The Joy of Writing Short Stories and Eating Eggplant
It’s been great weather but moving into drought. I am hoping for rain tonight, but it’s always chancy out here. Lots of times, storms peter out over the Bay before they ever get to us.I have been writing again after interruption – two new poems and a new short story. I am enjoying writing short fiction almost as much as I enjoy writing poems. It’s a whole new set of ideas and way of thinking.Climate change is impacting us directly. Not only have we been moved from zone 6 to zone 7, but we are experiencing a difference. Many more bugs and weeds. For the first time in all the decades I’ve lived here, a superabundance of eggplants, both Oriental and Italian. I even gave a few away for the first time ever. Tomatoes and pole beans and peppers, sweet, hot and frying, all producing in a frenzy. But we got almost no peas this year. It was too warm for them too early. Complete disaster on beets.Friends we give tomatoes to gave us a bluefish yesterday. I am thinking how to make it. I think baked in a sauce. Puck the Abbysinian will be very interested. Since he is James Beard reincarnated but much slimmer, he takes a great interest in cooking and likes a good sauce. Cats are so very individual. The brown brothers, the two Burmese, would never consider touching human food. They never beg. They chow down but are never piggish. Puck on the other hand will try to steal what we don’t give him. He sits and watches the rotisserie chicken go round and round, better than kitty TV.Once reason I like writing short stories is that it’s more like writing poetry. I can produce a draft in two or three days’ work and then revise as much as I need to. Writing a novel is like getting married to a subject for years. Short stories are more of a quick affair. If an idea doesn’t work out, I’ve lost a week or so. With a novel, by the time I know it isn’t succeeding, isn’t cohering, I’ve lost six months.I am still not sure what to do with some of my very old stories. I read and like them, but they are dated. I play with the idea of including a section in the PM book that fences them off as period pieces, which is what they are. The ones from the middle years of writing them don’t feel anachronistic. They still work.Getting ready starting today for the festival in Ithaca, N.Y. September 8th. I made my program today, although of course I may decide to change it before then.This is the floodtide of harvest. But we are just about done canning, although still dehydrating and freezing some. Also I just started chive blossom vinegar. One of my favorites. I made a new vinegar this year, triple lemon: lemon balm, lemon basil and lemon verbena. It came out terrific. Used it on green beans last night with mushrooms and red onions.