All posts filed under: Creative Nonfiction

William and his goose.

On Living with Geese

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The goose arrived in early Autumn. William, my husband, was standing on top of the shed, working on the roof. The shed was ramshackle, its floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with bottles and bags of powders—alumina, bentonite, borax, cobalt oxide and lithium carbonate—wood working tools, packing peanuts, and weathered cardboard boxes. It belonged to his mother, Daphne. Nearly eighty and a working potter, she used the shed to mix her glazes and pack her pottery off to folks around the country. William’s father, Roger, had built it in the seventies, and the asphalt shingles were so curled and cupped that the roofing nails had all been exposed and were bleeding rust. As William pulled the nails out, steel strained against the wood, creating a series of rapid screeches—something like a manic squeaky toy or the call of a domestic goose. Read more [Appeared in Switchback literary magazine]

On Raising Chickens

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One spring, a friend purchased a $2 carton of fertilized eggs at the farmers’ market and stuck them under a borrowed incubator. Twenty-one days later, the resulting clutch threatened to overwhelm her modest backyard coop, and so she farmed the chicks out to adoptive parents. I presented two of those pullets, Hazel and Lydia, to my husband for our second anniversary. At the time, it felt terribly romantic. On one of our early dates, William had used the butcher paper covering a cafe table to draw me an elaborate plan for the kitchen garden he hoped to one day build. In addition to vegetables and fruit trees, it included an ingenious chicken hutch. Since then, we’d relocated to San Antonio, Texas, and it seemed like we’d be missing out on part of the experience if we didn’t keep some kind of livestock in the yard. Chickens would be charming pets. They would bring us fresh eggs. When I brought Hazel and Lydia home, they were six weeks old, still small and fluffy. Their feathers were …

Book: Minnesota Lunch

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What’s for lunch? On the Iron range, one answer with the weight of history is a pasty— ground meat and vegetables folded into a pastry crust. Make your way along Eat Street in Minneapolis and encounter the Somali sambusa, the Mexican torta, or the Vietnamese bánh mì. Stop by a Scandinavian hot spot to find the traditional open-faced sandwich, assembled with fresh fish and vegetables and herbs. Beyond providing our daily bread, sandwiches carry stories and cultural traditions. In researching these tasty, tasty sandwiches, my colleagues and I fanned out across the state to sample sandwiches and chat with chefs, church ladies, fisherfolk, turkey farmers, and bartenders. The result is a book that serves up an unconventional regional history loaded with culinary anecdotes, treasured recollections and tasty recipes. I contributed three essays to the book. >> Get it