Remember Podcasts In The Kitchen?

Recently I read an article on the popularity of podcasts. It reminded me that I listened to them back, it appears, in 2016. I listened to podcasts while I was binge cooking on weekends. I eventually got tired of them.

• I wasn't interested in just sitting and listening to a podcast, and it was difficult to concentrate on them while doing something else. For instance, baking for three hours.
• I also found a lot of them back then more interesting in concept than in execution. 
• Hosts often thought they could say anything and it would be entertaining. They were wrong.

Dipping into the archives, I found 10 podcast and cooking posts over a year period from November 1, 2015 through October 16, 2016. As part of my 20th anniversary observance, I'm rerunning one that pretty much expresses what happened for me with podcasts. It discusses a podcast I liked and that still exists. (Not all the podcasts I listened to back then do. Hmm. Do they come and go like blogs?) 

At the end of the post, you'll see a reference to a blog called Beth Fish Reads and a round-up of cooking posts from other bloggers she did called Weekend Cooking. Beth Fish Reads still exists, focusing on food-related books and cooking. The Weekend Cooking round-up is now hosted at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader. The Children's War, which I also mention at the end of this post, also still exists.  

Today is Saturday. I do have some cooking to do. I'll try listening to The Memory Palace to see how that goes these days.

Sunday, May 22, 2016 Another Cooking Binge, Another Podcast: "The Memory Palace"

Podcasts Losing Their Attraction For Me

Last week I was just about ready to throw in the towel with podcasts. I'd been interested in listening to them while working in the kitchen as a way to take in work-related material while doing an unnecessary creative act. I did pick up some good information, particularly on content marketing, but I was trying and discarding a lot of podcasts. Things I liked the first time I listened to them got old fast when I tried them again. When pods involved more than one personality, the ratio of chitchat to important content was often pretty high. I guess you can tell you're an introvert when you can't even take listening to others having a good time.

Big Cooking Binge

But I really like something going on sound-wise when I'm working in the house. Music is a definite option. Nonetheless, last weekend, I was embarking on a big cooking binge and thought I'd take another quick look on-line. Somehow, I stumbled upon The Memory Palace.

All About The Story

The Memory Palace's creator, Nate DiMeo, describes his podcast as "a storytelling podcast and public radio segment about the past." He takes isolated historical events and creates a written narrative about them. If you go back to the early days of the podcast, the story is often just an account of something that happened. But eventually his pieces began to include something on the event's significance. For instance, in his story about nineteenth century singer Jenny Lind, he talks about a major difference between her time and ours. In her day, before sound could be recorded, before recording sound was even thought of, you could only hear music during a performance. In many cases, you would never have another opportunity to hear a singer. Did people even give that a thought? Or was it just a normal part of life?

The significance part of these stories is important. History isn't just a list of facts. It means something. And in terms of The Memory Palace being a storytelling podcast, meaning is huge. Many times without including an understanding of a real event, all a storyteller/writer is doing is passing on a list of things that happened. What does it all mean, Mr. Natural? brings a piece of writing to another level.

Another thing that's neat about these podcasts is they're short. So far, I don't think I've listened to one that's more than fifteen minutes. DiMeo is "interested in keeping things small because I was interested in the smallness of those things" (the historical "moments" he finds) "and the way they added up to a larger picture."

These short podcasts are like flash nonfiction. They are intense and complete. They give listeners an opportunity to see how someone finds meaning in an event in  a quick, concise way. They have the potential, I think, to become a painless model for looking for and finding stories.

Hope I still like them in a few weeks.

I heard about Weekend Cooking through blogging buddy Alex Waugh of The Children's War.  I most definitely cook on the weekend, and it is often somehow connected to writing or reading, as is most things in my life. So this weekend I am taking my first shot at joining the weekend cook/book people at Beth Fish Reads.

Maybe It's Not Them, It's Me

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication Date: May 10, 2022

By the time I read my NetGalley ARC of Dear Friends by Lisa Greenwald, I'd forgotten how I found out about it or why I was interested. That kind of thing happens to me rather frequently and often leads to some very positive reading experiences. This was one of them.

Dear Friends begins with protagonist Leni confronting friend problems. She is really, really into best friends and when things go awry with her summer best friend as well as her all around best friend, she is shaken. My first thought was, Oh, this is going to be another one of those books about learning how to accept that relationships change. So true, so true, but I feel I've read enough of those.

But, no! As Leni starts to think about these situations, she realizes that a number of her friends are, indeed, former friends. Is this a pattern? What is going on here? So she sets out to investigate these former relationships and try to determine what happened. 

Leni is a bit of a girly girl, interested in traditional girl friendship things, and I could have found her difficult to take as a character. However, her recognition that looking at her past relationships and contacting former friends could have a positive impact on her future gave her depth and made her a much more sophisticated character.

Some might argue that the book becomes a little teachy with what Leni realizes a person, herself included, needs to do in order to be a good friend. However, what she learns and expresses is valuable and a little different from other friend books I've read, which are often about avoiding toxic relationshiops. In this case, Leni is coming to terms with the idea that maybe it isn't her friends, it's her. 

The book certainly made this adult reader dwell a little bit on whether or not she's making time for other people. Not enough to do anything about it, but still.

Time Management Tuesday: Chaos Involving Time, Place, And Money

Last week's TMT post was about my  favorite subject recently, writing in chaos, becoming one with the chaos. While writing it, I was reminded of an article I read a few months ago at Literary Hub,  The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer by Olivia Campbell.

Campbell is writing about women who are actually working as writers while functioning as the primary caregiver for children, not women who get most of their income from other jobs. Caregiving is just plain chaotic, and these women are writing while living with the chaos. They end up having to do what we've talked about here many times. They use small pieces of time to write, because the demands of their lives are such that they don't have big chunks to work with. While it would be terrific to have a month, a week, a weekend or even half a day to write, you can also write with little units of time spread over a long period.

Campbell's mother-writers deal with another level of chaos, of course, in that they often can't work in the same place all the time. It's not unusual for them to have to move around, writing in cars or at child events or in odd spots in their own homes. 

Time is one thing, place is another. Using whatever 20-minute, 45-minute, 90-minute unit of time you can grab when you can sit down at the same desk each time you grab it is very different from using those same amounts of time while in a room with people watching TV or at the lake while someone's having a swimming lesson. I can remember bringing some pages with me to a nursing home to revise and some reading with me when I was going to help out with some childcare in someone else's home. I ended up bringing it all back to my place. Years ago, before the splendor of the iPhone that is in my pocket right now, I bought a small tape recorder to carry with me in the car, so I could record ideas and plans for projects I was working on. I used it a couple of times and think I threw it away this past year.

I'm not touching the whole place thing here at OC. 

I Will Touch Money, Though

One of the things Campbell writes about is the fantasy that writers, particularly men, work in seclusion at big desks. I am going to argue that if this exists anywhere it is probably just for the most successful writers, male or female. The situation you see for Tom in Home Economics, who I think in one episode was working at a desk in a room with a crib, is probably much more the case for the majority of writers. 

Success and the money it brings is where things become tricky for writers, particularly mother-writers. As Campbell pointed out in an example from her own life, you need a certain amount of writing income to pay for child care so you have more time to write more so you can make more money. This becomes even more frustrating since writers have to spend an enormous amount of time on work that may never generate any income at all. Some of us are giving a lot of work away trying to develop a reputation that editors and publishers will be interested in, which could generate income in the future but there's nothing there to pay for childcare now.

Virginia Woolf is often quoted as saying that in order to write, women need a room of their own. But she didn't just say they needed a room of their own. She said they needed a room of their own and five hundred pounds a year. 

It's the lack of money--from either writing income or family--that has such an impact on mother-writers. It's what leaves them in chaos and working with little units of time.   

Time Management Tuesday: The Chaos Theory Of Time Management

I think from now on the bulk of my time management efforts are going to revolve around living with chaos. We are all a moment away from a time-consuming crisis, another illness (our own or someone else's), a breakdown, or storm damage; we are all a moment away from having today, tomorrow, or most of this week--hell, most of next month--totally consumed with something unrelated to what we had planned. 

You can be broken by chaos or you can roll with it. I'm still working on rolling with it.

A Case Study Using Set Aside Time, The Unit System, And Beginning Again

The case study, of course, involves me, as so many of my case studies do. For the past two months, I've been functioning as back up child care during a period involving a change in school schedules as well as one of those family illnesses that circulates around a couple of weeks and takes the regular child care provider out of commission, as well. 

Set-aside Time. My first step in dealing with this was to treat the period while I was going to be doing this particular part-time job as a set-aside time, like the May Days program I do with a Facebook group or National Novel Writing Month, when people set-aside the month of November to try to write the first draft of a book. During the time I was going to be committing a lot of time to family assistance, I would shift how I work. I wouldn't try to complete any particular work task. Instead, I would try to do something every day. 

This period started at the beginning of March, the beginning of a month, and the beginning of a time period is significant. It's easy to feel excited about starting something new then. 

Unit System. The second step in dealing with this situation was to accept that I didn't need huge periods of time in order to do something. I didn't need the whole month, a whole week, a retreat, a weekend, a day. In fact, there's a great deal of evidence that working over long periods of time actually decreases the quality of work. That's the argument for breaking your time into units or segments. 

The point being, having only a short period of time to work most days isn't a reason to give into the what-the-hell effect . Do something. Do anything.

During the month of March, I maintained a folder in my word processing program and every day I had to put something into that I had done. It could be reading a NetGalley ARC, which will become a blog post here. It could be working on one of several humor pieces I have in progress. It could be research. It could be working on a chapter.

Working like that during the month of March I was able to get a chapter started in the never-ending book I'm working on, finish revising a humorous essay into a humor piece, format it, and submit it, revise a story from years back and submit that, and submit a manuscript to an agent. 

It wasn't orderly, but I did something and moved forward. All the submissions have already been rejected, but one was a good rejection. A great rejection with feedback and the offer to look at a revision. This is a very positive outcome, and it came during a period when I wasn't working at my best.

Unfortunately, the end of time periods are just as important as the beginnings. When the end of March came, I couldn't maintain that daily work load, as minor as it was, because my set-aside time was over. Done.

Begin Again. And that is when beginning again comes into play. The end is in sight with the childcare situation. Gail shouldn't be twisting little minds much longer. I have a couple of days this week to get back on my feet and prepare for my more normal schedule next week. And then after that comes this year's May Days Facebook initiative, which I've found helpful for dealing with chaos in the past. What happened in March and most of April is in the past. It's behind me. I am beginning again.

Now, of course, that's only one possible future timeline, because remember my first paragraph--we are one call or text from chaos. But if I don't begin again next week, I'll try to use the May Days program to get back on task with a daily writing chore. That's a plan! 

Either way, I will begin again. 

Julia Child Is Everywhere This Spring

Julia Child is having a moment, due to the pretty terrific Julia showing on HBO Max right now.

It looks like pie, but it's cake!

Speaking of which, for Easter I made a gluten free version of the Queen of Sheba cake she makes in the first episode. Except for the no gluten and baking it in a pie plate instead of a spring form pan and using vegan margarine instead of butter, it was just like Julia's.

And speaking of Julia Child, over the last couple of weeks while watching the show about her, which has inspired many, many articles on-line, many of which I have read, I have been thinking about a lovely 2012 picture book by Susanna Reich about Child's cat, Minette. So, as part of my Original Content anniversary observance, I am republishing my post about it. It appears to be available as an e-book. I believe I still have my hard copy.

Friday, May 04, 2012 Blog Tour: "Minette's Feast" As Creative Nonfiction

If you're looking for Day Five of the Minette's Feast Blog Tour, you're in the right spot.

Minette’s Feast by Susanna Reich, illustrated by Amy Bates,  is a lovely picture book with a Parisian setting and a charming story. A woman living in Paris and studying French cuisine adopts a cat, Minette, that far prefers the results of her own food prep—hunting for birds and mice—to the cassoulets, soufflés, and pates her owner makes. She is finally won over, at least temporarily, by the leftovers from a dish that had taken three days to marinate.

The descriptions and illustrations of home, cooking, and food, food, food give Minette’s Feast the potential to become a comfort book, so it doesn’t matter that many young readers won’t know who the woman referred to in the book’s subtitle —“The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat”—is. Furthermore, Minette holds her own as a character. She does, after all, turn up her nose at meals prepared by a student at “Le Cordon Bleu, the famous cooking school.” Whether or not she will be won over to fine human food provides the narrative drive for this sweet piece of creative nonfiction.

That is what Minette’s Feast seems to be to me—creative nonfiction for kids. Creative nonfiction, as I first saw it defined years ago, is nonfiction that reads like fiction. It is written using  “elements borrowed from fiction to tell true stories,” as nonfiction children’s writer Melissa Stewart wrote earlier this year.  Descriptive language (“Julia and Paul were charmed by Minette’s delicate whiskers, her superior nose, and her quick little paws.”), dialogue (“Une maison sans chat, c’est la vie sans soleil!”), and the use of scenes (“And every time they went out for a walk, they enjoyed a fine, fine meal. They nibbled croissants in cafes where cats curled on chairs…”) are all examples of writing elements usually associated with fiction that a writer of creative nonfiction may choose to use.

In fact, in Lee Gutkind's collection of essays by writers of creative nonfiction, Keep It Real, scenes are described as the building blocks of creative nonfiction. They then need to be placed in some kind of order, or frame. In the case of Minette's Feast, Susannah Reich uses a traditional story frame to organize her scenes. A story is an account or retelling of something that happened told in a way that expresses meaning. That's why a beginning, middle, and end are so important to stories. We see the world of the story in the beginning, then a change or disturbance to that world in the middle, and the result of that change or disturbance in the end. We see what happened. Minette's Feast does read like a story--it's an account with a beginning, middle, and end of something that happened to Julia Child or to her cat, depending on which character you prefer to see as the protagonist. We also understand its meaning. This cat wouldn't eat Julia Child's cooking, for crying out loud!

Complete little stories turn up in all our lives (the story of how our parents met, the story of how we wrecked our new bikes, the story of how we came to settle into a career), but they aren’t always easily recognizable. And they don’t necessarily have any great significance or meaning beyond what happened to us. Creative nonfiction writers who choose to use a story frame have to recognize the potential for story while they are doing their research.  In her author’s note to Minette’s Feast, Susanna tells of having wanted to write about Julia Child for children “but I could never figure out how to make the story interesting to children.” She read Child’s memoir, My Life in France, “and discovered Minette, who inspired Julia’s lifelong love of cats. As a cat lover myself, I knew I had finally found my story.” 

Susannah’s story was actually Julia and Minette’s story. Through the use of creative nonfiction techniques, Susannah turned it into Minette’s Feast.

The Minette's Feast Blog Tour continues on Sunday at Great Kid Books. The earlier tour stops were:

Booktalking

Books Together

Tales from the Rushmore Kid

The Fourth Musketeer

After Sunday, the tour continues on Monday at Shelf-employed and Tuesday at ReaderKidZ 

Environmental Book Club

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication Date: May 3, 2022

A World Full of Nature Stories 50 Folktales and Legends  by Angela McAllister with illustrations by Hannah Bess Ross is a lovely collection of folktales and legends from around the world that, as the title says, feature nature. They are often creation stories relating to some natural feature or event. Arguably they are not nature stories so much as they are stories trying to explain nature from the standpoint of people who had no understanding of natural science. 

What makes them attractive for American readers, in particular, is that many of them are unfamiliar to us. They are new and novel. At the same time, though, it appears that foolish kings and jealous, nasty siblings are common all over the world, as are the rewards of good character.

As a child, I was a fan of a couple of books of short pieces to be read over a long period of time. For that reason, I can see A World Full of Nature Stories getting a lot of use in a home library. Elementary and middle school librarians in schools with units on folk tales and legends or foreign countries should really consider this, too. 

I read an e-arc but what I saw suggests that, in addition to its fine content, this is a beautiful looking book.

Some Virtual Opportunities For April

Books of Wonder still has a great many virtual author visits scheduled. Other bookstores, not so much. There's a definite shift back to live visits, which may be good for host bookstores. Readers attending virtual author talks may be buying their books anywhere or not at all. But when the end of virtual opportunities arrives, as it probably will, it will make the world seem smaller for readers, with fewer opportunities.

As usual, if I stumble upon anymore appearances this month, I'll post them here.

April 9 Carrie Tillotson and Estrela Lourenco, The Silver Unicorn Bookstore, Acton, Massachusetts 11:00 AM ET

April 19 Zibby Owens, Kerry Docherty, Karyn Parsons, Holly Hatam, R. J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, Connecticut 7:00 PM ET

April 25 Brady Smith, Blue Willow Bookshop, West Houston, Texas 5:00 PM CT

April 26 Cameron Chittock and Amanda Castillo, The Silver Unicorn Bookstore, Acton, Massachusetts 7:00 PM ET