Robyn Ryle's Blog, page 8

Madison Monday: After Chautauqua

I wish I could be writing here about how fabulous Chautauqua was this year. Or about the Wild Ponies at Red Bicycle Hall, the first in the RiverRoots concert series. Or the Madison Area Arts Alliance showcase of local artists that took place at Little Golden Fox. Maybe the music at Thomas Family Winery or the wine-tasting at Rembrandt’s.

But I came down with a cold Friday night, so all I can tell you about it is the purse I bought down the street at Old Courthouse Days on my short walk from home to the Dollar General to purchase ibuprofen. It’s a testament to how full and busy downtown Madison was this weekend that I could participate to some extent without having to walk more than a block.

My experience of all the fun this weekend was filtered through our open windows as we listened to folks on their way to various events. There’s a kind of pleasure there, sitting on the couch and watching the people go by with their shopping bags and their festival food.

This sign at Nice Shots! on Main St. today sums it all up

After a good sleep last night, I’m feeling better this morning. Well enough to teach my classes and spend the afternoon at the coffee shop. Well enough to enjoy the day after Chautauqua, which is it’s own kind of delight. As a friend said today, “It’s good to have our town back.”

Which is, of course, not to say we don’t enjoy sharing our town with all the visitors. Of course we do. You can’t help but swell with pride a little when you watch visitors walking up and down our streets, pointing at the architectural details on our buildings and houses. Or admiring our fall decorations. Pausing along the river to enjoy the slow glide of a barge down the river. We’re happy to overhear conversations in which folks imagine what it might be like to live here and know that we’re lucky enough to know the answer. We’re pleased to share everything that’s wonderful about Madison with out-of-towners.

But perhaps you’ll understand that’s it’s also nice to have the place all to yourself again when the company goes back home. Walking to the coffee shop this afternoon, I could smile at the signs that were still there—“Bathroom for paying customers only.” I didn’t have to fight through crowds or stand in line. There was no worry about whether my parking space would disappear while I was at work. We could all put on our comfy clothes so to speak. It’s just us again for now, until the next event comes along.

It’s hard to appreciate the stillness without the chaos that comes before. Life is like that. The noise helps you to appreciate the quiet that comes after.

Quest for the perfect baguette: part one

I’m on the quest for the perfect make-at-home, without a professional bakery oven, baguette recipe. What I’ve been using is a bread machine recipe, which is okay. I’ve figured out how to make the crust nice and brown by squirting water into the oven. But the inside is still dense and, well, bread-y. It’s like a good baguette outside hiding a regular loaf of bread inside. A really good baguette should be full of big holes and should fight back when you bite into it.

There’s a lot I don’t understand about baking bread. I bought a book once but there was too much math. In the end, it didn’t tell me what I wanted to know–how to make chewy, crusty bread. In other words, I’m a novice, so forgive me in advance if I get a lot of things wrong.

I Googled how to make crusty, chewy baguette and started from there. This weekend, I tried Saveur’s four-hour baguette. This recipe uses ice cubes in a cast-iron skillet to re-create the steam that a professional bakery oven would use. They also call for a shorter loaf, 14 inches instead of 24-30, so you can conceivably fit it into your oven.

The bad news: it really does take four hours. No cutting corners here, though I was very happy to have my standing mixer with a dough hook for the 10-minute knead they call for. Ten minutes doesn’t sound like that long until you spend it kneading dough.

The recipe uses volume measures for flour instead of weights, which is fine. I don’t have a kitchen scale. You can get by without if you have a sense of what the dough is supposed to feel like, and that’s my complaint about this recipe. I ended up with a pretty sticky dough and I wasn’t sure if that was how it was supposed to be, or if my flour was just really full of moisture.* I added more while it was kneading and it turned out okay to work with.

DIY baguette couche

For the last rise, you basically create your own baguette couche** with parchment paper and dish towels rolled up underneath. It was a little awkward, pleating the parchment paper and tucking the towels underneath, but I think that would get easier with practice.

I was worried that the three baguettes wouldn’t fit on my baking stone, which is a 14 inch, round pizza stone. But it worked fine. The longest baguette drooped off a little, but it all turned out okay.

I’ve tried cold water in a pan in the oven before, as well as a hot brick and many other desperate measures to create the right amount of steam. The ice cubes in the cast-iron skillet seemed to do the trick.

I’ve also tried multiple slits instead of one long one before putting the loaf in the oven. With other recipes, I ended up with a weirdly misshapen baguette, which I imagine had to do with how the crust was forming. This recipe called for three, 4-inch cuts at a diagonal and this time it worked.

The holes! The holes!

So, the verdict? The baguettes were gorgeous on the outside. My husband immediately took a picture. They looked quite narrow, so I wasn’t sure what they’d be like inside. They weren’t as full of holes and pockets as I would have liked, but were still a definite improvement over the bread machine recipe. The crust was nice and chewy. The taste was quite good. If you have four hours to spare, I give this recipe an A. The upside is that it makes 3 baguettes, which means you can eat one, freeze one and give one away (if you’re so inclined).

*In humid conditions, flour absorbs water, which makes it more dense. So a cup of flour measured by volume isn’t always the same amount of flour depending on the weather, etc. Baking is tricky.

** I don’t speak French, but a baker’s couche can be canvas or a basket or sometimes metal. It’s a form you use to proof bread, or to give it a shape while it rises. Apparently, it also means diaper in French.

Five years

I got married five years ago today. I was thirty-six. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m still not sure I know what I’m doing now.

I never really wanted to be married. It wasn’t something I dreamt or fantasized about. I only played house when the other kids made me. When I was on my own I played upstairs apartment. Sometimes it was above a bar. I lived in the apartment alone.

This gorgeous photo courtesy Heather Loehr

As far as I could tell, nothing interesting seemed to happen to married women, but it’s good to know now that I was wrong about that. It’s good to know that maybe for me, all the most interesting things happen when you’re married.

It’s hard to write about marriage without seeming maudlin, especially if you like being married, which I do. Especially if you have a happy marriage, even though I’m not really sure what that means. No marriage is happy all the time. Marriage is a hard thing sometimes, but I think all the best things are.

When I look back, I feel like I stumbled into my marriage, blind and half-asleep. It felt like taking a risk, but maybe it always is.

I guess after five years, here’s what I’d have to say to my thirty-six-year-old self: “Good call. You made the right decision. You made the right decision because with each passing year, you feel luckier and luckier about the person you picked. A little bewildered, but in the best possible way. You’ve learned things about yourself you probably never would have on your own. You’ve learned that you like to be hugged, tightly and with great frequency. That it’s okay to store the drinking glasses right-side-up instead of upside down. That you like to sleep with your foot pressed against someone’s calf. That one of the best ways to enjoy a city is with a late (or early) afternoon pint at the bar.

“You’ve learned that you can seek comfort and receive it. It’s okay. You’ve learned that needing someone doesn’t make you weak. You’ve learned that the stability and comfort of two-ness makes possible more things than you ever could have imagined on your own.”

On not submitting

I haven’t submitted any new writing to a magazine or journal since mid-June, which is just three months, but seems much longer. I didn’t arrive at the decision to stop submitting after long soul-searching and contemplation. I felt burned out. Uncertain about exactly what I was doing with my writing and exactly what I wanted to be doing with my writing. My husband said, “You should stop sending stuff out.” Around the same time, I saw Kathy Fish say something similar on Twitter. I thought to myself, if Kathy Fish is doing it, it can’t be a bad idea. So I stopped. Here’s what happened:

– I stopped checking Duotrope and Submittable daily. Okay, let me be honest. I stopped checking Duotrope and Submittable several times a day. I stopped checking them hourly. Yeah, it was like that and to stop doing it felt good. Every few weeks I would think, hey, maybe I should check Submittable. And I would. And then I’d move on.

– Eventually, I buckled down and got to work on something longer—a novel. I fell into a rhythm. It felt good. It felt really good. I looked forward to getting out of bed every morning and writing. I didn’t feel trapped and miserable while I was sitting in my chair. I wasn’t thinking constantly that I just wanted to be done. I realized that eventually I would be done, and that would be good, but it would also sad, because I was enjoying what I was doing right then. That was enough.

– I finished a draft of a novel. Another one. Maybe it’s the one. Maybe it isn’t. I’ve finally resigned myself to the idea that I’m going to have to write more than one novel in order to learn how to write a novel. That’s okay. I’m learning. I think I did a better job on this one.

– I took an online flash fiction class with Kathy Fish which was amazing. Truly. The exercises we did had me writing stuff that made me say, “Who wrote that? Did I? Wow.” We were amazing. Everyone in the class wrote blow-you-out-of-the-water flash. Really. If you have a chance to take a class from Kathy, do it.

– Because I took the class, I now have some pieces that, with some editing, I could start sending out. I’ve finished the novel draft. The school year has started back up, which makes working on something longer a bit harder. There’s a lot of discontinuity when you can only squeeze in an hour every few days. So working on smaller pieces should be ideal, but…

– I think maybe my attitude towards submitting has changed. The things I wrote in Kathy’s class—some of them are quite good. But “quite good” doesn’t feel like enough anymore. I’ve only just started thinking about this, but at the moment, I feel like unless it blows me away, I’m not really interested in sending it out. I want to ask myself why I’m sending something out. Is it the very best it could be or just good enough? Is it something that needs to be out in the world, or just a step to another publishing credit? And if it’s the latter, should I just maybe keep it to myself?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. I’m not sure exactly what it means that I’m asking these questions. For now, it feels okay and that’s enough.

Madison Monday: Madison Main Street Loft Tour–It’s What’s Up With Downtown

If you’re like me, at some point you’ve looked at a building in downtown Madison and thought, “I wonder what the upstairs looks like.” For the first time this October, you’ll get a chance to find out through the Madison Main Street Loft Tour. It’s what’s up with downtown. The tour happens on Saturday, October 3, from 10-4 pm.

You might think of the space above the first floors in downtown Madison as our great under-utilized resource. Converted into apartments, the second story can allow business owners to generate helpful extra income from rent. Both baby boomers and Millenials are increasingly attracted to walkable communities, and nothing says walkable like a second-story apartment, where you can literally walk downstairs and find yourself in the middle of restaurants and shops. Second and third stories also make great spaces for businesses that have a little less need for front-window appeal–service providers like law offices, real estate agents, consultants, tech companies, etc. Really, the possibilities are endless.

The Main Street Loft Tour gives folks the opportunity to take a look-see at second and third stories at varying stages of renovation and repair. Some spaces are raw and undeveloped while others are fully and luxuriously finished. The tour takes place on the same weekend as Hanover College’s homecoming, so hopefully parents and alums will take advantage of the chance to enjoy a different view of Madison.

Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at Village Lights Bookstore or from me (robynryle at gmail dot com).

About “How to Preserve Food for the Winter”

It’s September and the windows are open and the air coming in is just cool enough to make me contemplate a sweater or fuzzy socks. Fall is creeping in and that seems like a perfect time to write about my essay in the Little Fiction/Big Truths Nomfiction Anthology, “How to Preserve Food for the Winter.”

 

Fast Facts

First draft written: August 2013

Number of drafts written: 4-5

Number of rejections: 3

From submission to publication: 4 months

The idea

Well, not suprisingly, I was cutting up eggplant rounds to roast and freeze. One of them rolled under the oven. I thought about the incredible satisfaction I feel when I can or freeze or in any other way take food I’ve grown and store it away. Smug, is how I would describe it.

The first draft of this essay was much shorter; it was just the eggplant. I submitted it to CARVE for their poefictiontry category and got a personal rejection, which was pretty exciting. I sent it two other places and then kind of forgot about it.

Then I saw the call for the food anthology at Big Truths and I knew I wanted to write something for that. I tried an essay about poor man’s soup, one of the first things I ever learned to cook–my comfort food. I kept working and working at it, and the deadline kept getting closer and closer. I was about to give up when I looked at the tiny little eggplant essay. I think it was probably 2-3 days before the deadline when I got the idea to add a few other vegetables and make it a segmented essay. A kind of list.

I picked the three vegetables I feel most strongly about (does that sound weird to feel strongly about vegetables?)–tomatoes, beets and corn. I wrote the draft, edited it a couple of times and then sent it in.

My mom

I really do call my mom every time I can tomatoes to ask how long it takes. Partly this is because I really can’t remember and partly this is because I want to talk to my mother. I feel certain there’s no one else on the planet who truly understands the satisfaction that comes from sound of a quart jar sealing. My mom taught me how to can and someday perhaps I’ll teach my own daughter. When I get to the end of this essay, I tear up a little every time.

The anthology

The essays in the Nomfiction Anthology are amazing and delicious. Really. Every single one. You can order a print version of the anthology here, so go do that, now. The only thing better than eating food is reading about it.

The end of the summer, 2015

Back in my office this week, a sure sign the summer’s almost over

It’s been a long, strange summer and on Monday, it’ll officially be over for me as classes start back up. I spent the first part of the summer at loose ends and in a bit of a funk. It felt like it was only in July that I was really able to settle into some kind of good routine, and of course, by then the summer was more than halfway over.

Nonetheless, some things got done. I finished a first draft of a mystery novel I’m pretty excited about. I finished my chapbook for WhiskeyPaper Press and that’ll be coming out in late October. I got the go-ahead to start a 3rd edition of my textbook, Questioning Gender: A Sociological Exploration. My entry for the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality is finished. My story, “How to Identify Birds in the Wild,” which originally appeared in Luna Luna Magazine, was accepted for the Among Animals Anthology at Ashland Creek Press.

I did a lot of reading, finishing my reading goal of 90 books for the year in August. Many of those books were mysteries, and I’ll be sharing some of my favorites soon.

I also attended the Midwest Writer’s Workshop in Muncie again this year, where I got do do an amazing short story workshop with Cathy Day.  Getting to work on my query with Janet Reid, the famous Query Shark (who was so incredibly nice and not at all shark-like) and the mystery boot camp with Lori Rader-Day were other highlights of the conference.

I was pretty intensely noveling for the last two months of summer, but now that’s done, I have every intention of getting back to blogging a bit more. Fingers crossed. You’ll definitely be hearing more about the chapbook as we get closer to its release.

Until then, happy end of summer! Think of me on Labor Day, when I’ll be teaching a new batch of college students.

Re-post: Dear NFL: Women are people, too

I wrote this post in November 2010, when Michael Vick was making what looked like might be his comeback with the Eagles. Now it’s 2015 and he’s been signed by the Steelers, and people, oh, the irony! Now the whole question of are dogs or women more important is neatly contained in one NFL locker room. Well, not really, but it raises some interesting questions. Is the Steelers’ most odious quarterback the dog abuser or the probable rapist?

I’m a woman with a Ph.D. in sociology and I love the NFL. I realize that makes me a fairly small demographic and so the commissioner, the networks, ESPN and NFL Network are not really that concerned with my own personal perspective. But there are other women out there who like the NFL for more than just the opportunity to wear tight-fitting jerseys, and so surely I’m not the only one who is wondering about the odd message the NFL and the media who cover it seem to be sending us about the value of dogs versus women.

With the Eagle’s in the national spotlight again with this week’s Monday night game, I find myself subject to yet another round of what I’ve come to call, “the parade of the penitent negro.” Is Michael Vick a different person after having been in prison? What did Michael Vick think about while he was in prison? Doesn’t Michael Vick’s skin seem a little bit lighter since he got out of prison and professed the horrors of his sins?

Let me say at the outset that I think dog fighting is a fairly sad method of entertainment and something that I would in no way endorse. I also think that Michael Vick’s participation in dog fighting was probably part of a larger spectrum of potentially destructive behaviors which he was engaged in at the time, something he himself has admitted in one of his come-to-Jesus, post-prison interviews. I’m very happy for Michael Vick in what seems to be his much healthier current lifestyle, but also very sad that he seemed to need to go to prison to get there. At least that’s the implication of the narrative the sports media seem to be selling us.

But here’s my real question: Why is it that Michael Vick has to spend 21 months in federal prison for dog fighting while Ben Roethlisberger gets a 4 game NFL suspension for being accused of sexually assaulting two women? And why is it that the sports media treat Vick’s dog fighting so very seriously while they completely ignore Roethlisberger’s sexual assaults? The answer is both complicated and infuriatingly simple. We live in a society where it’s easier to prove dog fighting than it is sexual assault, and where I imagine the rates of conviction for dog fighting are, in fact, much higher than those for sexual assault. Roethlisberger was never charged with sexual assault in either case which made it into the press, and some might argue that this tells us something about the strength of the case these two women had against the quarterback. But there’s another reality for women which tells us that reporting a rape to the police might not actually be the best way to go. Estimates tell us that of all sexual assaults that happen, only about 60% are reported to the police. Once a rape is reported, there’s about a 50% chance that the assailant will be arrested. If you get to trial, there’s a 58% chance of a conviction and with a felony conviction, a 69% chance that the assailant will spend time in prison. To sum up, among the small percentage of assaults that are ever reported to the police, there’s about a 16% chance that the assailant will end up in jail (http://www.rainn.org/get-information/...). This might explain why at least one of the women who accused Roethlisberger went to a civil court rather than a criminal court with her charges. And none of these statistics take into account the very real trauma of going through a criminal trial as a victim of sexual assault, let alone what that might be like when the assailant is the Ben Roethlisberger. So it’s harder to send people to prison for sexual assault, period.

It’s also harder to send a white man to prison for pretty much anything than it is to send a young, black man. I don’t know if Ben Roethlisberger has any dogs on the side, but if he did, he probably wouldn’t be going to jail for it. When a young black man, and especially a black athlete, gets in trouble in the United States, you can almost feel a collective sigh of relief from white America as all our deep suspicions about the way “they” really are get confirmed in the most public of ways. Michael Vick ended up in jail because no one in our society can completely escape the ways in which race has become so indelibly woven into how we see the world, and that includes law enforcement officers, lawyers, judges, NFL commissioners and sports commentators. Almost 10% of all young black men are in prison in the United States, and while African-Americans make up 12% of the total population, they’re 44% of the prison population. Numbers like those weigh the scales pretty heavily in favor of Michael Vick finding himself in prison for a crime that as disturbing as it might be to many people, didn’t actually involve causing any physical harm to a human being.

Those are the complicated answers, and you could go on teasing out all the intricacies of these two men and their particular situations, because life is complex. But the answer to the second question is sadly simpler. Why is there no interview when the Steelers play in which Ben Roethlisberger admits to the error of his ways, and professes to be so sorry for what he’s done? Why do we not get to see James Brown or Mike Tirico or Chris Berman looking so very serious as they discuss Roethlisberger’s sins and transgressions? Why does no one say about Ben Roethlisberger, as Rich Eisen did about Michael Vick, that some people will just never cheer for him again? Because to the extent that you believe sports and the coverage of sports represent our cultural beliefs, our culture doesn’t really give a shit about women and what happens to them. If you watch coverage of the NFL, and I do quite a bit, the cause of Ben Roethlisberger’s four game suspension would be a complete mystery to you. Or it might be colluded within a cloud of Roethlisberger’s “wild ways.” Oh, that Ben, he’s a wild one. Boys will be boys, right? No need to make atonement for that. No need to apologize. No need to say a word.

I am a woman and I really love the NFL. I’m not talking I love to drink beer on Sunday’s or have something to talk to men about. I think there are moments when this game is really a beautiful thing to behold, even when my own team is, in fact, among the very shittiest in the league. Even with the brutality that happens on the field. But I have to ask myself, what does it mean for me to love an institution that really doesn’t seem to give a shit about me?

Madison Monday: Undeniably Indiana

Madisonians and other Hoosiers, here’s your chance to tell your uniquely Indiana story and have it preserved for all time as well as sharing it with a larger audience.

Indiana University Press is celebrating the Indiana bicentennial in 2016 with a book that is as unique as our state. Next year, we will publish Undeniably Indiana, a crowd-sourced book written by the people of Indiana for the state of Indiana. We invite you to share offbeat, interesting, and unusual facts and stories about things that could only happen here. Submissions will be accepted until September 1.

Share your story by posting it to the Undeniably Indiana Facebook page, here, by September 1. If you want to see examples of the kinds stories they’re looking for, check out Gorilla Terrorizes Thorntown and Indiana is…

I know Madison is chocked full of stories, so let’s get writing!

What I cooked in June

June is the month of waiting in the garden, at least for me. The show-stoppers of summer vegetables–tomatoes and sweet corn–have largely not yet arrived. I spend a lot of time pacing the garden, looking for signs of the first ripe tomato. In the meantime, there’s always squash. And squash. And more squash. If there’s a theme to what I cooked this month, that would be it.

Cold curried yellow squash soup

Southwestern Summer Vegetable Soup. I really love making up soups. It’s very hard to go wrong. There’s lots of room for corrections and adjustments. I was in the mood for something tomato-y, kind of like the Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable Soup I used to eat every day after school, but better. What I had on hand: summer squash, green Bell peppers and jalapenos. Also, the tomato juice my Mom cans every summer.

I sauteed some onions with the jalapeno and a pepper. Added some cumin. Then the squash. The quart of tomato juice and a little bit of vegetarian boullion. Secret ingredient: a dried chipotle pepper to give it a little smokiness. One summer squash down, two hundred forty million left to go.

Zucchini Tater Tots. Surprisingly, the zucchini plants are lagging significantly behind the yellow squash this year in terms of production. Still, while I was in North Carolina for five days, several zukes swelled to the size of baseball bats. I think the English prefer their zukes this way (they’re called marrows or courgette over there–not sure what the difference is). But a large zuke is really only good for shredding, so I decided to try this recipe. I bought a mini-muffin pan just for this, a potential solution to how to convince our daughter to eat squash. These were really good, though I would probably double the recipe next time. They’d make perfect appetizers for a dinner party and would go well with Siriacha mayonnaise, because everything goes well with Siriacha mayonnaise.

Zucchini Bread. Always. My mother’s recipe makes two loaves–one for your family to eat on and one to give away. One of my favorite things about making zucchini bread is deciding who will get the second loaf. Spread the zucchini love.

Caramelized zucchini with herbs and feta. This is from my cookbook bible, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. Have a vegetable and you’re not sure what to do with it? Deborah knows, and it will be delicious. Here, you slow cook the zucchini so it caramelizes, then toss it with herbs and feta. This dish convinced me that zucchini does, in fact, have a taste, and under the right circumstances, it’s delicious.

Cold curried yellow squash soup. Made this one up again after getting the general idea with a few online recipes. Some friends brought a similar dish with zucchini to a dinner party and it was so good. Easy enough to do with yellow squash, too. In the past, I wasn’t much of a fan of cold soups. But I’ve been converted to chilled soups of the creamy, curried variety. Two more yellow squash down.

Tupelo Honey Cafe Pickled Beet Salad. So pretty much the best restaurant in the whole entire world is Tupelo Honey Cafe. On my annual pilgrimage this year, I bought their cookbook. With the last of my mom’s beets, I made their pickled honey beet salad. You slice the beets very thin and don’t cook them at all. Just let them sit in the marinade overnight. Yum and a nice change from yellow squash.