In The Kitchen With Gail

This was another weekend of cooking during which I didn't feel that I was binging. It was more a matter of "We need dessert." "I'm out of bread." "I want to eat pears in a way that I have never eaten pears before." Then I dragged myself around the kitchen and made this stuff. A binge is a little more ecstatic and less needy.

I continued my attempt to find podcasts of people reading a piece of writing instead of people talking about writing. What did I listen to?

Zahna by Dorothy Bouzouma at Slice Magazine. This is an essay that Slice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The author married a man from Mauritania, and her essay is about his family's effort to turn her into a Mauritanian woman during a visit there. The author sounded somewhat down reading Zahna, and I have to say I found myself feeling distressed listening to it. It seemed as if Bouzouma was being taken over, losing herself, to this culture that wasn't her own. I found myself thinking, Is any man worth this? It's a pretty successful essay in that it drew such a strong response from this listener.

Then I found No Extra Words, a flash fiction podcast. Over the past two years, I have worked steadily completing and revising a couple of novels. But the only truly new works I've written are two pieces of flash, one fiction and one an essay. I listened to a few pieces at No Extra Words and found them well done. But nothing moved me the way Zahna did. I'll go back to this site and explore some more.

Finally, I went back to The Memory Palace, where I listened to Family Snapshot. Now The Memory Palace is a storytelling podcast about the past. I think the stories could be described as creative nonfiction. While listening to Family Snapshot, I thought about all the writing

process advice about the necessity for conflict in fiction and sometimes even the need for an antagonist. But in true life stories is that always the case? Can "something happen to somebody and
so what" (my definition of story) without traditional conflict?

Once again, I'm taking part in the Weekend Cooking meme at Beth Fish Reads.

 

You can also check out all my Podcasts in the Kitchen posts at Pinterest.