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.

Karibu Books Shuts Its Doors

This Friday marks the beginning of Black History Month, but by mid-February 15-year-old Karibu Books—one of the leading African American bookstores in the country and one of the few remaining bookstores aimed at black readers—will shut its doors.

It’s unfortunately not an uncommon event in recent years; many specialty book retailers, including women’s and LGBT bookstores, have felt the brunt of big-box stores and have been competitively edged out of the market by online bookselling giants like Amazon. “Independent stores function as literary laboratories, and publishers rely on them to champion new and controversial work,” claims Alex Beckstead, the producer and director of Paperback Dreams, a documentary that chronicles the rise and fall of independent bookstores.

We know these stores; we love theses stores. So, I ask, “What’s your favorite independent bookstore . . . and, when’s the last time you’ve been?”

A Tale of Two New Yorks

It is a truly Dickensian tale.

This fall, I spent the semester negotiating both cities. Most mornings, I'd wake up on the well-to-do Upper West Side, grab a coffee on the corner, walk past the Gap and Banana Republic to the train.

A half hour later I'd emerge in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, where 45 percent of residents live below the poverty line (which is $13,167 per year for a family of 2), and 97 percent or residents are black or hispanic, according to the New York City Department of City Planning, roll up my sleeves, and start reporting for my classes.

I'm a student at the Columbia School of Journalism, where students are assigned a neighborhood in New York City that they report on all semester.

I wrote stories on hunger, crime, welfare, community health, the schools, and many other subjects, and what I found shocked me, not because I hadn't read about communities like Mott Haven, but because seeing and reading are two different things.

A few telling facts that I ferreted out:

• The principal of IS-162, Maryann Manzolillo, budgets money for graph paper, because there's no where to buy it in the community. She also opens the school library to parents, because there are few, if any bookstores in the community (I never saw one).

• Asthma rates are among the highest in the city and have been connected to the intense pollution and poverty of the area. As a result, the neighborhood's rate of asthma hospitalization -- meaning a person's asthma is so out of control that they might die -- is more than three times the rate for all of New York City, with 123.6 hospitalizations per 10,000 people. In contrast, New York City as a whole has only 35 hospitalizations per 10,000 people.

• I met a man, Anthony Ormas, who lived in a dilapidated apartment. In his bathroom, there is no light, and there hasn’t been for several years. “We live by candlelight,” Ormas said. Water drips continuously from a pipe in the wall where a bathtub faucet should be. The floor is rotted in places where steam from the pipes that feed the rusty old radiators has leaked out and risen up from beneath the floorboards. Many of the windows do not close at all, close poorly, or fit to the window frame a kilter, leaving gaps for cold air to come inside. Drug addicts and prostitutes gather on the stairwell inside his apartment, and on the roof.

• Sometimes, food stamps are not enough. The junior warden of Saint Ann's explained that $135.50 per week in food stamps goes fast for a family of four with growing children, and that parents often make choices between nutrition and quantity – unhealthy food like soda and white bread is cheaper than fresh produce. Ironically, one in four Mott Haven residents are obese, compared to one in five in New York City as a whole, and 17 percent have diabetes, compared to 9 percent of New York City residents, according to 2006 New York City Department of Health statistics, and 36 percent receive food stamps.

• On Labor Day, 2005, Naiesha Pearson, 10, was playing outside at a Labor Day picnic for children, when she got caught by a gunshot and bled to death in her mother's arms. During the murderer's trial, her mother said, "I ran to her and I called out, all she did was say mommy and stumbled to me. She stumbled to me and said mommy and fell into my arms." As bled to death, someone stole her new bike.

There is some light in the neighborhood -- there are numerous community groups, including churches, that are working toward positive change.

In reporting, the scope of the area's problems surprised me -- the area's issues are complex and interlocking, so that poverty, for example, often means that residents can't afford healthy food, which ups rates of obesity and type II diabetes, which can't be treated well because residents can't afford blood testing strips...

This is America at its most hideous.

We can afford to build new stadiums for the Yankees, but not to give families of four more than $135/week in food stamps, which is, of course, a gross-oversimplification of the situation.

So I'll say it -- shame on America for ignoring communities like this. It's inhumane, it's real, and it needs to change.

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.

Flannery O'Connor and Heroes

So this is my first blog attempt and I'm assuming it's going to suck, but stick with me. Good intro, right? Now I'll talk about what kind of food got stuck in my teeth this morning (cinnamon apple sauce) and my favorite kind of toilet paper (whatever that commercial is with those red bears!).... I thought that was how blogs worked? You see, I did a little research. Dwight Schrute's blog is about a time capsule he sent to himself. No, really. I'm actually getting to something literary. Seems to me time's a pretty mysterious mofo. Heard about this study about how people like to see, in their movie trailers, everything that's going to happen in the movie? Not original. Flannery was doing that stuff ages ago. See "A Good Man is Hard to Find." You know damn well they're going to meet the misfit the moment the grandmother, and then the storeowner, mentions it. Or "A Circle in the Fire." Fire's in the title, even, and it's the protagonist's greatest fear. What she really pulled off is making us pant with anticipation (that's right, like a dog) until we get there. Why don't we see this in a lot of writing today (though, yes, there are exceptions like Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex--on our Best Books List)?

Actually, this isn't what I wanted to talk about at all. What I wanted to talk about was dialogue subtext. In "A Circle in the Fire" (really one of O'Connor's fastest moving stories) we've got this woman who's convincing herself the invading boys are only hungry and will soon leave vs. the boys who know exactly what they are doing but pretend to speak politely. The suspense is in waiting for the subtext to come to the surface, for the woman to realize (or let herself realize) what exactly is going on, in opposition to what is being said. That's a whole lot of suspense, a whole lot more than just wondering what physical action will play out. If you look back at pop culture, you'll see this at work in shows like Heroes, where characters will have whole conversations full of disparate subtexts, disparate levels of knowledge (though this is probably easier to do when your characters' identities/super powers are secret). Too heavy? My time capsule would include gay Albus Dumbledore, embryonic research, global warming in a tube, a copy of James Scott's OneStory, an issue of the latest Redivider, my upcoming issue of Mid-American Review, other shameless plugs, etc. And yours?

Susan B. Komen Race for the Cure

See me? I'm TOUGH.

I'm the first to admit that my life gets busy. I've got something planned every day, and it feels like I'm putting every minute to use. I spend my time commuting on the T knitting, I write emails while I watch TV, I eat while I walk. I even sleep with a book resting on my forehead just in case reading by osmosis is more than a pipe-dream. But this weekend, I am slowing down just a bit so that I can do something good for someone else.

Fringe copyeditor Karen Crosby pulled together a team to participate in the Susan B. Komen Race for the Cure, taking place in Boston this coming Sunday, September 23rd.

I've already raised $345.00 for the cause, and I can't tell you how happy I am to be spending a few hours walking with a group of dedicated Fringies and surrounded by breast cancer survivors and supporters of all shapes and sizes. Look out your windows and watch your TVs, because the Fringe team will be sporting Fringe T-shirts that day.

I can't help thinking about the women I know personally who have dealt with breast cancer. Some have been lucky, and some haven't. Aunt Judy, Aunt Karen, Aunt Donna, Nancee Sherman, Gretchen Stark, and Anne Marie McAvey, I'm racing for you. This is a women's issue, and it's not going away. What is there to do but sink my teeth into helping any way I can?