Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. Why Good Food Writing is Critical – and Where to Find It
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Food is life. It’s sustenance. It’s also a simple pleasure. Life’s too short not to pause at least once a day to enjoy seasonal flavors and textures. Even on busy days, I’m a big fan of throwing together a bowl of pasta and pan sauce, or a plate of sliced tomatoes and cheese, or even just a really great cup of coffee.
But of course food is about more than sustenance and pleasure. Growing up on a working orchard in the Midwest, I discovered that people want blemish-free food, the kind you get with labor-intensive hand-picking, but they want it to cost less than the mechanically-harvested option at the grocery chain. I came to understand that some people prefer fruit that was shipped green from New Zealand and cold-stored for 8 months over a fresh-picked local apple simply because: size matters. I learned first-hand that a late frost or a Fire blight infection or an insurance rate hike can put a farmer out of business almost instantaneously. Economics plays as much a role in our food production as does water and sunlight.
Continue Reading →What I learned emceeing TEDxWayPublicLibrary
Me hosting TEDxWayPublicLibrary, April 12, 2014
Last night I had the privilege of emceeing the inaugural TEDx event in my current hometown. (TEDx is an initiative of the TED Conference that allows communities to organize local TED-style events.) TEDxWayPublicLibrary was the vision of Natalie Dielman, program coordinator at our incredible local library (I’ve written before about my appreciation for Way Public Library). Natalie organized a planning committee that threw themselves into the task, and the event was sold out a couple weeks ago.
Our theme was “A Community of Ideas,†admittedly broad, but somehow all five presentations, plus the few TED talk videos we featured, together drove home a message about what we can see and hear in the everyday if we just pay closer attention.
C.R. Kasprzyk on “Sustainability and Found Composition” at TEDxWayPublicLibrary, April 12, 2014
C.R. Kasprzyk, a composer finishing his doctorate in music composition and digital media at Bowling Green State University, gave a gorgeous presentation on “Sustainability and Found Composition.†He played his own recordings of walleye, bats, a glacier, ambient city sounds and more (hear samples on his website), and talked about his compositional philosophy of letting his surroundings direct his work, demonstrating how all earthlings (human and otherwise) are connected. Cory has a effervescent charm that really connected with the audience.
Julie Rubini told her personal story about how she was inspired to found Claire’s Day, an annual children’s book festival and literary outreach program that helps thousands of children in our area, after her young daughter died unexpectedly. She has since published Hidden Ohio, and is working on two other books. She was passionate about the transformative power of bringing authors and illustrators face-to-face with kids.
Tim Marzullo of Backyard Brains at TEDxWayPublicLibrary, April 12, 2014
And last night I saw, in person, one man move the arm of another man using a human-human interface. Tim Marzullo, a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Michigan and co-founder of Backyard Brains, gave a mesmerizing, rapid-fire demonstration (involving bilingual slides and an unscripted device repair) of some of his neuroprosthetic research. In less than 20 minutes, he made an incredible case for inexpensive tech and community maker spaces to foster DIY science around the world.
Our city has a top-ranked public school system, but Tom Hosler, school superintendent, argued from statistics and personal experience that public education needs a new model. Instead of giving kids “faster horses,†a la Henry Ford (“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horsesâ€) it’s time for real innovation in education – and he has a vision more communities should get behind.
We closed with a rousing call to action from Ken Leslie, former professional comedian and founder of 1Matters.org, a national nonprofit that works to house the unhoused. Once a homeless addict, his life was turned around by the realization that “when you feel you matter to no one, go care for someone.†Preaching the “power of one,†he had the whole crowd smiling in minutes (and had me laughing in the Green Room the second he walked in). Moose fist bump, Ken!
It was a great evening for the 100+ of us gathered around the TEDxWayPublicLibrary stage, discussing together how learning to look closer and listen more attentively makes our community more interesting and more humane. So many people came up to me during the breaks to say how excited they were to have access to such a program right in their neighborhood.
It was a bit of a milestone for me too. I’ve spoken in public many times before, but I’ve never introduced the mayor and anchored a 3-hour live event. As an introvert, I surprised myself at how much I enjoyed the back and forth with the audience, the on-the-fly connecting the threads of each presentation, and the general energy of the event. I was exhausted by the end of the night – and still feeling it today, too, if I’m honest – but so glad to have been a part of it. I’m sincerely grateful to Natalie and everyone at the Way for giving me the opportunity.
The Stranger in the House: A Review of Ten White Geese
In Gerbrand Bakker’s novel Ten White Geese (published in the UK as The Detour), a Dutch woman takes a short-term lease on an old cottage in rural Wales. Avoiding contact with the handful of locals, she does little but sleep, drink wine, smoke, and wander around the property.
She’s brought only a handful of personal items with her, including copies of Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems and Alfred Habegger’s biography of the poet. But the way she carefully ignores these items connects her to the remnants of a life she’s fleeing from – and the people looking for her.
Ten White Geese
by Gerbrand Bakker
translated from Dutch
by David Colmer
Penguin, 2012
230 pages (paperback)
Source: public library
Available at Amazon
The house, like its temporary occupant, has a mysterious backstory. It’s functional but shabby. The overgrown property sports a few outbuildings, a stream, and a quiet woods that opens onto an ancient ring of stones. Resting there during a walk, the woman encounters an uncharacteristically diurnal badger – one disoriented interloper challenging another.
As the days pass, the woman begins to garden aggressively. She conceives of a plan to establish a rose garden on the property, tackling the overgrowth with a vigor and then collapsing into bed at night with a handful of pills. Her progress is slow until a young man appears suddenly on the property and offers to help for a few days. In response, she hands him a shovel and makes up a bed for him in one of the empty rooms.
This is suspense at its most spare. A psychological screw – familiar but unnamed, liberating but fatalistic – cranks tighter with every paragraph. Bakker makes masterful use of few words, revealing the complexities of relationships with no more than a glance or a lack of response. The territory of the novel is so tight that the smallest movements and personal exchanges have enormous potential to shift the outcome.
The English translation won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last year, making it Bakker’s second award-winning novel – and a winner in my quest to read more works in translation this year. Stark and disquieting, it’s a book that takes up residence in your head and leaves its mark on the place.
“Remember the Thalamus!” A Review of Andrew’s Brain
The narrator of E. L. Doctorow’s new novel is Andrew. Or, more accurately, Andrew’s brain. Or, perhaps most accurately, some consciousness that refers to itself as Andrew. It’s hard to get your bearings in this novel of neuroscience, because Andrew is the ultimate unreliable narrator: he knows that “there is nothing you can think of except of yourself thinking.”
How can I think about my brain when it’s my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it? I can’t trust anyone these days, least of all myself. I am a mysteriously generated consciousness, and no comfort to me that it’s one of billions.
Andrew’s Brain
by E. L. Doctorow
Random House, 2014
200 pp (hardcover)
Source: public library
Amazon
Andrew identifies himself as a cognitive scientist with a history of traumatic personal relationships. For the duration of the novel, he’s talking (or is he just thinking that he’s talking?) in some unknown place to an unknown second party (a therapist, perhaps). His account starts as a sad but mostly ordinary life before taking some fantastic turns.
Is he lying? Is he confused as a result of post traumatic stress? Is he telling the truth? He knows what he thinks has happened, but as he points out:
We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will.
Andrew calls himself “Andrew the Pretender,” but this isn’t an admission that he’s falsifying his story. He explains:
We’re all Pretenders, Doctor, even you….Pretending is the brain’s work. It’s what it does. The brain can even pretend not to be itself.
Oh? What can it pretend to be, just by way of example?
Well, for the longest time, and until just recently, the soul.
Doctorow is asking some of the biggest questions of our time: What is consciousness? What is personal identity? Is there any way in which we are more than the sum of our circuits?
…the great problem presenting neuroscience is how the brain becomes the mind. How that three-pound knitting ball makes you feel like a human being….If we figure out how the brain gives us consciousness, we will have learned how to replicate consciousness.
Andrew’s Brain is not light reading, but it’s a satisfying challenge. Drawing on current research in neuroscience, it’s a story about what we’re thinking about when we’re thinking about how we think. It’s cleverly framed. The characters Andrew describes are fascinating. And subtle stylistic choices like the lack of quotation marks shake the reader’s confidence in what Andrew knows – and therefore what we know.
Which, given how trustworthy our brains are, makes this unreliable narrator possibly the most reliable narrator I’ve ever read.
Meanwhile at The Discarded Image
Just a quick note to say that I continue to do most of my blogging over at The Discarded Image, where in the last few months I’ve reviewed Virginia Dust’s atmospheric debut novel River of Dust; Joseph Geha’s Lebanese Blonde, set in my hometown of Toledo; Josh Hanagarne’s wise and witty memoir, The World’s Strongest Librarian; and Eli Brown’s magnificent Cinnamon and Gunpowder. One of our more popular features there is our weekly 3 for Thursday, like “3 Instant Writing Improvements,” “3 Things to Do with Unwanted Books“, and “3 Practical Reasons to Support Public Libraries.” I’ve got some other personal projects underway, too, but in the meantime, if you haven’t yet checked out The Discarded Image – and you’re interested in literature, science, philosophy, and religion – please do.
