Originally published at Substack: AUG 7, 2023 Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality? –from “Write Till You Drop,” The New York Times, 1989 I’ve had this quote from Annie Dillard on my corkboard since that interview came out in the NY Times in 1989. At the time, I was writing Place Last Seen and so, spent all my time trying to…

Making as an act of subversion Originally published at Substack: JUL 17, 2023 When everything burst into flower at once in May, I knew I might be in for a busy summer. Over the years, I’ve planted a lot of fruit in this yard. I have gooseberry, red currant, black currant and raspberry bushes. I have a grapevine (last year I got a single bunch, but since I’d been killing grapevines for years, I was okay with that). I have three sour cherry trees, an American plum, a greengage that seems to be growing a feral plum grove around itself,…

On puttering as creative practice Originally published at Substack: JUL 3, 2023 I feel like the last few newsletters have been excessively grumpy and it made me realize that I’ve been stretched a little thin. As always, when things get busy, what gets dropped is creative stuff — and so I took this week off work to try to get my mojo back. Someone I follow on Substack had a piece a few weeks back about how they’d finally gotten a “studio day” and how rejuvenating it had been. I cannot for the life of me find the piece, but…

The tourists and the rain and my dying cat … Originally published at Substack, JUN 19, 2023 It is a rainy Sunday afternoon and it seems that Betty Boop, the wizened elder-kitty of indeterminate age, is probably dying of kidney failure. It happens with old cats. She spent yesterday having a series of small seizures all day long, including one where she lost control of her bladder while sitting next to me on the couch. While we had guests. Which wasn’t a big deal, but was totally uncharacteristic. I tucked her into her cozy lair in the greenhouse room overnight,…

Always the same. Never the same. Originally published at Substack: JUN 5, 2023 Spring lasted about two weeks this year, but it was a glorious two weeks. I’ve never seen the trees bloom like that. Seemingly on the same day, every apple and crabapple tree, every plum and cherry, every pear tree, and the banks and banks of lilacs that often serve as borders between our city lots here in town — they all burst into the heaviest bloom any of us have seen in decades. The lilacs lasted almost two weeks. I’ve never seen anything like it. The white…

Abloom and ablaze at the same time … Originally published at Substack: MAY 21, 2023 We’ve had such a late spring that all the flowering trees have burst into blossom at once. One day, nothing was greening up, and the next day, the entire town is awash in blossom. The apple and crabapple trees are glorious. I don’t know if it was the cold winter or what, but I haven’t seen this many flowers in the 20 years I’ve lived here. Every fruit tree is covered in spurs all up and down every branch. Apple, crabapple, lilac, cherry, and plum…

The power of spring after a week away, and a funeral for my mother Originally published at Substack: MAY 7, 2023 Spring happened while we were in Chicago to bury my mother, and I returned to raised beds full of mustard greens, spinach, arugula, spring onions, Chinese garlic chives and … ASPARAGUS! I have no pictures of the asparagus because I cut it for lunch the afternoon we returned, sauteed it with some spring onions and greens, added a splash each of mirin and light soy sauce, and ate it over rice. It was delicious. It tasted of home. It was home.…

Dark Mountain: Issue 23 – Dark Kitchen (Post originally published on Substack, April 18, 2023) The Dark Mountain Project has long been a haven for my writing, and I was thrilled last fall when they asked me to contribute to their first Dark Kitchen issue. Dark Kitchen is “an assemblage of writing and art that investigates food culture in times of collapse.” If you can, please join the online celebration of launching the issue – Thurs 20th April, 7pm BST. It should be great fun. Terrestrial Sourdough appears in the print version of Dark Kitchen. Like all of The Dark Mountain Project’s issues, it’s a gorgeous, hardcover…

On not following recipes (Originally published at Substack, April 14, 2023) I accidentally made perfect yogurt the other day, after thinking I’d blown it. It’s hard to express how perfect this yogurt is. It’s set almost like a panna cotta. It’s fresh and creamy and only a tiny bit sour. It has perfect mouthfeel and hardly weeps whey at all. I’ve been making yogurt off and on for years. For ages I used the method listed in that I got off the early internets from a food scientist back East (lost to the link rot of the early intertubes, alas). Then…

February is still frozen, but the days are getting longer … (Originally published at Substack, February 19, 2023) February. The gloomiest, windiest month of the year. It’s a tough month to live in the northern-tier states, but I have to say, this February, I find myself coming back to the surface, breathing deep, turning my face to the sunshine that has come back to us. The days go on past five o’clock again. There have been whole days at a time in my greenhouse shed addition at the back of the house where I feel like I’m working inside one…