Sara Ryan's Blog, page 14

Spinach soup with some other stuff in it.

There is not a picture because we ate it all. It is a somewhat tweaked version of this soup.

Ingredients:

All that spinach I shoved in the freezer because it was about to go bad; approximately 2 6-ounce packages of the prewashed kind

Four cloves of garlic

An onion

Some olive oil

A package of four mild Italian chicken sausages

Two 32 ounce packages of aseptic chicken broth

A handful of barley

Two lemons

Four eggs

Salt, pepper

Directions:

Puree the spinach & set it aside.

Saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil. When they have softened, add the sausage. We pureed the sausage, too, but you could just slice it up instead. And you could use any kind of sausage including veggie sausage. It would be fine.

Add the broth. You could use vegetable broth or mushroom broth instead of chicken broth. That would also be fine.

Add the spinach. Add the barley. Or not. It would be fine without barley, just sometimes a little barley is nice.

While you wait for the barley to cook, zest one of the lemons and set the zest aside. You will use it, but not right away. Then juice both the lemons. If you are not using barley, maybe just let the soup cook for a while anyway, especially if the sausage you are using is not the precooked kind.

Ok, now the exciting part. Get out a small bowl and crack the eggs into it. Pour the beaten eggs into the soup, stirring to make sure the egg strands don’t clump up. (If there happens to be someone else around helping you, it is nice for one of you to stir while the other pours. If not, stir with one hand and pour with the other. It will be fine.) The egg will cook almost instantly in the hot soup.

Turn off the heat, stir in the lemon juice & zest. Salt & pepper to taste. We ate it from mugs, but you could use bowls. It would be fine.

It will not be nice-looking if you are using frozen spinach like we did, because it will do that thing where it turns grayish-green. But it will be super tasty anyway.

You’d think this would be obvious.

So the other day I was reading this very excellent post by Laini Taylor over at Figment, and one of the things she recommends struck me with the force of a cartoon anvil (I’m paraphrasing):

Keep a notebook in which you write down things you love, things that spark your curiosity and compel your attention. From these things, you can generate story.

I’ve carried notebooks for years, but devoting one solely to this purpose had never occurred to me before. It’s not that I’ve actively avoided including things I love in my writing up til now — I’m not sure that’s actually possible for a writer to do — but to some extent, deliberately putting in stuff I’m passionate about felt like…cheating? Because it would make it too fun, not hard enough?

I know, it’s ridiculous when I say it flat out. But I’m awfully good at tying myself in knots where writing is concerned, and one of my many expert self-knot-tying techniques is to approach my work in progress with grim determination, like an assignment I have to finish, rather than with eager anticipation. (I’ve written about this before; Earbrass vs. GoshWow.)

And of course, of course, I know I’m not gonna be able to make it fun all the way through — this is a job, ass in chair, don’t wait for the muse — but goddamn if keeping a catalog of Stuff I Find ShinyAwesomeCreepyGorgeousGrimAndOtherwiseCompelling doesn’t sound, well, really cool.

Beyond Judy Blume: followup

There were a lot of other things going on last night — I would’ve been at the Sister Spit event if I could’ve been in two places at once — so thanks to everyone who came to Beyond Judy Blume: Identity and Sexuality in YA Literature!

Links for some things that came up during the conversation:

Malinda Lo’s post on the statistics of LGBTQ YA books published in the U.S.

Cooperative Children’s Book Center statistics on Children’s Books By And About People Of Color

Matt de la Peña’s appearance at Tucson High after the state of Arizona ordered the school district to disband its Mexican-American Studies program

The Children’s Book Council Diversity committee

Chimamanda Adichie’s  The Danger of a Single Story

And I think folks who came to the event would also find it worthwhile to read back through the posts & comments from Colleen Mondor‘s What A Girl Wants series.

Oh, and here’s the cover of the book I wanted to show everyone but forgot to bring as an example of something I read as a teen that changed my understanding of youth identity and expression…kind of a cheesy cover, right?

But it has vivid, passionate excerpts from the teenage diaries of Anaïs Nin, Maggie Owen Wadelton, Kathie Gray, Gretchen Lainer, Selma Lagerlöf, Marie Bashkirtseff, Nelly Ptaschkina, Mathilde von Buddenbroch, and Benoîte and Flora Groult – several of whom grew up to be noted writers.

 

Beyond Judy Blume Community Forum

Hey Portland area friends, you around 11/8?

Are identity and sexuality in YA literature relevant to your interests?

Then come to Beyond Judy Blume: an interactive community forum about identity and sexuality in YA literature with an interdisciplinary panel of educators and authors. Panelists include Sara Ryan, Michelle Roehm McCann, Vanessa F. La Torre, and Carter Sickels! (Link is to the Facebook description/invite.)

Hope to see you there!

Answering the downside

Scanning my comment spam, I ran across the following:

“This really answered my downside.”

It’s one of those bot sentences that hovers on the border of nonsensical and profound, and it made me want to figure out what “answering the downside” would actually constitute. Because there sure is a lot of downside out there, and I’d like to think we can answer it. I settled on “doing things that in some small way make bad situations better, or help prevent them from happening in the first place.”

So: Vote. Donate. And take care of others and yourself as best you can.

In which a conversational exchange provides a writing lesson

I’m home. The clouds are the right shape. I’ve given myself a day to readjust to my timezone and get myself back to the latest version of normal.

While I was away, from time to time I’d find myself talking with someone who, when I said I was from Portland, would react to that fact.

My favorite of these exchanges was with an employee of a miraculously good Middle Eastern restaurant in a small Ohio town. When I confirmed that it does, in fact, rain frequently here, she said:

“That’d be a terrible place to have kids. Mud all over everything! And you’d always be coming in with wet grocery bags…I couldn’t handle it.”

So, from that we can reasonably conclude:

– she’s a mom

– she does both the cleaning and the shopping for her family

– she’s prepared to pass judgment on the livability of a city based on a single feature.

Writing Lesson: you can reveal a lot about a character through their reactions to a place.

When the truth is told

If you were to judge strictly by this blog, you might assume that I have been on a nonstop writing marathon since my last entry, now that I have a designated room and everything.

This is, alas, not the case.

In fact, almost immediately after establishing my super sweet writing room, I skipped town, first to attend a conference about fifteen degrees off from the usual varieties I attend, and then — now — to go the latest version of the Undisclosed Location, my longstanding pointless code phrase for where I am when I visit family.

Also I have been sick, which made the conferencing more than usually exhausting, though definitely valuable nonetheless.

I’m still not quite at a hundred percent, still a little loopy on cold medicine. So I’m staring, semi-glazedly, at this screen and thinking about closing all my open tabs and opening Scrivener.

In the meantime, as I stare, please enjoy these two images from my mom’s 1961 Ohio University yearbook, “The Athena”:

A room of one’s own

Today is my first day with a room in which to write. It’s not my first dedicated writing space. But I’ve never had one with a door that shuts, until now.

I am not yet in the room as I type this. I want to reserve it for fiction, not blogging. In fact, I want to maintain the room as an Internet-free zone, and make a habit of turning off my laptop’s wireless before I go inside.

Until this past weekend, it was a guest room. A bed took up most of the space.

Without the bed, the room feels spacious all out of proportion to its square footage. A desk, a chair, bookshelves, beat-up file cabinets, my grandmother’s cedar chest repurposed as a window seat — and a wide, empty expanse of floor.

The view through the windows is mostly our neighbor’s roof and trees, but if I stand in the right place, I can see buildings on the other side of the river.

I’m going in.

In which Susan Fletcher is generous.

A little over a month ago I went to hear Susan Fletcher speak. I’ve been carrying around the handout from her talk, “25 Tips/25 Years: What I’ve Learned About Writing In the Quarter Century Since I Sold My First Novel” ever since, pulling it out of my bag every so often to reread.

I’m not going to give away all the tips, but I do want to share one that has been particularly resonating with me, which Fletcher herself got from Katherine Paterson. You can find Paterson’s essay on the topic in her collection A Sense of Wonder.

The tip: Be a good boss.

As a writer, of course, you’re ultimately your own boss. So what kind of boss are you?

Full disclosure: I have frequently not been a good boss, or even a mediocre one, to myself. I’ve often been the kind of boss who goes ballistic about my employee’s lack of productivity rather than helping her — I mean me — figure out ways to improve, and to set more realistic goals.

I appreciate the tip both because it inspires me to change my own behavior, and because I like thinking about it being passed on from Paterson to Fletcher to me and everyone else in Fletcher’s audience that evening. It’s generous.

And speaking of generosity: have you bought books for Ballou High School? I have. You should too.

Unforeseen consequences

Four days in a row, we overslept. It was mysterious; the alarm was set, the radio functioning.

This morning, I finally figured out why.

The alarm was properly set for 6 AM.

The time was set twelve hours off.

See, what happened was, last weekend I moved some furniture.

As an indirect result of this activity (I am, to put it mildly, enthusiastic when I start shoving furniture around), the clock got unplugged. When I reset it, I forgot to check the little red dot, the presence or absence of which indicates whether it’s AM or PM.

And okay, yeah, it’s a cheap digital clock. It is arguably not the greatest design.

But the impact of that mistake also made me remember that when we change things — in our houses, in our novels, in our lives generally — there are always going to be unforeseen consequences. Huh, so with the bed against the wall, there’s more space in the room, but you can also really see that stain in the carpet I forgot about. Wait, if that character is actually working for the enemy, I’ve got a lot of rewriting to do. Hmm, using a standing desk means if I wear high heels I’ll regret it.

Which does not, of course, mean we shouldn’t make changes. But when we do, we should remember that more will be affected than we think.