and now introducing Nina Friend, foodie and spellbinder

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It's an increasingly interesting thing—this writer/teacher role I play. I've been at it long enough to note the shifts in student needs and expectations, to be able to predict, better than I once could, what books, passages, and lines will inspire, which exercises will illuminate and which will stress, which days will quiver with hope, and which with longing.

But I can never summon, in the my mind's eye, the particular students who will find our classroom at 3808 Walnut on Tuesdays each spring. I can never predict the stretch of soul and commitment. When I first met Nina Friend last year, I saw beauty and height, enormous kindness and care, a young writer who could certainly place a sentence (or several, more) on the page, that generous type who shared her mother's cookies and who always offered more.

When Nina set out to write her honors thesis with me this year, we both knew that food would be involved, as well as Nina's passionate interest in the lives of those who serve. Over the course of many months, Nina went from restaurant to restaurant, from book to meeting, from interviews with famous people to serving herself. She wanted to see, as she writes in her thesis, beyond the performance. She wanted to know who was happy as they served—and when and why. She asked whether "serving others can coexist with serving oneself."

A supreme perfectionist, a writer who deeply cares, a young woman who asked for more and more critique—and who absorbed it, faithfully, returning each time with a thesis of ever greater grace and magnitude, Nina has gone behind the lines in her thesis—a work that will change its readers and remind them always (a perpetual nudge) to look harder at the person announcing the day's specials.

Nina, like David Marchino, whose thesis is featured here, has given me permission to share some of her work with you. I'm scurrying out of the way so that you can meet Nina and her cast of characters yourself. This is from the chapter called "Community."

Community

Crisp and golden, it’s propped in the middle of a silver platter that’s been in the family forever. A heap of crumbled bread forms a moat around the centerpiece. Stuck together with orange juice, flavored with parsley. The first cut slices the bird on its side. Succulent. Soft. A ladle filled with gravy. A spoonful of stuffing. Two helpings of pecan pie. Chocolate mousse. Whipped cream.

* * *

When Ellen Yin opened Fork Restaurant eighteen years ago, she wanted the
space to feel familial. The mosaic floor was laid down by a neighborhood tile guy. A local ironworker made the chandeliers. A fabric designer in the area crafted lampshades. Tony DeMelas says the restaurant instantly became “a community of artists and love.”

When Yin decided to revamp the restaurant in 2012, she called up Tony to create
a mural. Something to hang over the brown velvet couch that stretches across an entire
side of the restaurant. Tony was honored to be able to create something for the restaurant
he worked in.

When Tony was working on the mural, Chef Eli Kulp would drop by his studio.
Just to keep him company. Just to be there. “He was very hands-on,” Tony says. Kulp
was the only chef that has ever influenced Tony’s work. He was infatuated with the way
Kulp composed his plates. The way he could make a rib look like a log in the woods with
flowers blooming out of it and mushrooms growing from tiny cracks. His food was
sculpturesque. Tony says, “I’d look at [Eli’s plates] and go, ‘[If] you just blew this up and
abstracted it…and put it on a canvas, you could sell the hell out of this thing.’”

Tony’s mural hangs above the extra-long couch and reflects its color onto the
dark wood tables. Yellows and oranges and light greens and white and brown. A forest of
tree trunks, abstracted.

Tony used to walk past the painting hundreds of times every day as he hustled
from Fork’s kitchen to his tables, balancing plates in his arms. Customers would come in
and sit down and admire the mural. They would say things like, “Oh, it’s so much bigger
than in the pictures!” They would be waited on by Tony – with his square, tortoise-shell
glasses and eyes that feel like he’s staring into your soul – and they would have no idea
that the humble man taking their orders was the artist who painted that masterpiece.

* * *

Community can be built into a place. But it’s the people within that place who
decide whether community flourishes or dies.

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What My Spectaculars expect from the memoirists they read, in today's HuffPo

Readers of Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir know that—while I greatly vary the way I teach, the books I share, and the writers I invite to the classroom—there is one consistent essay I assign early-ish in the teaching season. A 750-word response designed to shake out ideas, ideals, and possibilities.

This year My Spectaculars produced such extraordinarily charming and elucidating responses to the assignment that I decided (with my students' permission) to knit together elements so that we might always have a record of Us. I've called the piece "How to Write a Memoir. Or (The Expectations Virtues)" and shared it on Huffington Post.

The piece, which begins like this, can be found in its entirety here.

I call them My Spectaculars. Together, we read, we write. We rive our hearts. We leave faux at the door. We expect big things from one another, from the memoirists we read, from the memoirists who may be writing now, from those books of truth in progress.

But what do we mean by that word, expectation?

It's a question I require my University of Pennsylvania Creative Nonfiction students to answer. A conversation we very deliberately have. What do you expect of the writers you read, and what do you expect of yourselves?

This year, again, I have been chastened, made breathless, by the rigor and transparency of my most glorious clan. By Anthony, for example, who declares up front, no segue: ......

(Read on, I exhort you. Find out.)

There is a single student voice missing from this tapestry—my Sarah. You are going to be hearing from her next week or so, after a page or two of her brilliance is published and cross-linked here. Trust me, you will be changed by Sarah's words.

For now, I leave you my students. Read, and you'll call them Spectaculars, too.

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White Space Memoirs: Creative Nonfiction Arrives (and I have HANDLING toes)

I wrote about this essay (and excerpted its first paragraph) not long ago, here, but I didn't hold the magazine in my hands until just now.

I know we live in a virtual world. But how happy I am when published on paper, and especially when published in a magazine of this caliber. Thank you, Hattie Fletcher and Creative Nonfiction. I loved writing this.

And thank you, Melissa Sarno, for the Handling the Truth polish. Leave to Sarno. Head to toes.

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George Saunders on the power of kindness

A beloved student sent this our way late last night—a NYT link to the convocation address that George Saunders made to the Class of 2013 at Syracuse University. I loved hearing from my student. And I loved every word of this address.

Especially this, below. Saunders is talking about the importance of being kind. A soft subject? Think about it. How hard is kindness, daily? How difficult to consistently transcend your own self, your own needs, your own Look at Me, so that you can look at other people? So that you can listen?

It's hard. But Saunders says:

One thing in our favor:  some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age.  It might be a simple matter of attrition:  as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish – how illogical, really.  We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality.  We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be.  We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now).  Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving.  I think this is true.  The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

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creative nonfiction 135.302: how many of you can really talk?

There comes that time, in advance of teaching semesters, that I sit apart from machines and noise and dwell.  That time is now.  My work at the University of Pennsylvania begins on Tuesday.  I'll retreat to a familiar room and wait for the students to find me. 

In preparing for that class today, I came across a page I'd torn from a June 2011 issue of Vanity Fair.  Christopher Hitchens was well advanced in his trial with malignant cancer by then, his physical voice nearly gone.  But he was still wrestling with ideas, still persistently, insistently promulgating them.  It seems just right to open this year's class with his words:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write.  Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake:  "How many people in this class, would you say, can talk?  I mean really talk?"  That had its duly woeful effect.  I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend.  The rules are much the same:  Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions.  Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.  If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading.  So, this above all:  Find your own voice." 

Rest in peace, Christopher Hitchens.

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This Kind of Day (English 135-302)

So that (during class) we listened to Yo Yo Ma playing Astor Piazzolla music (fitting, for the CD had been a gift from my fellow faculty member Karen Rile) and Zulu Jive playing "A Sambe Siye e Goli;" we listened and wrote of remembered street-scape scenes; we found our best lines.  We thought out loud about the expectations we have of writers we read, the expectations we have of ourselves.  We asked:  Where do we find music on the page?, and the answers were all at once and different—it's Virginia Woolf, it's Rick Nichols on food, it's Maya Angelou; it's the repeated line, the crescendo line, the long line, the short one; it is what is held and what is sloughed away.  There was the crowding in, afterward, the slow goodbyes, and there, in the doorway, stood a student from three semesters ago—still tall, still lean, still so smart; my impromptu escort to the 4:48 train.

The color of sun.

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Researching Creative Nonfiction: A passage from an upcoming talk

I'll be speaking at Rosemont College this coming Thursday evening on a topic I've often thought about but never spoken on—the art of researching creative nonfiction. I'll be talking about three books—Flow, Still Love in Strange Places, and Ghosts in the Garden. I'll be inspired, in part, by this photograph, found for me by my friend Adam Levine in the city archives. This from the talk, just written:

Whether I’m writing memoir or novels, fables or poems, young adult novels, adult novels, or fantasies, I am, at one point, reaching far beyond myself, to bring the greater world in. I am following the always persistent, hardly consistent, rarely well-tiled path of my insatiable curiosity. True, research is often either a surfeit of overwhelm, or a tease. Still, and nevertheless, I don’t believe in bringing presumption to the page—in writing simply and only what I already know. I don’t believe in closing doors before I’ve opened windows. I want to be alive when I am writing—engaged, in suspense, full of the unprotected what ifs? I want to convey my own surprise, dismay, or basic indignity right there, on the page. Formulae don’t cut it for me; formulae have been done. Research scrambles the math.

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