TBR: Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South by Sue Eisenfeld

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe!

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Wandering Dixie is a travel-through-history memoir about Jews, the South, race, the Confederacy, and me—my discovery of some worlds in the United States that I never knew existed. It’s a “Yankee’s journey” through the Deep South. And it’s a journey through the lost Jewish communities of the South, intersecting with some of the less-familiar African-American history of the nation.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

I write in a genre never-never land—not deep memoir, definitely not serious nonfiction. A travel memoir that isn’t super travely and definitely not service oriented; creative-nonfiction/literary-nonfiction that’s too U.S. history-ish to be considered CNF sometimes, but with chapters that are essay-ish. It’s about Jews of the South, but even more so, it’s about a white girl discovering the depth and value and meaning of the lost, hidden, and denied African American history of the nation. Does this break boundaries? It breaks rules. One review categorized this book under “Religion,” which doesn’t make any sense to me, even as the book uses Jewishness as its fulcrum.

I’m not sure this type of writing takes courage; it’s just what came out of me. Maybe the courage is in letting it be what it is meant to be, regardless of whether it will do well or find a big audience.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Does each hem and haw in revision count as a high and low? Each chapter is like a different child that must be nurtured individually, that has different needs and requirements, lengths and breadths. Making each chapter work is a low and a high every day, over and over again.

I wound up having two presses want the book at the same time, and I agonized over which one to choose. I guess that was a high (but also a low – I am bad with decisions). Both were university presses with a CNF category. Both were well respected. I went with the one where I knew the editor and she knew my writing, and where the press had already received comments from an outside reviewer, so I felt confident that the work had been well vetted, and I knew the direction it was going.

A lower spot was that it took me so long to conduct the travel and write the book, and I feel it might have been better placed in the state of the world if it had come out about a year earlier. But I couldn’t think or write any faster.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

One of my instructors in my graduate program told me that you should plan to spend about five years with your book subject, so it better be something you can live with for that long. When I first heard that, I thought, “There’s nothing I’m so fascinated by that I can attend to it for five years.” But later I realized: Whatever “it” is, is actually a braid of numerous threads—in this case, southern food, music, and culture, as well as religion, traditions, history, people, and politics.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

This was originally going to be a book about traveling through the history of the Civil War. Then I realized that it should really be a journey through the lost Jewish South because no one had done that. But the biggest surprise was that along the way, it became a journey about becoming more woke. It was the African American history that became most interesting to me, that I kept seeking out and writing about. Being on the ground, in the landscape, where key moments in African American history and civil rights history happened allowed me to better understand what “institutional racism” really meant, and how “white privilege” really worked, and what those terms meant for me and my life journey. I did not expect to be writing a book that included African American history, but that’s what happened. And maybe that limit is part of our nation’s problem in the first place.

How did you find the title of your book?

Finding the right title is an art unto itself. Wandering Dixie came about after much research and brainstorming, cutting out pieces of paper with key words on them and moving them around; concept mapping; and a back-and-forth with my editor. We wanted it to indicate travel writing, Jews, and the South all at once, which I think it accomplishes—playing off both “whistling Dixie” and the idea of the “wandering Jew.” For the subtitle, Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South, my editor really wanted to emphasize the Jewish theme of the book. But I love the fact that it echoes Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, which was one of the influences for my book.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

The most divine southern food I ate during my forays to the Deep South over a four-year period was lemon icebox pie, a relative of key lime pie. I had a slice at Fat Mama’s Tamales in Natchez, Mississippi, that changed my life: https://fatmamastamales.com/gourmet_food/lemon-icebox-pie/

This is a recipe I found and made that is pretty close:

A Northerner’s Take on Lemon Icebox Pie

(adapted from a source I can no longer identify but to whom I give my utmost gratitude)

2 cups graham cracker crumbs (14 whole crackers)

¼ cup sugar

8 Tbs unsalted butter, melted

1 ¼ cup fresh lemon juice (roughly the juice of 8 lemons)

Zest of 2 of those lemons

2 14-oz cans sweetened condensed milk

2 egg yolks

1 cup heavy cream

1 tsp vanilla extract

¼ cup powdered sugar

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Combine crumbs, sugar, and butter in a bowl until evenly mixed. Transfer to a 9”deep pie dish, and press into bottom and up sides to create a thick crust; set aside.

Squeeze lemons by slicing them in half (across the equator), sticking a fork in the center and using the fork and squeezing action to press out all the juice into a bowl. Combine juice, milk, and egg yolks; beat on medium-high speed of a mixer for 5 minutes. Pour into prepared crust. Bake until filling is only slightly set—until the center jiggles slightly, like a soft-setting custard, about 20 minutes. Remove from oven, set on cooling rack, and let cool for 90 minutes. Then stick a few toothpicks in it and cover with plastic wrap (toothpicks should hold up the wrap). Freeze at least 6 hours, or overnight.

Take out of freezer 1 to 1.5 hours before serving (no more; it will get too warm) (You want it just barely not frozen). Just before serving, combine cream, vanilla, and powdered sugar in a bowl and whip until stiff peaks form. Serve a large dollop onto each slice of pie.

Store leftovers in freezer.

(Do not store cream in freezer; it will freeze solid.)

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:  www.sueeisenfeld.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: www.politics-prose.com/search/site/Eisenfeld

TBR: Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me by Gae Polisner

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me is the story of a 15-year-old girl who is ready to grow up, but maybe not as ready as she thinks. In addition to being dark and a little sexy, it’s an exploration of the dysfunction of family, the fragility of female friendships, and the hope we are able to find when we learn to take stock in ourselves. 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

Once I unlocked who my main character JL was, and realized she was probably closer to young me than any other character I’ve written, she was enjoyable to write -- or actually rewrite. She’s like an ember about to burst aflame, and I really loved trying to capture that sense of both electricity and vulnerability, a person on the very verge.

And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I think all the characters in this story were a challenge because they’re all flawed and deeply human. Additionally, the mother is suffering from a clinical disorder (if even her therapist hasn’t actually pinned down exactly which one or how to fully help her). I wanted to portray her in a way to make the reader see how she could be there and seemingly “normal” one moment, and lost in her disorder the next. Walking that balance was difficult. Making her feel authentic.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Oh, a very rough version of this manuscript had been around for a LONG while before it was finally bought by my current editor. And that’s where the real work began. An early draft was one of my agent’s favorite works in progress of mine . . . but had always been my least favorite. I just couldn’t get JL fully right, nor wrap my head around where the story needed to go to matter. Plus, when we had shown that early version to a prior editor, she had unequivocally turned it down.

Then I wrote MEMORY OF THINGS and IN SIGHT OF STARS and loved both those stories so much. As did my current editor who bought them both, in that order. At some point after she bought STARS, I asked her if she wanted to read the crappy draft of KEROUAC. I remember her saying, “You keep saying you hate it, but you keep bringing it up, too, so there must be something there.” I decided I’d let her take a look and if she didn’t love it, I would put it to bed forever. Instead, she not only read it and loved JL, but knew exactly where the story needed to go -- and how to push me to make it come fully alive.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Hands down, Teddy Roosevelt’s “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I have to remind myself CONSTANTLY. And then my agent has to remind me too.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The last thirty pages or so (beginning on p. 245 of the Advance Review Copy), that start, “The cold shocks me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know this is crazy. It’s June. I shouldn’t be shaking like I am.” For me, no matter how many times I reread them, they are breathless and stunning, and I don’t quite know where they came from, but I felt the rhythm of them somewhere deep in my bones while I was writing them. Especially, the scene in the Shawnee motel. As if I had once been in that seedy motel -- metaphorically, if not literally. That may be some of my best writing in all the books and unsold manuscripts I’ve written.

How did you find the title of your book?

I actually woke up with the title in my head one morning years ago, shortly after I sold my debut novel The Pull of Gravity which has a main Of Mice and Men thread running through it so the classics were on my mind. Of course, I wouldn’t normally write a whole novel around a title but for some reason, this one really spoke to me. Of course, I was writing YA and knew that Kerouac would be pretty irrelevant to most teenagers, so I began to ask myself, “Why not my character? Why might my main character – let’s say, a 15 year old girl -- not only know who Kerouac was, but hate him? And the plot for the novel began to come to me, if not quite the heart of the story which, as I mentioned above, came to me only later.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Hmmm, now I need to think. There’s some cold pizza, and a meal of roast chicken and mashed potatoes. Not exactly a gourmand’s book. LOL.

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250312235

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR PILE: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250312235

TBR: Her Sister’s Tattoo by Ellen Meeropol

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Marching through downtown Detroit to protest the war in Vietnam, Rosa and Esther hear that mounted police are beating protestors a few blocks away and hurry to stop the violence. When an officer is badly injured and the sisters are arrested, deep differences in their responses threaten their close family. Esther has an infant daughter and wants to avoid prison, which means accepting a plea bargain and testifying against her sister. Told from multiple points of view and through the sisters’ never-mailed letters, Her Sister’s Tattoo explores the thorny intersection of family loyalty, betrayal, and clashing political decisions.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

The sisters, Rosa and Esther, were both the joy of writing this novel, and the most difficult. Developing their history of a deep connection as sisters and activists and their escalating differences was the major challenge. Their political differences grow stronger as the story proceeds, but I wanted to tease out the nuances of the political choices, and I needed to give them insights into each other’s positions. Their very different experiences of motherhood are central to their political choices and to their reluctant empathy for each other. In addition, the issue of betrayal is large in the story, and trying to understand it from each perspective was both exciting and troublesome.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The major thing about this book’s road to publication is that it took twenty years. I started writing it in 2000; it began as a short story and morphed into the first novel I attempted. I had no idea what I was doing. After several drafts, I gave up and attended an MFA program, working on a new novel. Each time I finished another novel, I returned to this one, writing new drafts and trying to figure out how to best tell this story. Finally, after many years and three other published novels, I got it “right” enough to send to my editor at Red Hen Press. Twenty years. Many many drafts. Finally Esther and Rosa get to tell their story.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Writing a novel, especially one like this that takes a long time, requires an almost illogical belief that you have a story worth telling. I like Jane Yolen’s writing mantra: “YIC – Yes, I can. BIC – butt in chair, because that’s where the muse will find you. HOP – Heart on page, because why else would we write?”

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

There were several surprises writing this book, particularly in the revision process. In early drafts, the action taken by Rosa and Esther to try to stop the cops from beating protestors was sugar in their gas tank, something my early readers simply didn’t believe. When I changed it, I was surprised by how their new actions opened up a whole area of sibling relationship that I hadn’t known before. Major changes in the structure of the manuscript also led to surprises. Who knew that giving a minor character a voice could lead to the sharing of secrets I hadn’t known before?

How did you find the title of your book?

Titles are hard. Over twenty years I went through several of them. The novel started as a short story titled “In Whose Camp,” because the first scenes I wrote took place at the leftwing summer camp where Rosa’s and Esther’s daughters meet. The next title also derived from the camp chapters: Until We All Are Blind, referring to the sisters’ estrangement and lack of forgiveness towards each other. There was a third attempt, A Folding of Cranes, that referred to the image of origami cranes that weaves through the novel. Finally, about eight years ago, I came up with Her Sister’s Tattoo, referring to the matching red stars Rosa and Esther had tattooed on their breasts, to signify their shared activism and to promise that sisters are forever. (Except that they maybe aren’t.) Luckily, my editor liked it and it’s the title forever.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.ellenmeeropol.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR PILE:  

https://redhenpress.org/collections/spring/products/her-sisters-tattoo-by-ellen-meeropol

TBR: Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 

  

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump but they don’t believe her. Her husband, Oscar is called to pick her up—the book is about what happens next.

Which character did you most enjoy creating?

Phoebe—The woman who Mina meets in London and begins to develop feelings for.

Why?

The book fairly closely follows Mina and Oscar’s points of view. They see Phoebe quite differently. To Mina Phoebe is new and shining, artistic, and tempting. To Oscar she is a childhood crush who he is no longer impressed by. Seeing her from both points of view allowed her to be a full person.

And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Oscar. I always knew the sort of man he was—hardworking, loves his wife, but often trying to shut down or look away from his own emotions. In early drafts, only his strength came through. It was hard to show the fear and vulnerability of a man who was doing so much to try to hide those qualities. In the end, I found the best way to do it was to show his attempts to overcome or to bury those feelings.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This book was part of a two-book deal in the UK so I knew it would have a home somewhere in the world. But I didn’t realize how hard writing it would be.

In between this book and my first novel, Harmless Like You, I wrote an entirely different novel. And it just wasn’t working. I sent it to friends, I edited it, I moved pieces around. Finally, I realized that it wasn’t ever going to be right. So, I tore it up and began again.

I thought about what questions were most important to me, what pressed on my mind and wouldn’t let go. From this, Starling Days and its questions about how to best to love someone who is sick, how to repair a life, and how to hold onto one another in the hardest times emerged.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Find what interests you. If you find something boring or stale, then so will the reader. Write towards what excites, interests, confuses, or angers you. Write to where your energy is. 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised by how much technology became part of the book. I realized that because we can always be connected it makes disconnection a dramatic act in and of itself. Oscar and Mina could theoretically always be in touch and know everything about each other. Towards this goal Oscar makes Mina download a tracking app onto her phone. I’d often been told that phones reduced dramatic tension e.g. Romeo could just have texted Juliet. But I found that by adding a form of communication I was also adding a means of miscommunication—of silences, secrets, and half-truths.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title Starling Days came to me from a particular moment in the book: one when Mina is looking up into the sky and imaging a new future. But it also symbolizes the struggle of both characters.

Ancient Roman augurs (religious officials) looked to the flight of birds as one of the ways to determine what the future might be. Both Mina and Oscar are both desperately trying to understand what their futures might hold. Each, in their own way, is looking for signs. Oscar looks to business plans and to family history. Mina tries to understand moment by moment, day by day what her brain is doing and to understand this she goes to medicine, love, and because she is a classicist, she looks to Greek and Roman legends.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

An incomplete list of things consumed in Starling Days:

Toast with French butter

Coffee

Hot water and lemon

Ginger tea

Pizza

Endive Salad

A recipe:

Almond Milk Matcha Latte

Ingredients

1/3 teaspoon matcha powder

½ teaspoon honey

40ml boiling water (1.35 fl oz)

10ml cold water (0.35 fl oz)

250 ml almond milk (8.5 fl oz)

Tools

Microwave or stovetop

Whisk

Milk frother (helpful but not required)

1.     In a large mug or small bowl combine waters so that they are hot but not boiling.

2.     Add honey and matcha to the water. Whisk until you can no longer see clumps of green.

3.     Heat almond milk until it’s bubbling on the stove or for 40 secs on high in the microwave.

4.     Then froth. I use this milk frother: https://www.bodum.com/gb/en/1446-143b-latteo (You can skip this step for a smoother less fluffy drink.)

5.     Combine.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.rowanhisayo.com

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/starling-days_9781419743597/

  

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR PILE:

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781419743597

TBR: The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Through Jewish and French Canadian family stories, meditations on my family’s glamorous past in 1970s and 80s New York City, and the tale of caretaking my vibrant and charming mother with Alzheimer’s while confronting my sister’s drug addiction, I explore memory: tyrannical in trauma, compulsive in nostalgia, and tragic when lost. Through this lens, my memoir unravels dazzling ancestral myths and damaging family secrets, and in the process explores the possibility of rewriting one’s own story to reconcile traumas both personal and generational.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

My favorite to write was the first, “A Taxonomy of the Unknown,” which uses French Canadian genealogical research and my Franco American family’s personal mythology to get at the ethos that my mother created for me growing up, an ethos that in many ways preferenced the unreal, the romantic, and the wished-for to the real. Discovering that many hundred-year old family stories as well as archetypal French Canadian origin stories were suspect helped me piece together the larger themes of the book—that the stories that you make up for yourself can be as integral a part of your identity as what’s fact. Another thing I loved about this essay was that it took me about 20 years to understand the significance of genealogical records that I’d dug up in Quebec on a grant in 1997. Many people told me to look up those records—in Quebec this is a very popular thing to do, because the French Canadian genealogical record is nearly unparalleled in its endogamy and comprehensiveness. Ultimately, I was able to use the data to show the evanescence of genealogical “truths” and a practically complete family tree. I had over a thousand ancestral stories to choose from, but none of those stories was complete. In some ways, the data only allowed me to imagine my own story more richly, but in a way that I could see was more imagination than fact.  

The one that gave me the most trouble also had its seed in the research trip that took me to Quebec in 1997, “Ghosts.” This grant also brought me to Maine and Boston to research my family history, but, subsequently, I had to research and write the essay several times. This was because, first, I lost the manuscript—a short story that I submitted for my graduate creative writing workshop. After the workshop, the carton containing the original manuscript and the copies with my peers’ and professor’s comments was mistakenly discarded during a move. Luckily, I still had my research notes and transcripts of interviews with family members, so I used them to piece together another essay which, seeming to lack something, led me on a subsequent research trip to re-interview several of the subjects on the mid 2000s. By that time my mother had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t answer new questions that the research unearthed, but by going through the research carefully and revisiting some pieces of it, I was able to unearth the family secret. Thank goodness I didn’t publish the earlier version of the essay, because unlocking the family secret also unlocked the significance of the story of the essay and its theme—transgenerational trauma. That, in turn, gave me the key to unlock the book itself. This was the last essay that I wrote before the book was selected for publication (I wrote one other after the fact). It was the Rosetta stone, really. Until then, I had a book manuscript that didn’t quite know what it was about. I’d written an adventure story, but its center was missing.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from? Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

In a sense, my story was too good a story—single mother, fashion model and 1970s New York City doyenne gets Alzheimer’s while living with dysfunctional grown daughter in a walkup in Queens and becomes charming and broke wander risk. Narrator must manage. It was Grey Gardens meets An Unmarried Woman—too easy. This narrative was seductive to both me and literary agents, and led me on the wrong path entirely. I wrote several versions of this book manuscript, and it was never very good. It wasn’t until I took a workshop with the editor Karen Braziller and read Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story that I understood the central missing piece, that this had to be my story, not a story about other dramatic, interesting, and tragic characters. However, I was still tied to the advice that my writing, when not subjected to the utmost rigor, moved around in time and space too much. It moved in ellipses and spirals, and it kept repetitively going over the same material. What broke ground was perhaps that I finally gave in to my instincts to tell a story that mimicked the experience of traumatic and nostalgic memory, revisiting images and incidents, and shifting from different points in the past to different points in the present repeatedly. The latter—a shifting and non-chronological present moment—owed to the fact that I was writing the book while my mother’s condition was progressing, and then through her death and into the aftermath of grief—for me—and homelessness—for my sister. Over this present moment, episodes from the past would assert themselves in no particular order. In organizing the book, I struggled between ordering it according to the progression of events in the past or the progression of events in the present. Finally, I realized that the overlay of many pasts onto many presents revealed just the right the mind state for the book, and so I chose themes, instead, as an organizing principle. This in part came from advice by the writer Mira Bartok, who worked with me on a manuscript consultation. Mira’s book The Memory Palace also works in this way, so my structure is perhaps not exactly groundbreaking, but it does feel to be an essential and unusual element for so dramatic a plot. The courage of going with this non-traditional structure definitely came from failure. At a certain point of having worked on the book for so long and having had several agents but no book contract, there seemed nothing to lose in writing exactly the book that I wanted to write.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice? My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

My favorite advice for writing memoir is an amalgam of Vivian Gornick’s “find the inner story” and John Gardner’s insight that all stories are about the transformation of a central character through an escalating sequence of challenges and tests. So, I ask memoir writers, how are you and not your subjects the central protagonist in your story? How are the stories that you are telling your story, and what do you—the protagonist—have to discover in order to change. What surprised me was how hard this actually was for me to do, and how, when I finally did, how obvious the answers were. My story was that I had internalized my mother’s central trauma, without even knowing what it was. Once I got to the root of it and discovered our family secret, I was able to see how that secret—and my mother’s shame and evasiveness surrounding it—had contributed to my own traumas and shame, and to dysfunctional systems in my family growing up. Discovering her secret give me the distance to see clearly not only her story, but mine.

Who is your ideal reader?

My story felt very dramatic to me when I was experiencing it, but in connecting with readers and friends I’ve realized that most aspects of it are universal, and not just in a general sense. My ideal reader sees her or himself in my story. With the aging of the baby boomers, many grown daughters and sons who have led unconventional lives so far find themselves in the surprising position of having to take care of someone when they can still barely take care of themselves. Also, many people find themselves at the intersection of the opioid epidemic and the Alzheimer’s epidemic. The scheme that seemed so unworkable in my family—dysfunctional child is living with ailing parent and becomes that parent’s caretaker but is completely unequipped to do so, and other, functional sibling who has a full-time job must step in—is in fact, systemically speaking, inevitable. Another thread that will feel familiar to many readers is that when one or especially two family members are in crisis, the bottom falls out quickly and surprisingly, because in the U.S. there is no safety net. That my mother could not qualify for insurance-covered home care felt wrong to me in so many ways. That my sister lived with her only lessened my mother’s eligibility, whether or not my sister was functional. In fact, I was called by adult protective services to be told that my mother was in danger on the same day that another government agency rejected her for services. This inspires a kind of rage that others can surely relate to. I am not the only person who has been let down by social services, and, on top of that, to have an experience of extreme panic and distress along the way. The book, in its way, suggests a political agenda that I hope will connect with readers who see the grand scale of the problems posed by the Alzheimer’s epidemic (and opioid epidemic) and what they reveal about the shortcomings of our medical and social services.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

My mother loved traditions, but they had to be made up, and this possibly explains the fact that our family celebrations invariably involved a cake that has no known origin in any of the traditions we actually hail from. This is Paschka, a delicious Russian Orthodox Easter cake that in our family was always made with a ricotta cheese base, and was set to mold in the refrigerator overnight in a flower pot—though we never had a garden, houseplants, or any other use for ceramic flower pots. We had to go out to the store to buy the flower pot each time (why we didn’t save one, I am not sure). Traditionally, this cake is decorated with the Eastern Orthodox cross, but my mother always decorated ours with pale purple-colored candied lavender from the nearby Hungarian shop on upper Second Avenue, Paprikash, and edible flowers such as nasturtiums—or inedible ones, because, why not? Like most things in the model’s diet, this one is extremely high in fat but not high in sugar—my mother used to eat buttered toast with a pat of butter on each slice and still stay thin.

INGREDIENTS

2 egg yolks

1 c whipping cream

Dash of salt

1/2 c sugar

1 t vanilla extract

6 c ricotta cheese

1⁄2 c room-temperature butter

1⁄4 c roasted almond slices

candied lavender

fresh flowers

Cheesecloth

Place egg yolks, cream, salt, and sugar in a saucepan and cook on low heat until they form a custard, about 10 minutes

Remove from heat, stir in vanilla

In a glass bowl, using a wooden spoon, combine ricotta and butter, and then add egg yolk mixture

Stir in almonds

Line a medium sized clay flowerpot with damp cheesecloth

Pour cheese mixture into pot; fold ends of cheesecloth over top. Place pot face up on a plate and place weights over the cheesecloth the help drain excess moisture through the hole in the bottom of the flowerpot

Refrigerate overnight, removing any water from the plate

Remove cake from flowerpot by upending it, and carefully remove cheesecloth. Decorate outside with flowers and candied lavender

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://elizabethkadetsky.com/

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https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Eaters-Juniper-Creative-Nonfiction/dp/162534502X/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=kadetsky&qid=1574518692&s=books&sr=1-2

READ AN EXCERPT OF THIS BOOK, “The Memory Pavilion”:

http://www.postroadmag.com/22/nonfiction/kadetsky.phtml

TBR: EDGE by Barbara Ungar

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

EDGE is named for the EDGE list, which stands for Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered. Most of the poems in it describe a singled endangered species, although there are some more general poems about living through and attempting to cope with The Sixth Extinction.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

These are the most impersonal and highly researched poems I’ve ever written. I wasn’t even sure they were poems at first, but I was driven by my obsession with The Sixth Extinction, so didn’t really care. I thought about Marianne Moore’s animal poems as an ideal model. In educating myself, I hope to also pass on information that might be valuable to someone else, or just make them care more about all the transfixing creatures we are destroying in our carelessness and greed.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This was the easiest road to publication ever. Once I put the poems together into a chapbook, I sent it out to a few contests, but in the meantime, a friend told me to try Ethel. I did, and in under 24 hours, I heard back, We would love to publish this.

The low was purely physical: I think because I was on sabbatical sitting at my computer (in a highly unergonomic set-up at my dining room table) doing research and writing all day, then jumping up to do Zumba or Pilates, I slipped a disc and spent five months in PT and recovery.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Every detail I included in these poems surprised me: I fell in love with each species while working on it. I was also surprised by the speed of acceptance of the manuscript (I have barely had time to get any individual poems published) and also by the excitement of my poet-pals at these poems, which are nothing like my usual (more personal, not to say confessional, and often humorous) work. I hope I managed to get some humor in there, despite the tragic subject.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

Some estimates say that four species are disappearing an hour, others say up to two hundred per day. We know only a very small portion of the natural world, which is melting away all around us. Each of these exquisite forms evolved over millennia and is irreplaceable, but so many are vanishing before we even have the chance to name them or know anything about them. The great writer and biologist E. O. Wilson warns that we have no idea at what point, as a result, our entire ecosystem might crash.

How did you find the title of your book?

As soon as I discovered the EDGE list, I knew I could use it.

Who is your ideal reader?

People who think they don’t like poetry but are surprised to find that they can read, comprehend, and enjoy my work.

How do you approach revision?

Obsessively. Discovering the poem is the hard part for me: my favorite metaphor is fishing. Once I’ve got one on the line, I’m completely happy and in the zone, and I can edit for hours. I generally start longhand, usually free writing, until the poem takes shape: then I type it up and print it, read it out loud, and revise in pencil, mostly trimming and trimming away, till it’s as spare as it can be. Sometimes I move parts around. When I can’t make it any better, I give it to one of my poet pals for criticism, and then repeat the process. I researched these poems online, gathering pages of information, which I printed out; I highlighted whatever caught my imagination, strung those parts together, and then started trimming and shaping. I like Michelangelo’s metaphor of seeing the sculpture in the stone and chiseling away until it’s revealed; I hope I accomplished something like that with my blocks of research.

What was your experience ordering these poems?

The first poems I wrote were the Madagascar poems, which come early in the book. Then I tried to vary them in length and tone, and the size of the subject species (some very tiny, others huge). I tried to begin and end with more general poems, and intersperse those throughout. I tried to end with a bit of hope, not to be too despairing.)

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

I am the opposite of a foodie, perhaps because I have anosmia (no sense of smell). But I would beg people to please avoid eating red meat: while humans are only 1/3 of the mammals on the planet by weight, another 60% are our livestock, mostly cows and pigs; this leaves only 4% left for ALL wild creatures, from mice to elephants. You don’t have to go vegan, or even vegetarian, but if we all simply ate less meat, there would be that much more room on the planet for everything else. And no farmed fish! It’s terrible for the ocean, and for wild fish.

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.barbaraungar.net

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR PILE:

https://www.ethelzine.com/shop

READ A POEM FROM THIS BOOK, “El Zunzuncito (Cuban Bee Hummingbird)”:

https://barbaraungar.net/edge/

TBR: Don’t You Know I Love You by Laura Bogart

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Don’t You Know I Love You is about a young woman, Angelina, who comes from a chaotic home learning to extricate herself from the influence of her violent, yet charismatic father – without turning into her mother, who forfeited her own hopes and ambitions years before. Angelina learns more about who she is – and more importantly, who she wants to be – through developing as an artist and falling in love for the first time, but the patterns she’s grown up with threaten her happiness.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?  

The character I most enjoyed creating is definitely Angelina, because she undergoes the most personal growth and change throughout the course of the novel – she starts off very armored and angry (and understandably so!), but with a tender, protective side she’s not always sure how to show. She becomes an artist, and in doing so, she becomes more of who she’s meant to be, and more importantly, who she wants to be. I feel like we so rarely see a woman artist’s coming of age, on the page; it seems so often like it’s still the providence of broody young men. So, it was exciting and powerful to be able to reimagine that story for a young woman, my own version of Rebel Without a Cause.

The character who gave me the most trouble was Jack, in part because I wanted to write about, and from the perspective of, a deeply troubled and toxic man – without seeming like I glamorized or validated his toxicity. I think a lot of the rise of the anti-hero we had across media a few years ago was really instructive because it showed how seductive it can to be render a person who does bad things in a rose-colored light, to be “edgy,” so I was very careful to portray how Jack’s violence and destructiveness truly haunted his daughter and his wife. Still, if I was going to put readers inside Jack’s head, I knew I had to make it a worthy, if uncomfortable, place to sit and stay a while – I saw my task as making him complex without exonerating him. 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I’m always very candid about the fact that it took nearly three years for this book to find its best home in the world because I feel like so much of the writing world, and writing lives, that we see on social media are so carefully curated – just the highest highs and insta-success stories. We had a lot of so-close but not quite because many publishers were really skittish about the intensity of the material. I was very lucky that I have an agent who was supportive and kept sending the book out – I tell all authors who are talking to agents to please, please, please, ask them what they’ll do if the book doesn’t sell to the first, or second, or third, or even fourth round of submissions – and we ended up with the perfect publisher in Dzanc, a publisher that isn’t afraid of the hard and thorny stories, and a real collaborator with their authors.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

If something just isn’t gelling – whether that something is a character or subplot, or even as tiny as a particular sentence structure – don’t hesitate to let it go. Our intuition is the architect of marvelous surprises, so trust it.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

My initial concept for Angelina’s art was much more literal and, in hindsight, sort of blunt. The bone drawings literally just came to me as I was writing one day and as soon as I described the first one, I had a lightning strike moment, like, oh yes, this is exactly what her art is supposed to be like.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title of the book comes from the way Elliott Smith sings the lyric “don’t you know that I love you” in his song “Angel in the Snow”: His voice is beautiful and haunted, knowing and raw – and that’s exactly the feeling I wanted for the book.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 I have no recipes, but anything they’d eat on The Sopranos is definitely applicable here!

[Editor’s note: May I recommend Carmela’s Baked Ziti?]

*****

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOU TBR PILE:  https://www.dzancbooks.org/our-books/dont-you-know