"Nothing is wasted on the writer." : Archives

cookbooks I've written

Crescent Dragonwagon: Bean By Bean: A Cookbook: More than 200 Recipes for Fresh Beans, Dried Beans, Cool Beans, Hot Beans, Savory Beans...Even Sweet Beans!
Crescent Dragonwagon: The Cornbread Gospels
Crescent Dragonwagon: Passionate Vegetarian
Crescent Dragonwagon: Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook
Crescent Dragonwagon: The Dairy Hollow House Cookbook/over 400 Delectable Recipes from America's Famed Ozark Inn

children's books I've written

fiction I've written

Books by the bed

Books I'm listening to in the car

Sena Jeter Naslund: Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.)
I don't like historical fiction. I have very little interest in the French monarchy. But Sena Jeter Nashland, whose first novel could not've been more different, is a brilliant writer, and has me utterly pulled into this world, time, and place, and given me sympathy towards a person to whom I had none. A novel like this reminds me of why I fall in love with fiction, over and over again. Transporting, tragic, and deeply fascinating. (****)
Markus Zusak: I Am the Messenger
(***)
L.A. Meyer: Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary 'Jacky' Faber, Ship's Boy (Bloody Jack Adventures)
(***)
Robert Mnookin: Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight
(*****)
Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife: A Novel
Alice Lindgren Blackwell's normal-enough middle-class Wisconsin life goes through the windshield twice, once quickly and literally (a car wreck when she is in her early teens, in which she kills the young man who just may have been the love of her life) and once very slowly, and for a long, long time (when she marries Charlie, a super-wealthy, basically incompetent charmer with fierce political ambitions, who ends up --- somewhat to everyone's surprise --- in the White House). An imagining of a life loosely based on Laura Bush's, Sittenfield's writing is unshow-offy, as unobtrusive and accommodating as her careful protagonist, who tries to walk the impossible line of being "good wife" to a public figure with whose actions, public and private, she does not always agree, and cleaving to her own conscience, which may have gotten lost somewhere along the way. The book is inhabited by carefully drawn, detailed, dimensional characters: Alice's off-again-on-again best friend, her wise, quietly lesbian grandmother, the members of the dynasty into which she has married. An endless war, a weak wealthy husband saved from being a total wash-up by the embrace of a Christianity Alice herself does not understand, a bereaved parent whose son has died in the war, who attempts to meet the president ... all these echo the tragedy of the Bush years from an imagined perspective. Yet finally the novel rings true not because of this echo, but because Sittenfeld has created characters and a plot as complex, flawed, and mysterious as life itself. (****)
Nora Ephron: I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (Vintage)
The wry, funny Nora Ephron, in her own words. She forgot more than many of us knew. Highly entertaining, and makes me grieve her recent death even more. (***)

Books in my (culinary) office

Mary Donovan: The Thirteen Colonies Cookbook: A Collection of Favourite Receipts from Thirteen Exemplary Eighteenth-Century Cooks With Proper Menus for Simple Fare
Early American recipes and lots of good quotes from period source material, this is just the kind of thing that fascinates me. (***)
Kevin Young: The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink
(***)
Michael Natkin: Herbivoracious: A Flavor Revolution with 150 Vibrant and Original Vegetarian Recipes
(****)
Ben Hewitt: The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food
Hewitt raises more questions and hypotheses than he answer... one has the sense that he was grappling with issues that were too large for him, and the subject of the book, the food-centric (sort of) hardscrabble town of Hardwick, Vermont. I got frustrated with his asides and a certain precious town that occasionally crept in, but I couldn't help but find it enthralling. He tries to make peace with the fact that environmentally sound, home gardening, and incremental agricultural semi-self-sufficiency may be elitist and nay not be economically sustainable. But that our present-day food system is also frighteningly fragile and unhealthful in any way, and simply would work unsubsidized: 1 single fast-food mega-ag calorie on the plate takes an average of ***95*** calories of fossil fuel to get from seed to plate. A gardener himself, Ben Hewitt writes: "The scale on which my family and I grow food is arguably inefficient, in terms of economics, efficiency, and land use. We don't utilize chemical fertilizers, synthetic weed and pest control, or genetically modified seed; these things could probably boost production in the short run, but then, we don't farm for the short run. "I can buy a fine potato from any number of local farmers, but (not) the May afternoon I spent w/ Penny in the garden, sticking our hands deep into the cool soil. I can buy a head of lettuce, but (not) the pleasure & pride of my boys returning from the garden w/ a basket of greens & saying 'We picked it ourselves, Papa.' " And, in this Monsanto-fast food-fake-food world... being willing and able to feed yourself, even partially is a true "Occupy" act. Hewitt quotes a farmer named Eliot Coleman: "Small farmers are the last bastion protecting society from corporate industry. When we feed ourselves, we become unconquerable." I wish this book had been better edited: someone needed to keep Hewitt more on track and focused, with fewer asides. He needed to be less anecdotal and more fact-based, or more anecdotal and... Well. Still very much worth a read. (***)
Ayun Halliday: Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste
A feisty memoiristic series of vignettes, from growing up in Indiana and aspiring to Betty Crocker Enchanted Castle cakes with a mom who aspired to Julia Child and a fried-chicken-and-mashed-potato cooking grandmother to the author's own "postcoital breakfasts", labor, deliveries, and childrearing (one picky eater, one not). Categorized on the jacket as "FOOD / HUMOR" it is both, sort of. A recipe, written slap-dash but followable, and certainly with personal, um, zest, follows each chapter. It kept me somewhat amused; it kept me reading; and it did warn "questionable taste." The latter was over-the-top for me; a combination of TMI, reliance on gross-out, and a few too many gratuitous 'fucks' crossed the just-have-to-drop-the-#-of-stars line. Ayun's a good writer; a little less smart-assiness and a little more depth to the revelations, and I could be done for the cause with her. (**)

Books in my (writing/creativity/teaching) office

Carolyn G. Heilbrun: The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty
The perplexing, brilliant and thoughtful Carolyn Heilbrun, a feminist and academic (who also wrote mysteries under the name of Amanda Cross) on various aspects of aging, as well as the people --- some well-known, like writer May Sarton, some not, like her husband --- who have crossed her life. She is smart, stubborn, and interesting. The last chapter, "On Mortality", is particularly good. It's not a how-to, a self-help book, oir an inspirational read; rather, it is a thoughtful and personal exploration about the span and depth of one individual, intellectual life. (***)
Thomas M. Sterner: The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life - Master Any Skill or Challenge by Learning to Love the Process
Over simplified, under-edited, states the obvious. I SO wanted to like this one (being as 'practice' fascinates me deeply), but was very 'enh' about it. (**)
Charles Duhigg: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Fascinating word from the brain neurophysiology/ psychology front on why we do and don't do what we should and shouldn't. Clunkily written, science-based, lots of case histories... well worth the read. (***)
Laraine Herring: The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True Voice
If you take an holistic approach to creativity (I do) you'll find much to like in Herring's suggested writing practice, and the thoughtful, story-rich anecdotes about the ever-cycling nature of writing. Herring's been compared to Julia Cameron (The Arist's Way) and there are some similarities. But where Julia Cameron comes out of a 12-step program and brings that perspective, Herring is a yoga teacher, so her mind-body-spirit lens, and the language with which she describes it, differs. There's a little more emphasis on the importance of craft in addition to process, and she comes across with more humility than Cameron, at least, to me. Good addition to a writer's library, and interesting suggestions for setting up a beginner's practice... no matter how experienced you are. (***)
Jane Maas: Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond
(****)
Patricia Ryan Madson: Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up
Jonathan Fields: Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance
Michael Port: Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling
Leonard S. Marcus: Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom
Douglas Stone: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most