The WordSpider

Thanksgiving is past now, and I’m back at the blog after taking a week off.  I tend to lose track of when I last posted, especially with holidays and families coming and going, so I’ve decided for consistency’s sake to post every weekend from now on.

We did the whole turkey thing twice at my house—Sunday for my descendants—my son and his children, my daughter and her husband and their kids, and then again on Thursday for my father-in-law, my sister-in-law and her husband and children.  Now, I really do love roast turkey, and used to think I could never get enough.  These all-natural birds were very tasty, but after five days of turkey I was ready for something different to eat.  Here’s what we’ve had for dinner this week:

 Sunday:  roast turkey & all the fixings

 Monday:  shepherd’s pie with leftover turkey, stuffing, gravy & mashed potatoes

 Tuesday:  tortilla soup with turkey and turkey broth

 Wednesday:  turkey Tikka Masala on rice

 Thursday:  roast turkey & all the fixings

 Friday:  FISH, dammit!!!!!!!

 We’re still eating turkey for lunch, of course.  Both the freezer and the refrigerator are full of turkey, and yes, we did make everyone take plenty home with them, but they were big birds.

 I remember promising occasional recipes in this blog, so here are a few for those of you also dealing with leftovers:

 Leftover Turkey Shepherd’s pie

 Ingredients:

 1 cup chopped leftover turkey

1 cup leftover stuffing

2/3 – 1 cup leftover gravy

½ – 1 cup leftover vegetables (peas, Brussels sprouts, etc.)

1 cup leftover mashed potatoes

unbaked single pie crust, if desired

Preparation:

 1.  Preheat oven to 375° F

2.  Put a layer of stuffing in pie crust, or if not using pastry, in a pie pan.

3.  Add a layer of chopped turkey.  This is an excellent use for scraps that don’t work well in sandwiches

4.  Add a layer of cooked vegetables.

5.  Pour gravy over all; thin with a little stock if necessary.

6.  Spread mashed potatoes on top; dot with butter if desired.

 Bake 30 minutes or until pastry or the peaks of the topping are browned.  Serves 4.

Turkey Tortilla Soup

With all the garlic, peppers and citrus juice, this soup is excellent medicine for colds.  I think of it as Mexican pho.

Ingredients:

3 cups turkey stock*

1 medium onion, chopped

1 – 3  jalapeño peppers, very thinly sliced

2 – 3  Roma tomatoes, chopped

2 – 6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced or crushed

1 cup or more chopped cooked turkey (scraps work well)

6 corn tortillas plus 2 tablespoons olive oil or 2 cups of tortilla chips

1 tablespoon chopped cilantro

juice of 2 limes or lemons

extra sliced jalapeños, sliced avocado, cilantro and lime wedges

Preparation:

1.  Warm the stock in a kettle or deep saucepan.

2.  If using tortillas, cut or tear into small pieces, place on a cookie sheet and drizzle oil over them, then place under broiler, stirring once or twice.

3.  Add onion, garlic and peppers to stock and simmer for ten minutes.  If peppers are very hot, only use one, and add more to taste at the table.

4.  Add tomatoes and turkey, and simmer until heated through.

5.  Remove from heat and stir in lime juice.

 To serve:

 Distribute the tortilla chips among four bowls and ladle the soup over them.  Garnish with cilantro and put the extra garnish on the table.  (Serves four.)

 I can’t take any credit for the Turkey Tikka Masala.  I just bought a bottle of Indian simmer sauce, added chopped turkey and frozen peas, and served over Basmati rice.

 *Turkey stock:

When I prepare a bird for roasting, I simmer the neck and giblets with a few vegetables (such as trimmings from the onions and celery in the stuffing).  Most of that stock is used in the gravy.  When I take apart the remains of the roast bird for distribution and storage, I boil all the bones and gristle for an hour or so, strain and add any stock left from before.

 On other fronts: 

 I’ve been feeling discouraged about my writing lately.  In a recent email I told a dear friend, “Don’t know what to say at this point except I’m not sure what I have to say as a writer.   And if I don’t have anything to say, why bother?”

 Her response reminded me, as if I needed reminding, of why I love her.  First, she reminded me that I am still grieving, and coping with others’ grief as well, for the loss of a family member, so naturally I am feeling some depression.  Then she added that a good cure for being stuck as a writer is to do some “volunteer writing.”

 “Something else you might consider,” she wrote, “even though this is of course NOT the same at all as writing about what you want and how you want to write about it, I can’t help thinking of all the organizations that would LOVE to have you donate some of your writing skills for them. I figure Bremerton must have a lot of organizations you care about, that put out something like an online newsletter!  I am aware you have a full, busy life but perhaps donating some of your writing skills would give you the chance to still do some writing, and not have to sort of “think” about it, or how you can present it, and how it will or can fit into the world, perhaps—but you’re still doing a variation of one of your heart’s desires.”

 She’s right.  And I do have an idea of an organization that might be able to use some volunteer writing and editing from me—but no more about that now until I’ve had a chance to scope it out.

Broken promise:  I said I would post here every week, and I’ve missed my date.  I am just getting over a truly horrendous cold and can now walk upstairs without growing faint.  My progress has also been slowed by depression:  some of it on my own account, some perhaps reflexively seasonal, and some because of my horror and grief at the loss of someone near me.  More about that in a few minutes.

Yesterday, among a group of dear friends in a small spiritual circle, I gave thanks that I am not in fact a tortured artist.  I write because I love the craft and because, after all these years of practice, I do it rather well.  Unlike many artists I have known, I do not create art because I must.  I don’t write to keep my wounded soul from shaking my body to pieces in its torment, or to give voice to its interior howling.  If I were that kind of writer, I would do a helluva lot more work than I do, but given the price, I can live with my inferior output.  I’m lucky enough to have an essentially happy and healthy life.  I have my griefs, my miseries, my old wounds — who doesn’t! — but they don’t torture me, not much, not often.

The other day I received a most delightful email.  “Congratulations!” it began.  “I’m pleased to tell you that your work – Mooring – has been selected to appear in Open to Interpretation: Water’s Edge.”

Open to Interpretation publishes books – yes, real old-fashioned paper-and-print objects – which are juried anthologies of photographs and short pieces of writing (300 words max) inspired by specific photographs.  I am honored to be chosen, and plan to submit to future volumes.   Check it out at  http://www.open2interpretation.com/

Mooring is a prose poem, if you’ll accept that term – my husband can’t bear it!  What I mean by “prose poem” is a prose piece that is a musical work, in which sound and sense unite as they do in poetry; a lapidary work, of cut and polished facets.  Mooring opens, “My mother was a seal” and ends with a woman becoming a seal again as she dies.  Although it was not written specifically, or entirely, about my own late mother, I soon realized that in it I was mythologizing my mother’s life and death. 

Mooring can be called a small fruit from a big tree:  a cross-genre work about my mother and myself (still in progress) called Two Little Girls.  My mother died eleven years ago, but so intense, so claustrophobic even, was our bond of love and need and anger that her death has taken me far longer to accept and mourn than any other death that has ever touched my life.  True simple grief for her did not begin to flow until I had begun to write about her in, yes, mythological terms.  In that regard, then, I am after all a writer-by-necessity:  sometimes it is only by my writing that I have access to my most painful emotions.

Twenty years ago at this season I wrote an obituary for my beloved friend the poet Jesse Bernstein, who died by suicide on October 22, 1991.  Earlier this year, after the release of a new film about Jesse, I reread it.  Compared to Mooring, the piece is not very polished.  My writing skills were twenty years younger then; it’s a much longer piece and was written for immediate publication, without much time for revision.  But it has a kinship with Mooring that I recognize:  although it was written as (and largely was) non-fiction, in it I had to some extent mythologized Jesse.

 Last month a beautiful and talented woman of my family disappeared from her home with the intention of ending her life.  From the vantage of my age she was young (38), but she had suffered longer than she could bear any more from severe chronic depression and PTSD.  Her body has not yet been found, but it is inconceivable that she still lives.

Shock, horror, lack of surprise, anguish for her immediate family:  all that I could feel, or rather, think, but until today I could not unstop the fountain of my own tears for her.  I need to write about her, I thought.  I need to mythologize her.  I had always seen her as other-worldly in some way, a fairy princess of a kind much older and more sorrowful than the Disney versions, and as I fell asleep last night I recited to myself over and over the first few words of what I would write about her.  “Green, green were her eyes, full of light and flickering shadows, green as the glades of the deep forest.”

Is it surprising that I dreamed of her?  It was a true dream, I believe:  a communication from her that her spirit, in the mysterious process of its remaking, has reached a new stage of hope and peace.

This morning, then, I wrote of her, what I had meant to write and then the dream as well.  And when it was written, my tears began to flow at last and I howled aloud in grief for her pain and for her passing.  I am not yet ready to publish what I wrote of her, but if you email me, I will send it to you.   Address:   Alisonjeanash@gmail.com

Wild Life

by Molly Gloss

Mariner Books trade paperback, 2000

cost:  $2.00 at Perry Mall Antiques,Bremerton

The words “antique” and “vintage” alarm me when I’m on a tight budget.  I’ve seen the twin of a colander I bought for $1.50 at St. Vinnie’s offered as an antique at $12.  But antique malls where dozens of venders set their own prices do sometimes offer bargains, like the collection of $2 books with Pacific Northwest themes I once found at Perry Mall.

I’d heard of Molly Gloss and The Jump-Off Creek, her award-winning novel about a fiercely independent widow homesteading in Eastern Oregon in the 1890s.  In buying Wild Life I thought I was getting another book of that type, a well-researched historical novel.  Wild Life is that, all right, but it’s something more as well.  Historical accuracy merges, at first imperceptibly, into a sense of the mythic quality of the ancient forest, and then into outright fantasy that is somehow utterly believable, making the story as unclassifiable as it is enthralling. 

Even more to my taste, the novel depicts the life of a working writer.  The heroine is not a troubled genius, nor a creator of undying art; she’s a popular novelist who works hard for her living at a craft she mostly enjoys, struggling—as do we all—to balance her work with her family, her health, her daily life.  Ultimately, because she is above all a both a truth teller and a storyteller, she’s trying to keep her balance between sharing and mythologizing her own experience of life.  This is not just a good read:  it’s a useful read for any working writer, no matter what her genre.

The story is set in turn-of-the-last-century Oregon, this time in the west, in small towns and logging camps along the Columbia and in the deep woods.  In an interview at the back of the book, Gloss says Wild Life grew out of her research for The Jump-Off Creek.  Lydia, the heroine of that book, was a reader, so Gloss immersed herself in the popular fiction of the era.  She discovered that many of those “dime novels” were written by women—not only stories of love and domestic life but also Western adventures, fantasy and science fiction featuring strong-minded and intrepid heroines. 

Charlotte, the heroine of Wild Life, earns her living as the author of such fantastical tales.  Born in Oregon and partly raised inNew York City, she now lives on the homestead she inherited from her mother.   Without regard for public opinion she smokes cigars and rides her bicycle to town wearing trousers.  Her husband having vanished—deliberately or not, neither she nor the reader knows—she must balance earning a living with the job of bringing up five sons, with the help of her loyal but disapproving housekeeper Melba.

When Melba’s granddaughter disappears from a logging camp near Yacolt, Charlotte, both concerned for the child and eager for action and new experience, joins the search party.  Separated from her companions in the deep forest, she finds herself living an adventure as fantastical as anything she has ever read or written.

Besides giving us a detailed and historically accurate picture of life in the muddy towns and logging camps linked together by Oregon’s great rivers,  Gloss weaves in Native American legend, feminism both theoretical and down-to-earth, and an illuminating sampling of the literature and the scientific and philosophical speculations of the era.  Above all she celebrates the human need for wilderness and mystery.

 Molly Gloss wrote her first novel, Outside the Gates, a young adult fantasy, after studying with Portland science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin.  The Jump-Off Creek followed in 1989.  The Dazzle of Day (1997) is science fiction.  The two streams of Gloss’s writing, history and fantasy, came together in Wild Life.  The Hearts of Horses (2007) is historical fiction again.  All five titles are available from the Kitsap Regional Library in various formats including large print and audio books.