The anthology Breaking Bread is finally out—well, almost. The official release date from Beacon Press is 5/24. But I already have my contributor copies. It’s a beautiful book, physically and storily (which is definitely a word I just made up). So much gratitude to editors Deborah Joy Corey and Debra Spark.
JUNE 7, at 7 p.m., I’ll be reading with another contributor, Margery Irvine, at the Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vermont. So if you know anyone within driving distance, send them our way. Yikes, I haven’t driven out of the state in 33 months!
JUNE 16, I’ll be reading at Coespace (Briar Patch Books) on Columbia Street in Bangor with Kimberley Ridley, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Donna Loring, and Deborah Joy Corey.
My essay, “I Tell Henry the Plate Is Red,” is about the time Henry came to me here in Maine in the year before he passed, a cluster of days in winter in which I got to cook in ways I hadn’t in years, in which I got to feed him and serve him, set the little square table for meals—three a day. He never ate three meals a day when he was in his own place—there were some days he didn’t eat at all until late at night—and this is long before he was sick. He’d just forget. Driven creatives can do that. I must, then, not be a ”driven” creative. I eat. I remember once when he didn’t eat and fainted in a store, fractured his ankle. He wore a boot. The docs wanted him to use a walker too, but, as he always said, nothing more dangerous than a blind man with a walker. How’s he going to wield that magical cane! Somehow he thought driving was safer, and when he could convince people to let him behind their wheel, he did!
When I received the request to write for the anthology, I had no idea what I would write about—I have so many food stories: the melding of an immigrant man’s palate with a younger woman’s from a small New England town whose cultural roots are dramatically different to make the family in which I would grow up; the girl (me) who had no interest in learning to cook and certainly no interest in lighting the gas stove with a match; holidays with their particular, quirky foods and their particular roles; friends’ families and their wild and wonderful foods (and customs) growing up in inner-city Boston; the uncatered outdoor-wedding feast (mine) in a postage-stamp-sized yard in Dorchester with 500 people (no RSVP: surprise!); learning to cook with no running water or electricity in Mt. Chase, Maine, much of it through the generosity of those extraordinary local folk I still call family (I can bake a mean loaf of bread, bake beans in a hole in the ground, cook everything from scratch—and I mean scratch, as in grinding the whole wheat berries to make the flour); being the only vegetarians in a small northern Maine hunter town hanging out with Marge and Dick Hall and their family down the road. There are so many food stories, and every one is filled with love and generosity.
But this is the story that rose up, and once its first words became first sentences, there was no other story to write.
Here’s the truth: I never know what I’m going to write about. The story chooses me. It’s like I’m standing on the train platform, and when the train arrives, I don’t notice the destination posted in its window. I get on the train. The doors close. And off I go.
Breaking Bread is an extraordinary book, with almost 70 Maine writers (full- and part-timers, long-haulers and short-timers, alike) writing about food in many of its coats (family, history, making, love and loss, community, dislike, poverty, self-perception—you know, the list is long). Most of us wrote original work for Breaking Bread. A few republished. All of us donated our work to make money for Blue Angel, a small, local food nonprofit that feeds the hungry in Maine.
Just so you get a sense of the range, we have Richard Russo, Lily King, Kifah Abdulla, Christina Baker Kline, Richard Ford, Stuart Kestenbaum, Roxana Robinson, Bill Roorbach, Myronn Hardy, Susan Minot, Maureen Stanton, Sandy Oliver, and, obviously, a bundle more.
I am so grateful. Hope to see you in one of the seats at one of the readings!
All photos by AJ or with permission