“The Possibilities of Place” Webinar with Nina Mingya Powles
Yesterday was National Nonfiction Day in the UK, apparently, as well as being part of the ongoing Nonfiction November challenge. Appropriately, I attended what I think must be my first writing workshop, run online by The Emma Press, a Birmingham-based publisher whose poetry and essay collections I enjoy. Thanks to Arts Council England funding, they’ve been able to arrange a series of masterclass webinars that explore some of the genres they publish.
The life writing class I participated in was led by Nina Mingya Powles, a poet and essayist whose terrific books Magnolia, Small Bodies of Water, and Tiny Moons (The Emma Press’s best-selling memoir) I’ve read and reviewed. Other attendees hailed from as far afield as Orkney, West Cork, the South of France, Berlin and New Zealand. The seminar was in Zoom presenter mode, so only Nina was on screen and the rest of us communicated via the chat box. I had been nervous about joining from my PC without a webcam or microphone, so I was relieved that this was the setup.
Nina spoke about how broad the umbrella of “life writing” is, potentially incorporating poetry and autofiction as well as straightforward prose. “Creative nonfiction” is a term sometimes used interchangeably with it. Today she wanted to focus on how memories (especially childhood memories), food and place are intertwined.
For our first warm-up exercise, she had us draw a rough map of a body of water and put a point on it, then write ourselves into that place. During this 7-minute freewrite, I compiled a list of not particularly poetic sense impressions of Annapolis harbour. I found myself crying as I realized I might never have a reason to go back to a place that was so important in my teen and early adult years.
Nina’s black-and-white cat, Otto, often butted in, in amusing and feline-appropriate ways. We proceeded to consider food as a portal to memories and to different places we’ve lived or travelled. Nina likes to think about being an outsider and the visitor’s perspective. She acknowledged that our relationships with food can be complicated, so sometimes it is a loaded topic. Mostly she is looking for gentle, tender, joyful depictions of food.
She read aloud Rebecca May Johnson’s recipe poem “to purge the desire to write like a man,” which on one level is about making tomato sauce (as is Small Fires) but ends with a “found incantation” from Natalia Ginzburg that reclaims the female realm of the kitchen as a place of power. I loved how the first stanzas describe the body as an archive, containing multitudes. Then we considered a Jennifer Wong poem, “A personal history of soups,” about all the Chinese soups she loves and misses, and their personal and legendary meanings.
Taking the Wong title as our prompt, we spent 15 minutes writing a rough piece about a foodstuff. I’ve reproduced mine below, without any tidying-up. I mimicked the part-recipe format of the Johnson and tried to picture the kitchen of our first Bowie house and the cookware we had there.
A personal history of apple pie
As American as…
Dad did all the cooking when I was growing up, so for my mother to accompany me in the kitchen was a big thing. One year of my adolescence, there was a baking contest at the church my best friend and her family attended. I didn’t expect to take part at all or, if anything, perhaps I assumed I’d knock together some simple chocolate chip cookies on my own. But Mom insisted we would make an apple pie from scratch together – crust and all.
An apron each. One green, one red. Hand-embroidered heirlooms made by her grandmother. (Don’t keep them folded away in a drawer. Use them. They are your lineage, your artefacts.)
Half shortening, half butter. Glass bowl. Cold water. Half-moon cutter criss-crosses through chunks of semi-solid fat to render them smaller and smaller, flour-covered pebbles the size of peas.
Scent clouds of cinnamon and cloves billow up from a pan of stewing apples. A ceramic dish with crimping around the rim. A wooden rolling pin to achieve a uniform one-quarter inch round of dough. Freshly washed fingers gently pressing divots into the sides until every air bubble disappears.
Blind bake the crust. Trust that it will hold your creation. The sizzle of softened fruit in contact with the part-baked crust.
I have no memory of whether we won a prize. And me so competitive! The prize was the time. The prize was the attention. The assurance that this was worth it, that I was worth it.
Next we moved on to think about place and journeys, especially departures and arrivals – bringing places with us versus leaving them behind. An attendee commented, and Nina agreed, that often distance is useful: we can most easily write about somewhere after we’ve left it, once there is a sense of yearning. For this section we looked at a few-page extract from Larissa Pham’s essay collection Pop Song in which she describes a drive from Albuquerque to Taos. Expecting beautiful Georgia O’Keeffe-type scenery, she experiences the letdown of signs of the opioid crisis and Trump voters.
Borrowing a line from the Pham essay, Nina invited us to spend 20 minutes writing a piece that would bring the reader into the immediacy of our experience of a place. She reminded us, as a general rule, to remember to cite whatever we borrow, or to remove the borrowed line afterwards and see if it still works. My take on “Here I was now in the distant place…” ended up being a few rambling paragraphs contrasting my two study abroad years, one magical and one difficult. (Sample line: “Everything in England was like that: partially familiar but slightly askew.”)
At the end, three participants unmuted themselves and read their food pieces aloud. One was about food and a mother’s love; milk and rice. The other two, amusingly, were both about meringue: making a cherry meringue pie with a Scottish granny, and assembling pavlovas with aunts in New Zealand.
Nina encouraged us to think of life writing as a fluid thing, including journaling, blogging, travel and nature writing. This was heartening because I’ve always indulged in bits of autobiographical writing on my blog, and I started a journal last month as my 40th birthday approached, inspired in part by the 150 journals I inherited from my mother as well as by the desires to document my life and believe that the day-to-day has meaning.
The two-hour workshop was incredibly good value, especially considering that The Emma Press sent a voucher for £4 off of one of their books. (I’ve ordered their poetry anthology on ageing.) Nina also generously circulated lists of additional writing prompts, magazines that accept life writing submissions, and relevant competitions to enter.
I’d purchased a ticket on a whim but wasn’t sure whether I’d participate fully – I have a bad habit of skipping the exercises in books, after all. I’m so glad I did join, and gave myself over to the writing prompts. Who knows if anything will come of it, but it was cathartic to think about life experiences I don’t often have at the forefront of my mind, and to see how much can be produced in short periods of concerted writing.
20 Books of Summer, 1–3: Hargrave, Powles & Stewart
Plants mirror minds,
Healing, harming powers
Growing green thoughts.
(First stanza of “Plants Mirror Minds” from The Facebook of the Dead by Valerie Laws)
Here are my first three selections for my flora-themed summer reading. I hope to get through more of my own books, as opposed to library books and review copies, as the months go on. Today I have one of each from fiction, nonfiction and poetry, with the settings ranging from 16th-century Alsace to late-20th-century Spain.
The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (2022)
Kiran Millwood Hargrave is one of my favourite new voices in historical fiction (she had written fiction for children and young adults before 2020’s The Mercies). Both novels hit the absolute sweet spot between the literary and women’s fiction camps, choosing a lesser-known time period and incident and filling in the background with sumptuous detail and language. Both also consider situations in which women, queer people and other cultural minorities were oppressed, and imagine characters pushing against those boundaries in affirming but authentic-feeling ways.
The setting is Strasbourg in the sweltering summer of 1518, when a dancing plague (choreomania) hit and hundreds of women engaged in frenzied public dancing, often until their feet bled or even, allegedly, until 15 per day dropped dead. Lisbet observes this all at close hand through her sister-in-law and best friend, who get caught up in the dancing. In the final trimester of pregnancy at last after the loss of many pregnancies and babies, Lisbet tends to the family beekeeping enterprise while her husband is away, but gets distracted when two musicians (brought in to accompany the dancers; an early strategy before the council cracked down), one a Turk, lodge with her and her mother-in-law. The dance tree, where she commemorates her lost children, is her refuge away from the chaos enveloping the city. She’s a naive point-of-view character who quickly has her eyes opened about different ways of living. “It takes courage, to love beyond what others deem the right boundaries.”
This is likely to attract readers of Hamnet; I was also reminded of The Sleeping Beauties, in that the author’s note discusses the possibility that the dancing plagues were an example of a mass hysteria that arose in response to religious restrictions. (Public library)
Magnolia by Nina Mingya Powles (2020)
(Powles also kicked off my 2020 food-themed summer reading.) This came out from Nine Arches Press and a small New Zealand press two years ago but is being published in the USA by Tin House in August. I’ve reviewed it for Shelf Awareness in advance of that release. Those who are new to Powles’s work should enjoy her trademark blend of themes in this poetry collection. She’s mixed race and writes about crossing cultural and language boundaries – especially trying to express herself in Chinese and Hakka. Often, food is her way of embodying split loyalties and love for her heritage. I noted the alliteration in “Layers of silken tofu float in the shape of a lotus slowly opening under swirls of soy sauce.” Magnolia is the literal translation of “Mulan,” and that Disney movie and a few other films play a major role here, as do writers Eileen Chang and Robin Hyde. My issue with the book is that it doesn’t feel sufficiently different from her essay collections that I’ve read – the other is Small Bodies of Water – especially given that many of the poems are in prose paragraphs. [Update: I dug out my copy of Small Bodies of Water from a box and found that, indeed, one piece had felt awfully familiar for a reason: that book contains a revised version of “Falling City” (about Eileen Chang’s Shanghai apartment), which first appeared here.] (Read via Edelweiss)
A Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart (2002)
It’s at least 10 years ago, probably nearer 15, that I read Driving over Lemons, the first in Stewart’s eventual trilogy about buying a remote farm in Andalusia. His books are in the Peter Mayle vein, low-key and humorous: an Englishman finds the good life abroad and tells amusing anecdotes about the locals and his own mishaps.
This sequel stood out for me a little more than the previous book, if only because I mostly read it in Spain. It’s in discrete essays, some of which look back on his earlier life. He was a founding member of Genesis and very briefly the band’s drummer; and to make some cash for the farm he used to rent himself out as a sheep shearer, including during winters in Sweden.
To start with, they were really very isolated, such that getting a telephone line put in revolutionized their lives. By this time, his first book had become something of a literary sensation, so he reflects on its composition and early reception, remembering when the Mail sent a clueless reporter out to find him. Spanish bureaucracy becomes a key element, especially when it looks like their land might be flooded by the building of a dam. Despite that vague sense of dread, this was good fun. (Public library)
20 Books of Summer 2022: Flora Theme
It’s my fifth year participating in Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer challenge, which starts tomorrow. Each year I choose a theme. Thus far I’ve done books by women; animals; food and drink; and colours. This year will be all about flora; mostly trees, I reckon. As always, I’ll interpret the theme loosely and include titles, authors and covers that seem apt for whatever reason.
I have lots to choose from. Here’s the stacks from my shelves, divided into fiction and non-:
And a relevant recent haul from the library:
There will be other options on my Kindle too, such as Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit.
I’m eyeing these up as my first four:
(Nina Mingya Powles also kicked off my 2020 foodie reading!)
Are you joining in the summer reading challenge? What’s the first book on the docket?
10 Favorite Nonfiction Novellas from My Shelves
What do I mean by a nonfiction novella? I’m not claiming a new genre like Truman Capote did for the nonfiction novel (so unless they’re talking about In Cold Blood or something very similar, yes, I can and do judge people who refer to a memoir as a “nonfiction novel”!); I’m referring literally to any works of nonfiction shorter than 200 pages. Many of my selections even come well under 100 pages.
I’m kicking off this nonfiction-focused week of Novellas in November with a rundown of 10 of my favorite short nonfiction works. Maybe you’ll find inspiration by seeing the wide range of subjects covered here: bereavement, social and racial justice, hospitality, cancer, nature, politics, poverty, food and mountaineering. I’d reviewed all but one of them on the blog, half of them as part of Novellas in November in various years.
When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book by Naja Marie Aidt [137 pages]: In March 2015 Aidt got word that her son Carl Emil was dead. The 25-year-old jumped out of his fifth-floor Copenhagen window after taking some mushrooms. The text is a collage of fragments: memories, dreams, dictionary definitions, journal entries, and quotations. The playful disregard for chronology and the variety of fonts, typefaces and sizes are a way of circumventing the feeling that grief has made words lose their meaning forever.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin [89 pages]: A hard-hitting book composed of two essays: “My Dungeon Shook,” is a letter addressed to his nephew and namesake on the 100th anniversary of emancipation; and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which first appeared in the New Yorker and tells of a crisis of faith that hit Baldwin when he was a teenager and started to question to what extent Christianity of all stripes was upholding white privilege. This feels completely relevant, and eminently quotable, nearly 60 years later.
Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity by Priya Basil [117 pages]: A thought-provoking essay that reaches into many different topics. Part of an Indian family that has lived in Kenya and England, Basil is used to culinary abundance. However, living in Berlin increased her awareness of the suffering of the Other – hundreds of thousands of refugees have entered the EU to be met with hostility. Yet the Sikh tradition she grew up in teaches kindness to strangers. She asks how we can all cultivate a spirit of generosity.
Survival Lessons by Alice Hoffman [83 pages]: Hoffman wrote this 15 years after her own experience of breast cancer to encourage anyone going through a crisis. Each chapter title begins with the word “Choose” – a reminder that, even when you can’t choose your circumstances, you can choose your response. This has been beautifully put together with blue-tinted watercolor-effect photographs and an overall yellow and blue theme (along with deckle edge pages – a personal favorite book trait). It’s a sweet little memoir with a self-help note.
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold [92 pages]: Few know how much of our current philosophy of wilderness and the human impact on the world is indebted to Aldo Leopold. This was published in 1949, but so much rings true today: how we only appreciate wildlife if we can put an economic value on it, the troubles we get into when we eradicate predators and let prey animals run rampant, and the danger of being disconnected from the land that supplies our very life. And all this he delivers in stunning, incisive prose.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels [70 pages]: Maybe you, like me, had always assumed this was an impenetrable tome of hundreds of pages? But, as I discovered when I read it on the train to Manchester some years ago, it’s very compact. That’s not to say it’s an easy read; I’ve never been politically or economically minded, so I struggled to follow the argument at times. Mostly what I appreciated was the language. Like The Origin of Species, it has many familiar lines and wonderful metaphors.
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell [189 pages]: Orwell’s first book, published when he was 30, is an excellent first-hand account of the working and living conditions of the poor in two world cities. He works as a dishwasher and waiter in Paris hotel restaurants for up to 80 hours a week and has to pawn his clothes to scrape together enough money to ward off starvation. Even as he’s conveying the harsh reality of exhaustion and indignity, Orwell takes a Dickensian delight in people and their eccentricities.
Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles [85 pages]: This lovely pamphlet of food-themed essays arose from a blog Powles kept while in Shanghai on a one-year scholarship to learn Mandarin. From one winter to another, she explores the city’s culinary offerings and muses on the ways in which food is bound up with her memories of people and places. This is about how food can help you be at home. I loved how she used the senses – not just taste, but also smell and sight – to recreate important places in her life.
The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd [108 pages]: This is something of a lost nature classic. Composed during the later years of World War II but only published in 1977, it’s Shepherd’s tribute to her beloved Cairngorms, a mountain region of Scotland. But it’s not a travel or nature book in the way you might usually think of those genres. It’s a subtle, meditative, even mystical look at the forces of nature, which are majestic but also menacing. Shepherd dwells on the senses, the mountain flora and fauna, and the special quality of time and existence (what we’d today call mindfulness) achieved in a place of natural splendor and solitude.
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit [143 pages]: Solnit believes in the power of purposeful individuals working towards social justice, even in the face of dispiriting evidence (e.g. the largest protests the world had seen didn’t stop the Iraq War). Instead of perfectionism, she advises flexibility and resilience; things could be even worse had we not acted. Her strong and stirring writing is a reminder that, though injustice is always with us, so is everyday heroism.
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