain store to the square.

Ten years ago the square had a diner, a plethora of used and new bookstores, and independent coffee shops. While cute local businesses like Herrell's, Newbury Comics, Tealuxe and Bartley's remain, they're increasingly sharing a block with cookie cutouts of fast food and suburbia (hi, American Apparel, Lush, phone stores ad infinitum). While the above paragraph could have been written angrily in the year 2000 and still rung true, I have to ask how much longer Harvard Square can embrace the mainstream before there's anything interesting left?

Papercut opened in 2005 and houses over 7000 zines; the space also offers workshops and concerts. I got in touch with the Papercut folk recently to see if the move was going to be definite and here's what they had to say:

Hi library patrons,
At the meeting, we discussed potential spaces where the zine library could move (most likely sometime after the end of June), as well as fundraising possibilities. If you have any ideas about potential spaces, feel free to let us know. Your ideas are our bread and butter.

So...looks likely. I've asked them for some more meaty info, in the interest of passing it on, but in the meantime it looks like the same story going down in Cambridge...another fun, intelligent store forced to leave the square, another cookie cutter vacancy. Rise up, Harvard, rise up. Help use your dollars to keep the counterculture spirit of Cambridge alive.


this post brought to you by the Tasty, the House of Blues, Toscannini's, Avventura, WordsWorth, and the Starr Book Shop, some of the many fine businesses forced out of the square.

poems for public radio

WMUK, Kalamazoo's NPR affiliate, put out an unusual request recently:

"Local public radio station wants to feature poems about radio experiences of any kind and/or fundraising to be read by area poets during the final day of pledge drive, April 4, in the afternoon. Station streams on internet so you can hear your poem. If you have anything, please mail to [mme642-at-yahoo.com] WMUK (Kalamazoo, Michigan) is the station. Humor good. Sentiment good. No cussin'."

via newpages

How's that for originality and support of literature?

Now if I can just get my NPR-lovin friends together to help me compose an ode to Ira Glass.

podcast, anyone?

I am alone at work almost all the time. I prefer it, but it does get lonely.

When KQED is repeating the morning news and I've had my fill of the dance station playing the latest Rihanna, Britney and Lady Gaga, I turn my iPod to literary (or would it be literature?) podcasts, because nothing is more soothing than being read to. Especially if I'm listening to This American Life. Ira Glass, you make me cry, you make me laugh, you make me feel a little less alone.

TAL, aside, I've discovered that I enjoy The New Yorker fiction podcast far more than I ever did any piece of fiction in The New Yorker (save three particular short stories, feel free to leave a guess in the comments). This podcast has esteemed authors choosing a selection from the fiction archives to be read aloud and discussed with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. While the podcast introduces me to new authors, it's also a great meditation on taste, the aesthetics and mechanics of the short story (the New Yorker short story, of course, being a particular kind of short story).

Another favorite--and one no longer found on Boston's WBUR, I believe--is PRI's Selected Shorts, another short story read-along. Selected Shorts tends to feature works by well-known authors--a hilarious reading of TC Boyle "Sorry Fugu," or a darkly entertaining rendition of David Schickler's "The Smoker."

While these three podcasts have kept me pretty busy until now, I've realized I need to expand my collection. That, or pony up for the Kindle 2 which will read to me itself.

So I've subscribed to The Moth and Writers Block.

Other podcast listeners out there, share your favorites!

the joys of composting

In honor of the upcoming Fringe Enviro-themed issue, I'm discussing a simple luxury San Franciscans tend to take for granted. The little green bin...


The little green bin is one of my favorite things about SF, but it's so trashy. Literally. Citywide (bay area wide, more specifically) composting allows businesses and residents the chance to turn any food scraps, paper food packaging, and compostable to-go ware into...wine.

That's right.

Green bins are provided by the city, and set out on the curb along with trash pickup. Restaurants usually have an equal number of compost and trash bins. It's in the restaurant industry that you can really see the impact composting has on waste disposal. At the end of a busy shift, the compost bins are jammed full, while the trash...maybe halfway, and that usually just plastic wrap.

The yard trimmings and unwanted leftovers of San Franciscans get turned into compost, which is used in the vineyards of Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties. While the thought brings a slight shift in meaning to the concept of terroir, the actual practice of composting couldn't be easier.


While composting isn't always perfect...and often kinda gross...it's one way to make a consistent contribution to living a green lifestyle and turning your own waste into something positive. If you're interested in composting but don't have a citywide program, check in with local community gardens. There are plenty of those in Boston, and most tend to have a compost pile that members contribute to. Or start your own compost pile in the backyard, and grow some food!

I will admit, we have a black composter in my yard, but 90% of the time I use the city's green bin (yes, because it's closer to the house). If you're interested in learning the hows of home composting, the New York City compost project has pretty comprehensive information on getting started.

open space blogging

Recently I started a new blog, recruited some co-bloggers, and then proceeded to tell everyone they could make whatever changes they wanted, so long as they didn't take anything away. I secured the blog name, but a friend designed it. Another blogger added a couple of widgets, which I then had to de-install because Wordpress is a far less fine product than Blogger. Posts can be authored by the individual authors or under the admin username.

Welcome to open space blogging. Open Space, for those not in the know, is a new information management scheme that takes the hierarchy and chain of command out of the workspace or meeting. According to its users, Open Space "works best when the work to be done is complex, the people and ideas involved are diverse, the passion for resolution (and potential for conflict) are high, and the time to get it done was yesterday."

What makes it different from a shared blogging experience such as Fringe is the fact that total control is in the hands of any user. A dangerous idea, in the abstract, but a useful one if my east coast co-blogger can update comments, contact interested participants, and track blog views while I'm still sleeping. The experiment so far is going well. But I'll be sure to keep you posted if any kinks arise.

Introducing SAVE Creative Writing

Hi all. Remember me? I'll forgive you if you don't. It's been a while. It's not like I fell out of a tree or anything. I got laid off and had to scramble to find a paid gig. I'll tell you about the troubled California economy another day. Right now I'm I introducing SAVE.

How many people does it take to reach Anthony Bourdain?
One, if you're me and you know how to find him.

How many people does it take to reach America's writers? To be exact, the specific subset of writers that attended Vassar College? I don't know. That's where you folk come in. (FYI, Bourdain attended but did not graduate)

Currently, due to budget cuts, the creative writing program at Vassar is facing severe budget cuts. If passed they threaten to undermine the integrity of the creative writing program.

To follow the fight against these cuts and find out how you can help visit SAVE Creative Writing

upcoming challenges to CA's prop 8

It's been a busy couple of weeks here in San Francisco since the November 4th election when a slim majority of Californians voted to overturn queer marriage rights. An
impromptu march, organized primarily through Facebook, Twitter and other internet sites, took place November 7th from SF's City Hall through the Castro to Dolores Park. Just over a week later, Join the Impact unified queer communities and their allies across the nation in concurrent protests.

Navel-gazing, angry San Franciscans examined any and all election results available to see what went wrong. A good 25% of the city's residents voted in support of prop 8; the SF Chronicle recently published a citywide map that allows users to determine the percentage of voters in each neighborhood who supported--or opposed--the proposition. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my neighborhood, where older Asian families rub up against houses packed with twentysomethings, voted 70-90% NO on 8. Some neighborhoods voting YES were obvious, such as Chinatown, but other districts, like SOMA, a semi-affluent loft playground for upwardly mobile suits, were surprising. The Chronicle also has a searchable database of donors to either side of the proposition 8 campaign. While such technology is necessary for any future fight, by allowing us to see where we need to create change, they also raise the prospect of community boycotts or hateful attacks. The community here has already spent a lot of time inaccurately blaming the black, latino and asian communities for passing prop 8, while few of us have been honest about our own efforts prior to the election. Most people I know, gay or straight, assumed 8 would never pass and did no work on the NO campaign. Sure, there is still work to be done within communities of color, but queers need to be mindful of scapegoating tactics.

In many ways, the fight over proposition 8 is the Stonewall of our generation. Over two weeks after the election, opposition to prop 8 is still making daily headlines, and Join the Impact continues to plan nationwide events, such as December 10th, aka Day Without A Gay. Want to follow the debate? The California Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear several challenges to prop 8. One such case examines the status of marriage rights of the 18,000 queer couples legally married in California. Will the state be forced to nullify those marriages? A second case focuses on the manner in which prop 8 was passed, arguing that a measure that strips a minority group of rights held by others needs to be passed in the legislature and not through a ballot initiative. This is the first instance of using the state constitution to rescind minority rights. A third challenge seeks to prove that prop 8 limits the scope of judicial power and violates the separation of powers guaranteed in the Constitution. Equality California has information on the challenges to proposition 8 for readers looking for extensive explanation of the cases going before the court as well as information on how to stay involved.

blogwatch: Alinea at Home

Any faithful blog reader must surely by now have encountered the cook-through-the-book type of blog. The general idea is that some enterprising non-professional cook, dissatisfied or bored with the rigors of corporate life, decides that cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, say, is a far finer thing to do. In Carol Blymire's case it was The French Laundry cookbook. Was, because after the better part of two years, Blymire finished every recipe in the French Laundry cookbook, complete with photo documentation, fancy dinners at The French Laundry and Keller's Per Se, and a wide internet fan base.

It's not too late to be won over by Blymire's humor over successes and epic failures both. You see, she's decided to do it all over again using the new cookbook from Alinea, Grant Achatz's Chicago restaurant. Alinea, while winning numerous honors including Gourmet magazine's nod as Best Restaurant in America, is primarily known for the adventurous detail involved in every plate. Think foams, agar and other hydrocolloids, aromas, airs and other aspects of molecular gastronomy most of us experience, if at all, secondhand. A blog post, with visuals sums up the intriguing experience.

How can you cook such cuisine at home? Lord knows, I would probably break down in tears. For those interested in following along, Achatz and co. worked with Ten Speed Press to make shockingly affordable $30 cookbook, and Blymire's Alina at Home blog is set to commence any day.

StoryMill: Making Writing Fun (Again)

I've been working on a long project for some time, and now that revisions are in order I decided to try out Mariner Software's StoryMill program I'd first heard mentioned in the end pages of a David Levithan novel. StoryMill, which is only for macs, comes with a free 30-uses demo although it's also quite affordably priced.

What makes StoryMill so helpful is that it provides a variety of ways to organize yourself while writing. If you're anything like me, you've usually got notes scratched on a notebook, three ideas rattling around your brain, a couple of links cut-and-pasted somewhere to help write the description of the main character's hometown, and some minor characters whose motivation you need to explore. With StoryMill, you can create character profiles, assign yourself research tasks, input any useful information from YouTube clips to website snippets. When you sit down to write, you can make sure you're surrounded with every tool you need to focus on the writing.

StoryMill also allows you to keep track of your productivity via a ProgressMeter that you can set to a specified word count goal or project goal. Thematically, you can organize your progress through a Scenes tab, or create a timeline of events. StoryMill allows annotation, tagging, and a full screen view to prevent any distractions on-screen.

I'm having such a wonderful time with StoryMill because it allows me to put all my relevant information in one place, and organize it in as many or as few ways as I feel it needs. That, in turn, makes me want to write, which is fantastic. I haven't played around with all of the functions, most notably the timeline, which received a rather negative review here. If anyone else has worked with StoryMill or a similar application, I'd love to hear about their experience.

Review of The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones

Judith Jones, at least to me, is one of those women in publishing. You know, those ones. You've heard their name somewhere, only you can't remember where. Maybe on NPR? You know she's responsible for something to do with...oh, cookbooks...publishing...you're pretty sure she's really important. Recently I picked up a copy of The Tenth Muse at the library feeling I ought to get to know a bit more about what this woman has done for publishing and also for cooking.

Suffice to say if there was a great discovery to be made, Jones quite likely had a hand in it. It was Jones who brought The Diary of Anne Frank to publication and, as if that weren't enough of a career accomplishment, Jones who championed Mastering the Art of French Cooking into its publication. Jones chronicles the process of working with Julia Child to present a recipe for a French baguette because, at the time, no such thing was commercially available in the US, and both women believed French bread to be crucial to a fine French meal.

Jones's memoir reads like a who's-who of the genesis, not only of American cooking (Marion Cunningham. MFK Fisher, Edna Lewis, Jams Beard) but of the great expansion of regional and international cookbook authors (Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, Hiroko Shimbo, Lidia Bastianich). I was surprised to see that Jones keeps constantly abreast of the changes in publishing, food trends and food history in this country, pausing to mention Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser in a local chapter on local eating and cultivating a garden.

While I would have liked to hear Jones discuss her position in publishing with some regard to feminism or women's issues (perhaps especially because she dealt primarily with cookbooks, and domesticity is already a murky issue for women) I thoroughly enjoyed the book overall. Jones has changed the character of many households through her continuous contribution to culinary writing and her memoir is a quiet pleasure for any fans of food. For anyone wanting to learn more about Jones, Michael Ruhlman has a good interview here and the New York Times has a great profile up here.
If these names sound unfamiliar to you, check them out next time you're thinking of googling some Food Network show or whipping up a Rachael Ray suggestion.

Miss the bus

I miss my long commute. No, seriously. I used to take me forty-five minutes to get downtown for my job, though I'd leave well over an hour to get there. Inevitably, MUNI would break down halfway between two stations and I'd barely make my shift on time. I've since moved and find myself significantly closer to work.

The great thing about this commute was simple: I got so much writing done. Yes, I was trapped on a subway car. Yes, there were loud students, sweaty, stinky bodies, tourists with too much luggage. But I'd stick my ipod on, get the pen out, and get some good work done.

I have the most difficult time writing at home. With wireless internet, a great roommate, two curious dogs, and a house that needs some work, I've got all the excuses I need not to write. I can water the garden, make more coffee, fold the laundry...and if I'm trying to write, all of these things become imminently important. Stuck on MUNI made it easier to force myself to write. And it made me happy, when I got to work, to know I'd gotten the real work of writing done for the day.

These days I take two crowded buses and there isn't room to sit down, much less write. I've got to find a new technique to stop avoiding writing. Those of you stuck with long treks to school or work, take a minute to consider yourself lucky. The rest of you, any suggestions?

tag, we're it!

I was tagged earlier this week with a meme that's been making circles through the SF food blog community. The game? List five sordid facts about yourself, then tag five others. My tagger thought this would be a perfect project for a writer-cook, and that fact threw me into a tizzy. I had to cough up something good. And there are a few sordid stories I'd really rather keep to myself. The pressure was on to come up with five details and then sell them on their grisly details.

I'll just share two of my "five sordid facts" here, but you can find the rest right here. I was hoping we could use this as a celebration of the more literary moments of blogging as well as an adventure. I challenge the subsequent posters to share (at least) one sordid fact with the Fringe community. Hell, you can even make it all up! We'll never know...right?

So, from my list:
1. the "who am I really?": For a long time when you googled me (which is to say when I googled myself) the first thing you saw was this: Toby Reid is a faggot Jew. It was the first sentence of a story I wrote and had published. It's actually a really good piece and I still love it, but I always wondered if people randomly coming across it would think I was a bigot. Also, in grad school I wrote a story on terrorism that involved me googling things like "how to make bombs" and "how to get away with arson" so the government probably thinks I'm nuts. And now you all can as well.

5. the "violence against literature": Recently I took The Last Course out of the library (back in Boston, because SF just has no love for Claudia Fleming) out of the library and photocopied the whole thing because I can't afford to buy a marked-up ebay copy and it's out of print. So I have the most ghetto version of that cookbook, but it's okay, I still love it. Also, years ago when I worked at a bookstore I was so fed up with things in my life that I would rip pages in the back of the travel guides. Customers would be able to bring them back for a new copy...plus people would just take them and read them on the floor so lots were pretty banged up anyway.

And now, I'm looking forward to yours...

writing beyond the MFA

Before delving into the real topic of my post, I wanted to take a moment to join in the recent spate of holiday-gift-madness posts with some suggestions of my own.

We are artists after all, aren't we, writers? Why not make something for those you love? We owe it to ourselves and our careers to support art, our own medium and others. Giving something homemade is giving something of yourself. Write a story or a poem, knit something (if you knit), bake a cake (you don't have to be a pro) or some cookies, craft something. Or support other artisans. Gift-giving does not have to support the store-bought culture of our country.

Ok, that aside...what to do if you are graduating this semester with your MFA? Have you realized at this point or some earlier point what a useless piece of paper that diploma is? Do you think I'm a dick for suggesting so? Do you still hold hope that your thesis manuscript will get read by agents, editors, and you'll be offered a contract in a few short months? Pinch yourself, or pinch me, and take heed. Below are some suggestions for life after graduate school.

1. Keep writing no matter what. Even if it's only for ten minutes a day. Even if you think it's not "good writing." Because regular practice helps you maintain your commitment to writing.

2. Explore alternate form of writing and publication, whether it's journalism, essay-writing, screenplays, blogging, or hypertext. If there's something you wanted to try but never got around to, do it now while the enthusiasm (or world-weariness) and discipline of the student is still at least vaguely familiar.

3. Think long and hard about what you want to do for a living, if you are going to be getting a full-time job for the first time in 3 years. Or ever. How much time will it leave you for writing? Are you going into something you are passionate about or are you just trying to pay the bills? After all the time, money and debt you've gone into for the MFA it can be challenging to channel your energy into something that (unless you're teaching or working in publishing) is unrelated to writing. How important your writing is to you--and how good you are at managing your time--are the most critical tools for building a steady writing practice. But it helps to pick a job that feeds you and challenges you in ways that mimic writing (as my profession does all the time) or else are unrelated but still of interest to you.

4. Join a writer's group, find a writing buddy, etc. If you can, make it someone outside your graduate school circle. Some many voices sound the same as certain styles and voices are privileged in MFA programs. I often felt like I couldn't relate to the stories in workshop and I'm sure I was not alone. (While Emerson seems to have expanded its graduate-level queer population since I began, it could stand some ethnic diversity and an influx of students of various ages and backgrounds.) My San Francisco writing group is comprised of people who are gay, straight, Asian, white, 20something, 50something, commentators on NPR and short story award finalists and published authors in varying genres. And then there's me. While it's not as comfortable as the MFA community you're leaving, it's good practice to surround yourself with people at a higher level that you are, if only for teh advice they may have.

5. Create community in any way you can. Write to share your voice. Attend readings, poetry slams, art exhibits, movie screenings. Help edit a literary journal or volunteer at one of the big guns ( Ploughshares, McSweeneys, Storyglossia, or one of the 826 entities).

6. Know, first and foremost, that how you succeed or struggle with your writing at this point is entirely up to you.

I'd love to hear other suggestions. Sometimes we all need a little push to continue our commitment to the things we love.

Blogging through the Culinary Underbelly

This year, for the second time in my writing life, I thought about participating in Nanowrimo.

When I did Nano before, in 2003, I wrote an awful 50,000 word genre novel. I didn't pretend it was serious work, but I was proud of the accomplishment. There's something intimidating about a novel--all that time, and all those words, namely--and in a month I had created one.

This year, working upwards of 60 hours a week, Nano just doesn't seem feasible, at least if you are also trying to get some sleep.

While I spent the last week of October stressing about logistics--Could I do it? How would I carve the time out of my schedule to write? What shape would the novel I had in mind take, and how would I link its disparate pieces together?--I allowed an even larger, scarier question to form in my mind.

Was it still the best way to get my writing out there? Is the novel, in our current society, a valuable product? Is it the best use of my time, of my reach? Hardly new ideas, I know. While we've all been talking about print culture being dead and how no one ever buys novels anymore, we're still waiting for the rise of e-books and their ilk, and we may wait a while more.

About a month ago I was sending out a piece of flash fiction to online journals. I'd worked over the piece and was fairly happy with it, but couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't "worth" sending out to print journals. I submitted the piece to over a dozen journals and within four days it was accepted. I'm not saying this to brag, but because the experience was just so shocking. Another writer in my writers' group, Jamey Genna, shared that she's also been getting a lot of flash fiction placed recently. There seems to be an energy around the form that isn't present around longer stories. What we want to hear, what we have time and space to hear, is it changing? Where do you read, and what do you read? If what we are after as writers is to affect other people, or to get out stories out there, how do we make the novel relevant and critical, and not an artifact?

This time, these questions are coming out of my experience as a blogger. Some time back I started an anonymous food-writer blog (and subsequently became un-anonymous), and while it's audience is not large by any means I do have some readers, many of whom are also in the culinary industry. An old Emerson professor of mine Pamela Painter always stressed the importance of giving your characters a good, unusual job because the wealth of useable details was such a gift to your story. By becoming a pastry cook halfway through my course in Emerson's MFA program I essentially gifted myself. While there are many food blogs out there in the blogosphere, the voice of the chef is still rare.

As inimitable Bay Area pastry chef/writer Shuna Lydon wrote in a guest-post on writer Michael Ruhlman's blog, what it means to be a chef is still a story largely created not by us, the people in the kitchen. What really happens behind those doors is not Top Chef and it's not represented accurately. I have a unique story to tell now, and I have a voice that tells mostly true stories, and I have learned a little something along the way about appropriate content.


Chef culture finds its way into my fiction, and this Nano novel that I wanted to write would have taken chef culture as its focus. But it seemed more important to blog. To write flash fiction. The food blogging sphere is being mined for book deals. Maybe you've heard of Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, but do you know Gluten-Free Girl? Confessions of a Restaurant Whore? Conversely, authors such as Maryusa Bociurkiw, whose novel Comfort Food for Breakups is by turn both funny and wrenching, are turning to blogging as a promotional tool once the novel is published.

There are different kinds of stories we tell in blogging and in print. There is an immediacy at play in blog posts that does not translate well to the slow pace of fiction. But somehow, as I've let a part of my writing work be through blogging--and writing about the work I do, in which the voices of women and of queers are hardly well represented--is informing and changing the writer's work I do. Blogging is no longer a sidebar to my work. It is part of my writing identity. Perhaps, troublingly at times, the most important and far-reaching part.

The Hours: A Review by Lindsey Danis

This is the eighth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project.

I was given The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. My mother, not a very avid reader, bought it in an airport and handed it to me when I was between books one day. "It’s all about Virginia Woolf," she said. "I think you’ll like it." While it’s true that the experience of reading The Hours is richer if you have read Mrs. Dalloway, the acclaimed Woolf novel Cunningham writes The Hours after, the book is a marvel either way.

The Hours tells three stories simultaneously:

• In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughn prepares to host a party for her friend and former love interest Richard, a gay poet physically and mentally ravaged by AIDS.
  
• In 1950’s suburban America, a timid housewife struggles in an unhappy marriage and confining social role, finding her only comfort in reading Mrs. Dalloway.
  
• And in 1920s England, Virginia Woolf begins to compose Mrs. Dalloway.

Cunningham weaves his stories together on strings, relying on the resonance of certain lines and images, and on the plot points of Mrs. Dalloway. Yet the stories are also connected organically, which becomes clear in the novel’s final pages. The Hours is poignant, each portrait finely honed and beautifully written. If you think that The Hours sounds like a clever trick, or that seeing the movie exempts you from reading, know that Cunningham’s skill lies in the gorgeous prose and the timeliness of each detail. Next to nothing is wasted.

Cunningham tells compelling stories about queer lives. But he also queers the stories he tells, finding spaces for taboo relationships and alternative family structures that subtly show another way of being. It helps that his prose is haunting, that he has an eye for heartbreakingly minute detail, that his characters are fully-rendered flawed beings. Cunningham earns my pick for the 25 Books Project because he works so skillfully with characters who are marginalized in too much contemporary fiction, and because, in The Hours and his recent Specimen Days, he collages literary tropes and genres in a way that is playful without being pretentious, serious while primarily lyric. His dissent from the forms and values of mainstream culture is lyrical, and The Hours is a fine introduction to this important writer.

Lindsey Danis is a writer and pastry chef currently living in San Francisco. She writes the mostly food blog Adventures in Dessert, holds an MFA from Emerson College, gets free reign over the best peaches and plums in town, and dearly misses the ice cream scene in Boston.