Stuck

On Thursday, March 7, I’m offering a free online workshop through Blue Stoop! It’s called Containing Multitudes: Creating & Corralling a Large Cast of Characters, and in it, I’ll share some strategies and resources I used in writing Heading North and guide folks through some generative exercises focused on creating distinct and memorable characters. Sign up here!

It’s March! I am never sad to see the end of February, but this year especially, I find myself looking for spring, metaphysically if not meteorologically. There are signs, my favorite of which is the return of baseball, and I’ve seen some barrel-chested robins in the yard already. But I also am trying to remind myself that I know better; spring doesn’t come here until well after the equinox. It’s winter, and it’s going to stay that way (metaphysically, too) for a while.

One very cold night two weeks ago apparently encouraged a squirrel to make its way into the exhaust pipe for our hot water heater.

When I woke up that Thursday, a week and change into a miserable bout of sickness, and turned on the shower, the water stayed cold. I bumbled downstairs to see the water heater flashing an error message and heard a noise in the pipe. Sure enough: small claws, skittering in a lot of sealed PVC. A mouse, we thought, that had dropped down an elbow and couldn’t climb back out.

Well, that explained why the cat had an epic meltdown at the basement door at 3 a.m.: Gil could hear it.

Finally, a tech came, sawed through the pipe, and found not a mouse but a grown squirrel.

The squirrel was liberated and returned to the yard, though not best pleased and a little woozy from being upside down in a pipe for hours. The pipe now has a rubber sleeve over the cut-away part of the pipe, so we can release any other creature that makes the same trip. There are also screens on the ends of the pipes (why those weren’t installed when the pipes were is its own mystery).

Anyway. It’s always something.

Carl Lavigne asked some me some fabulous questions about Heading North, and the wonderful folks at Necessary Fiction gave us a home for this conversation about sport and writing and having a body. (Necessary Fiction also featured Reneé E. D’Aoust’s insightful review of Heading North in early February.)

It being the nature of the newsletter, I like to share my making successes with you all: the fine yarns made from gorgeously dyed fibers, the custom-knit mitts that leave my fingertips free to type in my chilly office, the bread with the thick and burnished crust. And when there are failures, it’s nice when the failure turns out to be temporary and easy to fix, as in Moving the Beam. From those, it’s not so difficult to conjure some bits of wisdom or a metaphor I can apply to something else that interests me.

But it’s also a matter of honesty and accountability to share the failures when they happen. As a writer, I find failure to be a regular visitor, and as a writer, I understand it as part of the process. I’m sure there was a time when I didn’t feel that way, but I don’t remember it clearly, which means I made my peace with the draft-that-doesn’t-work a long, long time ago.

In knitting, I have ripped back my fair share of projects, too, because the fit was wrong or the gauge was off, and that has caused me very little angst, cosmically, over the years. That might be because I knit mostly because I enjoy the action of knitting, much more than I ultimately enjoy the finished product, on the whole. It’s nice to have the little fingerless gloves and the hat that fits my head, but I also have a few lace projects that are completely knit and are languishing in a box because now that the knitting part is done, I don’t feel much urgency to weave in the ends and block them. It truly is about the process for me, and that’s fine.

But in baking and cooking, botching something feels like a physical burn, and I properly botched one recently.

I set out to make the King Arthur Double Chocolate Focaccia when I finally felt like eating again. I can follow a recipe, and I know enough about baking chemistry to know what can and can’t be substituted on the whole, and mostly I don’t mess with anything structural, especially not the first time around. And King Arthur recipes are good, well-tested.

Not a lot of concern in diving into a focaccia recipe, honestly.

Which made it a total, excruciating shock when the bread wouldn’t come out of the pan. A very respectable amount of olive oil was supposed to ensure a good release, but no amount of shimmying or jimmying made a difference, nor did the delicate cut around the perimeter. What followed thereafter was a frenzy of hack-and-pry that resulted in me freeing 3/5 of the bread from the pan, mostly in inelegant chunks. I stood beside the pan and tore up crumbs to eat longer than is strictly dignified—it was very tasty—and tried to understand what I did wrong.

I still don’t know.

This is one of the reasons, perhaps, that knitting issues don’t vex me the way baking or cooking ones do. In knitting, the cause is always discernible: incorrect gauge, wrong fiber for the purpose, even the occasional pattern error (or pattern-reading error). In the kitchen, sometimes there’s just a little hex hanging over the whole thing. Making the same pan-seared + oven-roasted skin-on chicken thighs you make at least once a month in the same pan you always use? Just this once, the chicken won’t release from the pan. Following the same jam recipe and even have both the sugar thermometer in use and the chilled plate for the wrinkle test? Surprise: weird pectin curse means this batch will set like fudge or not at all. Or sometimes despite setting your raft of dough afloat on a little lake of EVOO it will run aground most horribly.

Next time, I’ll try lining the bottom of the pan with parchment (something I have never done with a focaccia) and I will likely bake it in a different pan (though there’s no reason the one I used should have been a problem). But, honestly, there will be a next time. Even the embarrassing shards I scraped up with a butter knife were rich and decadent in a way that transcends the sum of its parts.

This, I suppose, is where the conversation is supposed to turn on what I’ve just said I’ll do: try again. I know I will. It’s not even something I particularly struggle with (and I know it’s part of all of these ways of making). But the frustration of not-knowing why something isn’t working is the hardest part. I’ve had those feelings about writing, but it’s rare that the not-right-ness of the writing project is so stark and immediate. Culinary failures speed up the moment of reckoning, and maybe that’s the issue.

What are your favorite/least favorite kitchen disasters?

Reading:

In Baseball Literature, we’re reading The Cactus League. It’s my fifth time through the book, and every time I read it, I see new things about the way Emily Nemens has layered this story that impress and delight me. This time, I am finding Greg Carver and his part of the story arriving earlier and more intensely than I had remembered. Carver, a former top prospect whose career is being derailed by a botched elbow surgery, is in deep and compelling denial about being able to pitch through the pain. In a previous read, I was fixated on the unnamed sports writer whose perspective is threaded between the stories and who is set on unifying them.

Since we’re in the month in which the MLB season officially begins, it feels like the right book to share.

Heading North has been officially out in the world for four months! If you’ve read it, please consider leaving a review on Goodreads or Amazon or LibraryThing or wherever you like to tell people about books.