Kurt Timmermeister's Blog

2014 Book Tour

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Description: Launch event at Town Hall Seattle. Event presented in the Great Hall at Town Hall Seattle in partnership with Elliott Bay Book Company through the Arts & Culture series. The event should run 60 minutes start-to-finish including 35-45 minute talk and conversation with Dan Savage, and audience Q&A. Book signing follows.

Start time: 7:30 pm

Location: Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA 98101

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Description: Talk and signing at Powell’s.

Start time: 7:30pm

Location: Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., Portland, OR – the main store downtown

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Description: Talk and signing at University Book Store in Seattle. The event should run 60 minutes start-to-finish including 35-45 minute presentation/conversation, audience Q&A. Book signing follows.

Start time: 7:00pm

Location: University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Description: Talk and cheese tasting at Book Larder in Seattle

Start time: 6:30pm

Location: 4252 Fremont Avenue North, Seattle, WA  98103

 

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Description: Talk and cheese tasting at Omnivore Books in San Francisco

Start time: 6:30pm

Location: 3885a Cesar Chavez Street (at Church Street), San Francisco, CA 94131

Book Readings in February

I will be out doing readings for the paperback edition of Growing a Farmer. Do come down and join me if you can.

Wednesday February 1st at 7:00 at Elliott Bay Books

Friday February 10th at 6:00 at Vashon Book Shop.

Wednesday February 15th at 6:30 at Book Larder

First day of the new web site

It is a beautiful morning here on the farm; briskly cold, dry and quite cloudy. But the cows are happy, eating their morning hay while I snap their picture.

Off to the make-room to work on Dinah’s Cheese. Thankfully it is a toasty 72′ in there.

Local 2.0

I find that I have been misunderstood. Wouldn't be such a bad thing except that I fancy myself a writer. The whole point of writing is to communicate thoughts clearly. If I am unable to convey ideas properly, then I should just go back to the barn and muck out the stalls and be done with the whole book writing thing.

The misunderstanding I am referring to is people thinking I believe in local foods as being intrinsically superior to mass produced foods. I doubt that I have ever written that or said that because I do not believe that. I believe in eating the very best foods, made in the very best ways. Oftentimes that is a small local grower / farmer / producer, but it is not necessarily always the case.

There have been two notorious cases of problems with small creameries in Washington State in the past few months. Both Sally Jackson creamery and Estrella Family Creamery were small local cheese producers. Both had trouble with the regulators for possible contaminations. Both are shut down. These are great examples of local is not necessarily better.

Would I want a strawberry in December from Chile? Not at all, I love a great, local strawberry picked from a small farm in my area. But possibly a wedge of Cheddar from Cabot Creamery in Vermont is a good bet for a cheese fix. Cabot Creamery is a fairly large producer, a factory if you will, but they make exceptional cheese.

The way that this recently came up was because I posted on Facebook encouraging friends to go to Amazon.com. Critics were outraged that as a promoter of local foods I should therefore be an advocate of their local bookstores. I like the small book stores. I shopped in them for years and still do when I am in town. I also shop on Amazon.com.

I was recently on book tour in San Francisco and did a reading at Omnivore Books in San Francisco. It was without a doubt the most amazing bookstore I have ever seen. It is tiny, maybe four hundred square feet, with a beautifully curated inventory of primarily cookbooks. From now on, whenever I am in San Francisco I will stop in there to buy a book or two.

The largest and most successful book store in Seattle sells my book. I was the second highest seller of non-fiction books at this store in the month of February just after my book was released. I packed the reading room the night of a book reading and people left because there was not enough room. They sold out of my book that night. Let me repeat that: people came from across town, parked, came to a reading and could not buy a book. I now stop in once per week to check to make sure that they have books. Twice I have showed up and there were no books in stock. I was told that they were in the basement and had just been delivered. How do books sell if there aren't any on the shelves? I love this book store. I buy books there, but it is most frustrating as an author to stop by and to see the shelf with none of your books. This is an example of local sometimes just isn't good enough.

Amazon is headquartered in Seattle. I have many friends and farm customers who work for Amazon. They also want my support. I think they do an amazing job. They always have my book. People can always buy it. It is cheaper than in the stores. And they link my book to others in a generally very good way. And they sell the vast majority of my books across the country.

The issue of price is a tricky one. It is similar to buying cheap food. I never advocate for buying cheap food. Something is just wrong about that. It makes for poorly managed land, poorly paid farmers and out poor health. I believe that books are different however. 'Growing a Farmer' that you paid $16.77 on Amazon is exactly the same book that you paid $24.95 for at the small bookstore. There may be repercussions in the publishing world because of their pricing, but the book is exactly the same.

So, I hope this clears things up a bit. Buy local if it is great. Buy not so local if they do a great job. Look for quality -- quality of product if it is strawberries and quality of service if it is something like a mass produced book.

Back to the Farm

I finally feel as though I am back at the farm after setting aside three months to work on selling my book Growing a Farmer. I flew out to New York City to appear on the Martha Stewart show on March 1st, then headed down to San Francisco to speak at a few book stores and meet with foodies of the Bay Area. The rest of January, February and March I spoke at book stores, dinners and events in Seattle, Portland and Bellingham. Although I continue to work on the book promotion, I am much relieved to be back at the farm, taking care of the cows, making cheese and getting the gardens ready for Spring.
With a bit of luck, I will find the time to get back to writing. The proposal for my next book is sitting on my desk, screaming for attention and I have ignored this blog for far too long. Time for Spring, time to get back in the swing of things.

If you missed the Martha Stewart episode, here is the link:
http://www.marthastewart.com/336007/septieme-hard-rolls

Growing a Farmer

My book -- Growing a Farmer has been officially released by WW Norton. It has been quite a month, seeing a copy of the book for the first time last month and now traveling around talking about the book.

The book launch party was this past Monday and was a great success. Two hundred and fifty people packed into Chase Jarvis' photography studio in downtown Seattle to have a glass or two of wine, a plate of tacos made with Kurtwood Farms pork and listen to me ramble on about small farms.

On Tuesday I was at Elliott Bay Books to read from the book to a standing room only crowd. It was the greatest thrill seeing old friends who had heard about the event. Next week I am off to Powell's In Portland and Village Books in Bellingham. Sure to be great fun at both.

Here is a quick video we made to promote Growing a Farmer. The cows take center stage.

It’s a Small World

I just got this email. I love it. It made me smile. Made me realize that it is a small world and oftentimes a difficult world and that little bits of glee help so very much at times.


I used to work at the Heinen’s on Route 306. I loaded groceries into cars. It was a shit job, because we were paid awfully (pretty sure I made $3.15/hr), had to belong to a union, couldn’t get any tips, and people were generally ungrateful.

I lasted about four weeks until I walked off the job in the beginning of my shift in the middle of a rainstorm (I’ve always assumed, obviously incorrectly, that I was meant to do something useful).

It’s the kind of thing where I’d prefer to say I never had to go back to that Heinen’s again. I can’t. I’m there at least once every time I come home. This time, I went back to look for some wine. Ohio makes some terrific wine, but fuck me if I can find any of it for sale besides versions of pink catawba, a style of wine so horrible that adding carbonated buttermilk would be a significant improvement.

So I looked through the aisles, couldn’t find anything I really wanted, decided to buy some mass market wine sparkling wine, and then discovered, of all fucking things, a picture of Dinah’s Cheese. On a magazine. At this fucking grocery store in a shithole town in Ohio.

It made my fucking day.

Eric

It's a Small World

I just got this email. I love it. It made me smile. Made me realize that it is a small world and oftentimes a difficult world and that little bits of glee help so very much at times.


I used to work at the Heinen's on Route 306. I loaded groceries into cars. It was a shit job, because we were paid awfully (pretty sure I made $3.15/hr), had to belong to a union, couldn't get any tips, and people were generally ungrateful.

I lasted about four weeks until I walked off the job in the beginning of my shift in the middle of a rainstorm (I've always assumed, obviously incorrectly, that I was meant to do something useful).

It's the kind of thing where I'd prefer to say I never had to go back to that Heinen's again. I can't. I'm there at least once every time I come home. This time, I went back to look for some wine. Ohio makes some terrific wine, but fuck me if I can find any of it for sale besides versions of pink catawba, a style of wine so horrible that adding carbonated buttermilk would be a significant improvement.

So I looked through the aisles, couldn't find anything I really wanted, decided to buy some mass market wine sparkling wine, and then discovered, of all fucking things, a picture of Dinah's Cheese. On a magazine. At this fucking grocery store in a shithole town in Ohio.

It made my fucking day.

Eric

Culture 2.0

This past Tuesday I was in the city. Seattle, that is. I needed to leave the Island for an appointment, even though it was the height of summer and I am loathe to leave my sunny spot of a farm. As I had a few minutes to kill, I walked over to the Frye Art Museum, a few blocks from my tardy meeting.

The Frye is a relatively unique museum. It was founded at the turn of the earlier century by a wealthy Seattle industrialist. Actually he sold a lot of pork products. His new found wealth gave him the ability to purchase a trove of European paintings: some quite good, others rather dull.

Upon his death he willed his home and art collection to be a museum open to the public. Only a century later did it become an interesting vibrant place. Now it is my place of refuge in the city; calm, quiet and filled with some lovely paintings.

I spent the mid day walking among a great exhibition. I relished the Sydney Lawrence views of Alaska, enjoyed the lush Bougereau and was rather bored by the lesser Renoir. And then I stepped back into the middle of room and pondered the message as a whole.

Here were a dozen beautiful paintings -- essentially no different than paintings created over the past thousand years. They represented our collective Euro culture. Scenes of daily life, the artists impressions of the world around us, snapshots into feels, emotions and vibes.

What I am most curious about is if this chapter of history has been eclipsed by our present digital, ephemeral world. I am trying to imagine an artist spending days, weeks, months creating a single, one off image. Even more unlikely is the idea that we will save and catalogue and display those unique, single images and cherish their vision.

We have moved to a time of scaling; of distributing information to the broadest possible audience, in the quickest amount of time. As I sat there in the middle of the gallery, the idea of a museum of our present generation looking anything like these fine canvases seemed distant and unlikely.

My pondering fiinished, I left the cool, calm Frye and headed back to the city, to the ferry and back to my verdant pastures.

Learning from the Beasts

It has been a dry summer even if it hasn't been particularly sunny and hot. The pastures have dried up and the grass growing is slowly down. As I have eleven cows that need to be fed daily, I have stepped in and begun to feed them hay, to save the remaining pastures from over grazing.

I have decided, however, to leave the three cows in milk in the pastures so that they can have the last remaining fresh grasses to eat. Seems like a good plan -- the milkers on the high quality pastures, the dry cows in the barn paddock eating hay.

The three milkers -- Baby, 4x4 and Dinah 2.0 -- think otherwise. Their ability to reason and view a complete scenario is limited. They are presently standing at the fence line staring at the rest of the herd locked in the barn eating last winters left over hay. They have been stationed there for the past four hours, bellowing loudly. They feel that they have been cheated; that they got the short end of the stick. In reality, they have ten acres to roam and find great, fresh, pasture grasses.

It is tempting to fall into the old axiom of 'the grass is always greener...' but I will try to steer away from that. I am myself often that milker standing at the fence line looking forlorn at those beasts locked in the barn. It looks so nice. It must be better than the pasture under my feet.

The thing that I have taken from this morning experience is not that you think it is better on the other side of the fence, but rather, even though you eventually learn the truth, it takes a bit of time to do so. The trio of milkers will eventually get tired of complaining and turn around and begin to forage for themselves. It will take some time though. They could have been eating their bellies full all morning long.

And so I am trying to appreciate the pastures beneath my feet. Sure, that barn looks great from a distance, but in reality it is the distance that makes it appealing.