Food is the ultimate subject to write about.
It speaks to us all because we all eat…we’re all in contact with food everyday. And whether that’s a pleasant experience or a troubling one it is part of our basic connection to life.
I think that’s why the subject is so good at eliciting fiction, essays, memoirs, and poetry: stories. Readers know about food and are eager to know the experiences of other individuals. Food inspires interaction with the world around you. And interactions always come with stories.
Food writer (and fiction writer) Laurie Colwin said: “For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.”
Here is a little taste of food literature: a recipe poem of my own, and two excerpts from pieces that appeared in the journal I publish: Alimentum.
Peas
Peas are a strange animal. Two peas in a pod. Peas on earth. Grandma at the farm shelling peas into a bowl while rocking on the back porch. I grew up well away from any farm. My mom bought Le Seur petite peas in a can. They were green, but really a kind of grey-green. Still we thought they were the most excellent. Never being an advocate of frozen food I finally realized that the best peas are frozen peas (if you don’t have a back porch on a farm). You can even get petite frozen peas. I like them in a bag rather than a box because you can squish the frozen peas around in there. Not squish to pop them, just to juggle them a little. I sauté some cut up pancetta and thin sliced onion half-moons in a little olive oil. Add a splash of white wine and let it evaporate then pour in the peas (with a bit of water if they need it) and salt and pepper. This recipe gives peas a little lift. Makes them feels European. Lots of things improve when they feel European.
Excerpt from The Art of Eating Alone by Scott Seward Smith
. . . I sat there waiting for my food and feeling quite proper in my loneliness, quite relaxed. I felt the propriety of my loneliness. It’s all in the attitude: don’t keep recrossing your ankles, don’t bite your cuticles, don’t twist your glass so much, but don’t look catatonic either. Just look like you know something everyone else doesn’t.
Excerpt from The Freedom of Found Food by Ellen Morris Prewitt
We roamed the pastures of Mamo’s farm, we weaved in and out of neighbors’ trees, we even sampled from our own front yards. Like the scavengers we were, we’d examine, but not eat, the onions at the end of the onion grass. We ate flower petals—velvety—and, on our walk to Power Elementary School, we’d lick the pollen butter from the buttercups—a dry, powdery disappointment. Likewise for wild strawberries—the little knots had no taste at all. At least the mimosa beans that we crunched while Mother was learning to play tennis on the public courts tasted like dirt. But taste wasn’t the point, was it, or why tackle the bitter persimmon?
Alimentum news:
We’ve named our 2009 Poetry Contest Winners…
For April National Poetry Month we’re once again publishing menupoems for diners to enjoy with their meals (and their menus). This year we’re inviting you to video your reading of a menupoem and we’ll post it on Alimentum’s Youtube channel.
AND: We just got word that Alimentum won Best Food Magazine in the World from the 2010 International Gourmand Awards!

More news, samples, and food fun on Alimentum’s website:
http://www.alimentumjournal.com/
Paulette Licitra

Dinitia Smith’s new play “Dirty Pictures” just had a highly-successful reading at the Actors Studio, with the well-known theater actor actor, Austin Pendleton, in the lead role. There are hopes for a production the play soon.

“Dirty Pictures” is the story of a little-known piece of American history, the arrest in 1960 of the gay literary critic Newton Arvin and two younger colleagues at Smith College as part of a government crackdown on homosexuals that occurred at the end of the McCarthy period. Gays were targeted as security risks because they were supposedly vulnerable to blackmail by Communists. Prior to the arrests of Arvin and his friends, nearly 1,000 Federal workers in Washington, D.C. had lost their jobs for “sexual perversion” under Executive Order 10450 from President Eisenhower.

The play is a reimagining of these incidents based on interviews, trial transcripts, and historical documents.

NOTE: A leading agent is now taking the lead. We will watch for upcoming developments! — Chris Spencer

FootHills Publishing is pleased to announce the release of
Mandala by Diana Woodcock, the 14th book in FootHills Poets on Peace Series.
(Release Date, December

From the book:

FOR LHASA

March 17, 2008 I could not shake
the thought of you in flames.
Throughout the day whispering
the names of those I know still
living in your center, on your
periphery. Felt your misery.
Smelled burning shops, overturned cars,
Chinese flags. Saw smoke rising like

incense over the Potala and Jokhang.
Heard the rumblings of a hundred
tanks moving through your hallowed
streets. Remembered the soldier
who narrowly missed me, knocking
me down-bicycle and body sprawled
on the ground as he sped past laughing.
Today I said it out loud to no one

in particular, to the nameless faces
in the crowd, “I never left you nor
loved any city more.” So tonight
I’ll fill seven prayer bowls, make a
mandala out of Arabian desert sand,
remember as I dangle my feet in Gulf
waters the source of the Ganges,
and wonder if indeed I am a certain

lama’s reincarnation. I’ll take that
long flight back, walk the famished,
enflamed road leading to the holy
city where I’ll rise up like incense,
a faithful wife burning on her husband’s
pyre because I can’t forget
you, most fragile tragic city of Tibet.

Mandala
is a 40 page hand-stitched chapbook.
$10.00

For comments about the book, cover image,
another poem, author bio
or to order on-line go to:
http://foothillspublishing.com/2009/id69.htm

To order through mail send total price plus $1.75 Shipping and Handling
($2.75 in Canada; $5.00 other countries) for each address sent to.
(NYS Residents please add $1.20 Sales Tax per book)

Send orders to:

FootHills Publishing
PO Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856

(This is a one-time only mailing. Your address was supplied by the poet
and will not be used in any other mailing.)

–
***************************
www.foothillspublishing.com
“Never Stop Asking for Poems”

A Tale About a Tiger and Other Mysterious Events from “The American Culture”

Crippen & Landru Publishers
Paper: 243 pages
ISBN (cloth): 978-1-932009-89-7 … (paper): 978-1-932009-90-3
$42.00 (cloth) … $17.00 (paper)

Multiple-award-winning private eye (p.i.) author S. J. Rozan is equally at home writing novels or short stories. Crippen & Landru has collected together some prime examples of her work in the short form.

Rozan’s tone in these stories varies from decidedly grim to lightly humorous, but she never strays very far from what is usually called the “real” world — or at least the world typically envisioned by private eye authors (i.e., that environment of unremitting sin and corruption in high and low places which p.i. writers have created by common consent and inhabited with sinful and corrupt characters who are never more than one step removed from being stereotypes) — a world, in brief, that is as real and yet as unreal as Middle Earth.

All of which in no wise detracts from Rozan’s story-telling skill; when it comes to p.i. fiction, she may be one of its foremost contemporary practitioners.

“Night Court” takes us to an unexpected place, almost to another universe, yet it’s where we live daily:

Murph took his seat on the bench, after which the assembled multitudes, who had been bidden by Rossi to stand, sat also. Not that they were all that multitudinous: night court didn’t allow spectators. The only people here were directly connected with the case. The attorneys, the witnesses, Rossi, the guards. And the defendant. Murph watched Leopold squirm. The guy looked pale. Well, he ought to. He was in big trouble.

Rozan gives a p.i. named Smith in one story and Bill Smith in another two cases (“Hoops” and “Childhood”) keyed to the shortcomings of the social system:

”Why me?” I asked. “Curtis knows every piece of black slime that ever walked the earth, but he sent you a white detective. Why?”
”Cause the slime we looking for,” Raymond said evenly, “I don’t believe they black.”

“Passline” is a departure for Rozan, not a p.i. story but a character study of a man, a compulsive gambler, under extreme pressure:

And the people who built this place (not the first time, not the old days, but now), they knew, too. They built everything huge and so obviously fake because of it. No one talked about it (that was part of it, the shared secret) but they didn’t want you to forget it. They knew the rush was better because of the desert. They knew the illusion only worked because of the truth.
And the truth was, if he didn’t come home with $400,000 for Bennie, Taylor was a dead man.

In “Seeing the Moon,” Chinese-American private eye and fine art connoisseur Jack Lee gets involved in an art swindle:

”Molly told me he gives you the hives.”
”Hives, he makes me itch? Yah, that’s good, Jack! Yes, it’s bad enough, the people who buy and sell art as a commodity, with no love. But to cheat also, this is abhorrent. Such men must be avoided. You cannot win against a man like that.”

The remaining four stories in A Tale About a Tiger feature Rozan’s famous series character, Chinatown p.i. Lydia Chin, who sometimes joins forces with her “barbarian” partner Bill Smith. The first one is “Film at Eleven,” where Lydia is on the trail of a murderer who seems to have gotten away with it:

As it had been when our eyes first met, my skin crawled now, so near Mitch Ellman. The way he leaned a little too close; the way his teeth seemed pointed when he smiled; the way his eyes held mine too long every time they met: I wanted to get up and move, to put actual, physical distance between us.

In “Subway,” a rape case escalates into murder — of the witnesses:

“I told you, no one was sure-sure. Or if they were, they wouldn’t say. And they can’t get DNA without a court order if he don’t want to give it. They can’t get a court order unless they arrest him, which they can’t without probable cause. They got no conviction in the prior and no i.d., they got no probable cause. Besides,” she added, shaking her head, “they lost him.”
“What do you mean, lost him?”
“He disappeared. After the line-up. He’s scum but I guess he’s not stupid.”

With “A Tale About a Tiger,” folk lore leads to fraud — and also to gunplay:

“Fifteen, Ho. That’s a cool $135,000, in good American cash. Take it and run.”
“That will barely cover my expenses,” Ho objected, “much less compensate me for the risks I’ve taken in obtaining these items, and bringing them into this country.”
Meaning, I thought, bribing and poaching and smuggling.

Finally, in “Double-Crossing Delancey,” Lydia must outcon a consummate conman:

Well, that would be like Joe: giving away as little as possible, even to his business partner. Controlling the information minimizes the chance of error, misstep, or deliberate double-cross. As, for example, what Charlie and I were up to right now.

If you like your private eyes both hard- and soft-boiled but imbued with a social conscience, A Tale About a Tiger should satisfy you. S. J. Rozan strikes a fine balance between the extremes of Miss Marple and Mike Hammer, and for that reason — as well as her smooth prose — these stories will be of interest.

(Parental warning: Strong language, not for children.)

—Mike Gray

Two cool things!

One: Library Journal has put THE SHANGHAI MOON on their Best of 2009 list! You need to scroll down because it’s not in Fiction, it’s in Genre Fiction. Leaving aside what I think of that division, these are their categories, and I’m thrilled to be there!

Two: I’ve been nominated for a Career Achievement Award by Romantic Times Magazine! By whom? Yup, it’s true. Romantic Times is into Bill and Lydia, I guess. Or Joe and Ann, from IN THIS RAIN. Or that complicated crowd from ABSENT FRIENDS. This info came to me in a PDF, which I’m not smart enough to include here. I can’t find it on their website, but maybe one of you guys can find it and figure out how to link it. In my category, Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense, the other nominees are Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Muller, and Tamar Myers.

From S.J. Rozan - see more about her award-winning mysteries at www.sjrozan.com

Tune in to Great Performances your local PBS station tonight (9 P.M. CST) to see Charles Hobson’s “Harlem in Montmarte: Paris Jazz.” Charles said that he worked on and off 5 years on this project. France took an active interest in the documentary - the French Embassy in NYC had a gala premiere August 12.

For a preview, here’s a link to NYC’s Channel 13.

Next summer Art Workshop International will offer an extraordinary opportunity for aspiring filmmakers to take a class with Charles Hobson, who has won multiple awards for his work. The very limited class will be personally selected by him.

We congratulate Charles on his latest documentary!

Chris Spencer

Here’s a few basic things that may make your trip to Italy a little easier.
BEFORE YOU LEAVE, first double-check your passport is valid (hey, it’s happened). And, stash a copy of your passport and credit cards in another spot of your luggage or trade with your partner. I always carry important documents in a travel pouch around my neck under my blouse/shirt. Better safe, I say.
LABEL YOUR BAG with the Hotel Giotto address: Via Fontebella 41; 06081 Assisi; Perugia, Italy and phone number 39-075-812744. Put your name and address inside the bag- you can label the bag the reverse on the way back. That way, your bag can follow you if it gets separated!
ARRIVING at the international gate in Rome, you will exit through a glass door (just like in domestic airports) into the lobby. This is where a driver will wait for you with an Art Workshop International sign.
TO CHANGE MONEY, there are ATM machines everywhere, including the airport. Some credit cards are better than others - try to find one that has a commercial, not forex, rate of exchange and is set daily. There probably will be an surcharge, too. Brokerage firms tend to be better than banks.
IF YOU LOVE COFFEE, try one of the stand-up bars. You order and pay first at the cashier, then show your ticket to the barrista who will fill your order.
TO CALL HOME, buy a phone card. Don’t use it with a cellphone - it will still be expensive. Your family and friends back home can do the same, for example, with a www.nobel.com access code.
A few words can get you far - per favore (please), grazie (thank you), mi scusi (excuse me), buon giorno (good day), parla inglese? (do you speak English).
Most of all, relax and enjoy the differences!
Ciao, Chris Spencer

Small travel tip–call your credit card customer service number to alert them to the fact that you’ll be using it out of the country. Last year I could charge, but couldn’t withdraw money on mine because it was considered “suspicious activity.”

Barbara Shoup

TURNING HEADS, frocks in flight
a site-specific dance created for Sitelines 09

TURNING HEADS, frocks in flight is an exuberant dance for women inspired by 15 unique “Dresses of Transformation” created by artist Caterina Bertolotto. Colorful and fanciful dresses adorn this celebration of freedom and personal transformation.

Performances at the South Cove of Battery Park
August 3-13th, 2009
M, T, TH @ 12:30pm
W@ 6:30pm
Tickets: FREE

Click on www.lmcc.net or www.rivertoriver.com for more information & directions.

Produced by Sitelines and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
in association with the River to River Festival.

“As a member of the Danish group Corners, I am joining 8 other members to teach at an art school in Inner Mongolia. The school is part of a museum. We will also show at the museum. I am bringing a CD with 80 images that will be shown on a loop and left with them. The group will first meet in Beijing and go together to Houhot, the capitol of Inner Mongolia.