Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Happy Easter! Or in my case, atheist celebration of the coming spring, complete with pastel chocolate products and friends.

We're going to a potluck this afternoon, so my husband and I spent last night making carrot cake cupcakes. In a normal blog scenario, the thing would be to post the recipe for these cupcakes, but as this is my husband's great-grandma's recipe, I am pretty sure I don't have permission to do that. Suffice to say, grate your carrots thin and make sure not to use too much vegetable oil!

Delicious!

Crochet Time!

In the spirit of my sister's new blog, I spent last night relearning how to crochet. Knitting has always come more easily to me, but I am enjoying figuring this out. Behold, my crocheted headband!

Tonight I want to try crocheting a hat. Then I'm going to sew oodles of buttons on it. Because I love buttons.

Guerrilla Shelving

On Sunday, I did one of my favorite weekend activities: I went to the Book Thing*. I picked up some short story collections, a few novels, and, as I browsed the shelves in the romance section, my arms full of books, I found an impressive number of books that needed my rescuing.

From left to right, The Beet Queen, Love Medicine, A Thousand Acres, At Weddings and Wakes, and Pigs in Heaven.

In this imposing group of books, every single author has won or been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. These writers are all idols of mine (and one of them is my adviser ). So what do these books have in common with romance novels? The words “queen,” “marriage,” “love,” and “heaven” appear in the titles, which I guess helps them blend in with The Viscount Who Loved Me. (I have no idea what A Thousand Acres did to get included.) And, more importantly, they are all written by women.

I did not find a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez or The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love by Hijuelos or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Carver.

Feeling that these books deserved better, I gathered them to my bosom and moved them to the recommended reading shelves. It seemed only fair, especially as I have read all of these books and I do recommend them.

Now, this isn’t a post about how romance novels suck. Some are great and have filled my heart with chuckles and the joy of a love fulfilled. (I’m not kidding. Sometimes I like to read a happy book when literature gets to be a bit too much.) Many are terrible, and in some the writing is so bad I want to stab my eyes out. Much has been written about romance novels. What interested me, though, in that moment, was the constant fight of female literary authors to be taken as seriously as men.

In the end, I don’t think it’s about sexism (or at least not mostly about sexism). It’s about money. Romance novels are the bestselling genre of book. Chick lit is up there. Women buy way more fiction than men. As Ian McEwan said, “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.” So if you write books and you are a woman, you (and your publisher) can make more money if your book has a pink cover than if it has a gray one. Your book, if it can be made to seem “feminine,” will be. It is an odd thought that, as a woman writer who aspires to write literary fiction, I will always have to argue that my books aren't feminine, shouldn't be categorized as being “for women,” while my male counterparts can take pride in the legacy of being a “masculine” writer or ignore that legacy and bash on Hemingway and write about the domestic sphere until they are blue in the face (and you do it beautifully, Franzen).

I’m not saying that the literary establishment thinks that Louise Erdrich writes romance novels. I am saying that as women writing, we "talk about love" at our peril.

*If you live in Baltimore and haven’t been to the Book Thing, you should go. The Book Thing receives book donations every day, 24/7, and then every Saturday and Sunday from 9 to 6 you can walk in and take as many books as you want, all of them free. It is an amazing operation and I've donated a lot of books to them (to make up for how many I've taken). This is not a blog post about how the Book Thing is anything but awesome. It is a post about women in writing. And guerrilla shelving.

Clap if You Believe

As I sat in the Brody Learning Commons (or "the Bro" as I've heard undergraduates refer to it), reading my book for class, blithely minding my own business, I reached into my bag for the Dove chocolate I had squirreled away. This is what my chocolate had to say to me:

"Calories only exist if you count them. Love, Dove."

Okay, as Jon Stewart would say after a particularly offensive clip from Fox News, two things. One, calories are not like fairies. They exist whether you believe in them or not. No hand clapping is necessary. Don't patronize me.

Two, this is like telling someone, "Don't think about a pink elephant!" Thanks, Dove, with your stupid platitude, for making me think about counting calories when I should be thinking about this delicious piece of chocolate.

Love,
Gwen

P.S. Thanks for the Bro, Mayor Bloomberg.

Mark Strand!

Looking forward to seeing Mark Strand on Wednesday. If you are in Baltimore, you should come out and see one of the major American poets of the last fifty years.

Adventures in Food: Gnocchi Edition

Tonight, I had a severe case of writer's block. And not just block, really. It was a full blown case of writer's aversion. I didn't like my writing at that particular moment (or myself, life, the universe, and everything [You know how writers are. Our frustrations are epic!]). I needed to take a step back and return to the simple things in life.

Enter: gnocchi recipe on my wonderful friend's blog, Matzo & Rice.

Electing to watching the Jets/Patriots game (go LT!) and make gnocchi from scratch instead of writing, here's what I did:

Gwen says, "Hurry up and boil, potatoes!"


Once the potatoes were boiled, I mashed up a cup of potatoes with butter and salt and pepper (per the very clear and excellent recipe). At this point I thought, why ruin delicious mashed potatoes by making them into a gnocchi that I will inevitably botch? But the Jets were pressing on, and so did I.

Next came the dough! One cup of flour was plenty. The directions said knead, so I punched it warily a few times, then decided if you could see my knuckle imprints in the dough, it was good enough. Then I shaped the gnocchi into bite sized bits and got a good man to make the gnocchi sauce:

Voila! Dinner!

Now I feel much happier about the world. If only that meant my story was done and winding its brilliant way to the New Yorker.

New Year, New Books!

After an exciting day of scraping snow off my car, editing books, marveling at recalcitrant authors, and wending my way home behind cars still spitting off snow, I arrived home to find a package of books propped up against my front door! My Amazon shipment has arrived!

As I said in my new year's day post, I am excited for all the reading that I'm going to do in 2011. I am especially excited about pushing my boundaries a bit more than usual by venturing into the realm of short story collections in addition to novels (basically the only thing I read).

In the mail for me was:

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguru
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy
Best European Fiction 2011 (on my Kindle), edited by Aleksandar Hemon


Lahiri and Ishiguru have been on my radar for a long time, I've seen Jennifer Egan's book making a splash in book stores and reviews, and Meloy and the European fiction are short story collections that I bought out of a spirit of mad, unknowable adventure! This is how I go wild, okay? Five whole new books and they are all mine!

What new books are you reading in 2011? Any recommendations?