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New Feature: A Series on (Private) MFA’s

Over the next few months, I’ll be asking a number of writer friends to answer (approximately) 5 questions about MFAs–whether they had MFA’s, or not, and how their MFA’s were structured, and how they would design their own private MFA. Again, I want to stress that I’m not against traditional MFA’s. But I am fascinated by the current debate about them. So this feature is about curiosity and learning about differently structured programs,and thinking about what what one gets from an MFA, or not. And it lets me introduce you to some of my favorite people and writers.

Mark McGurl’s recent article in The Los Angeles Review of Books, by the way, is an interesting order ventolin no prescription reflection on MFA’s and creative writing. Among the questions he answers are “Why does everyone hate creative writing programs so much?” and  “Are writers ashamed of being writers?” But because I read so much contemporary fiction, I really appreciate what he has to say about contemporary novels:

“..I think what is going on in these indictments of the mediocrity of contemporary fiction is a kind of unacknowledged mourning. What is mourned is not good new novels, of which there are still plenty—of which there may be more than ever—but the passing of a culture in which the novel was more central than it is now…”

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Reflections on the private MFA, year 1 (part 2)

(In which I continue to reflect on Year 1 of the “private MFA.”)

Have you submitted anything for publication?
Yes! And happily, it was accepted, by a kind editor with very encouraging words. I know this is not how submissions usually happen, but it helped. I will post more details when the piece comes out.

What writing projects are next?
Well, the memoir. I’m in a strange place with it right now, because it’s about grief. And while I turned to it as a way to process grief, I have found that I don’t need it in the same way at the moment. Or, perhaps there’s too much grieving to do in this moment. Or, both. There are ten pieces altogether so far, all in different stages of being.

I’m beginning to study other memoirs which are not quite so linear, such as Kim Severson’s wonderful read Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life. I just finished Caroline Leavitt’s novel Pictures of You, partly about the death of a parent. I think I will need to read Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir The Long Goodbye, as difficult as it sounds, because it is close to the market that I want to reach. And I would like to read Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, for its work on memory.

I think I want to begin to write some longer essays next, ones that I can send out to other literary magazines as excerpts. I plan to create a work timeline by the end of this week.

Aaaand, I’ve got a historical novel in mind, or a series of linked novellas. It is a teeny seedling of a novel, scarcely more than an idea, a sketched outline and a hundred words, but it is incredibly exciting to me because I have never written fiction before (unless you count the fictional territory of some of my poems). I am not even sure what I am doing yet. Because it’s a historical novel, there’s a ton of research that I’ll need to do. But I am happy to be moving into this unknown territory. That’s the ultimate challenge, where I will feel the most stretched, and perhaps I would never have arrived at this space if I was in the tracks that a traditional program would have provided (moving from nonfiction to fiction).

Writing a novel strikes me as the ultimate leap of faith for me and my sense of my writing self. I look forward to being a memoirist, don’t get me wrong. But because I read ventolin over the counter novels and they nourish me like nothing else, I want to be a novelist. Alexander Chee, a former student of Annie Dillard’s, writes beautifully about one of her pieces of writing advice: go to the bookstore, and find the place where your book would go, and place your finger on the shelf to mark the place for your own book. I’ve done this a couple of times. It’s exhilarating, and terrifying. But that’s as closest to the heart of what I want to do as I’ve ever come. Where do I go? I go to the fiction section, the literature section, of the bookstore.

What would you like to see happen with this blog?
I never quite know who’s been reading the blog, except my husband, and my mom, and maybe the one or two kind friends who have subscribed via RSS. And I don’t want to become the person who always assumes that others have read her or contacted her or tried to keep in touch via the blog (e.g., “Oh, well, then. I thought you already read this week’s post.”).

Nevertheless, some of the best blogs that I read, that take advantage of the blog format (rather than a private journal) are also spaces to create community. So I’d like to see more dialogue here. It’s a “private” MFA, but of course it is also public and in the ether. It can be a lonely space—sometimes you feel as though you are speaking to an entirely dark theater, and you have no idea what or who’s in the audience—and since I’m venturing into the unknown with my career, I’d like to hear more from and about the folks reading here. Some company, if you will.

I’d also like to ask others what their own private MFA would look like, or has looked like. (I have asked a few kind writer friends, who have already agreed to do this. I’ve received my first set of responses already, so look for that soon! I’m very excited about this feature.)

And I’d like to post more frequently, creating a more consistent space for readers, and a clearer throughline for the stories that are here.

Readers: your turn!
Who are you? What draws you back to this space? And, what would you like to see happen here? Anything else you’d like to say, constructively? Comments, as always, are open.

(Part 3 will be a partial reading and rereading list for the year.)

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Reflections on the private MFA, year 1 (part 1)

Approximately one year ago, I wrote yet another menu status update on Twitter. “You’re making me hungry!” my friend Shauna wrote back. Confession time for me: “I have always been auditioning to be a food writer.” “Well then,” she decided. “It’s about time we got you a blog.” A few clicks and keystrokes later, and my husband Josh set up this space. Thanks, Shauna and Josh.

It’s the first-year anniversary of this blog, and thus the first year of my own private MFA. Since reflection and self-assessment are part of any good writing program, I thought I’d try that out here.

Why the private MFA, again?

Well, honestly, at first it was kind of a joke. You know, my own private Idaho—although, truth be told, I’m more of a B-52’s girl. But I wanted a space to practice writing. And I’m not against traditional MFA’s, necessarily, but I’m just not in the right kind of space to do one right now. I don’t want to be away from my family (and my two little girls) right now, for a residential MFA. A non-residential MFA may be an option later. But financially, those are not an option at the moment. I do know that I want to apply to some short residencies like these, if our finances and arrangements become more stable.

Any drawbacks or rewards to the private MFA?

I would have had to specialize before I applied to an MFA program (poetry, fiction, nonfiction). Here, I’ve played with poetry, interviews, personal essay, memoir, literary mixtape, food writing, love letters to my family and my husband, graduation address. A lot of nonfiction and memoir, but I’m glad I also got to play.

Any assignments are my own. Both drawback and reward.

I wish I had more structure towards a larger project. However, that’s something that I can remedy, so I’m going to work on a plan and timeline next.

Sometimes I wish I had an advisor, a reading list, a set of classmates, a set time when I was supposed to be working on my writing. A space where writing is my primary job.

But I do have an advisor and reader in my husband Josh. He is usually my first reader, and my best reader. He’s an artist, too, but he’s a composer, so we’re able to have wonderful art-related, creative life-related conversations.

I do have a reading list—it seems rather scattered, but I have certainly read more new fiction and nonfiction this last ventolin online year than I have since graduate school. Certainly, many writing programs ask their students to read a great deal. And I have. The next post will be my reading list.

How do you think your writing has progressed?

At the beginning of the year I think wrote a lot of elliptical narrative in order to cover things up, rather than to expose them. There was a lot of throat-clearing, or waiting around to get to the point. As the year went on, I tried to reach for the guts, the heart of the post, and write towards that moment. As a result, I think my voice has gotten stronger, more confident, less apologetic. Last year, I wrote about my overuse of parentheses: they meant me ducking under my own words. I don’t think I use parentheses as often, or for the same purpose anymore, at least. I use commas a lot more now. I think that overall my writing’s moved towards the lyrical, the litany, the urgent. I use commas to connect, and I use commas to convey energy. I have noticed that the more I write and speak from the heart—not towards sentiment, necessarily, but towards the guts of the emotion or the moment—the stronger the writing becomes.

I noticed a common trajectory in my blog posts—linear chronology moving to epiphany–and tried to move away from using the same structure all the time. I think this shift marks the beginning of my experimentation with plot and linear narrative. Some of the trajectories are linear, while others are cyclical, and still others spiral towards their end.

And I’ve remembered what it is to be in “the writing zone.” I felt it when I went to speak at Evergreen, where I read the essay that’s coming out soon. (More on that in the next post.) It’s the space where I’m writing with both mind and heart absolutely committed to the work. I’m not there most of the time. I’d like to be there more often.

However, this is not to say that the rest of the time and words are wasted. I have found that I need all the other writing (good, bad, and in-between) to get me into the zone. I don’t know if being in that zone all the time is actually sustainable. It is consuming and exhausting…and still, incredibly satisfying.

Next up: reflections, part 2 (Have you submitted anything? What writing projects are next? What have you read?)

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What I would say (a love letter/address to African American Studies)

This month, I was asked to address the graduating students from the African American Studies minor at my university. While I declined the invitation with a great deal of regret, I also thought a great deal about what I would say. So I wrote my remarks anyway, and decided to post them here.

Good afternoon.

My name is Tamiko Nimura, and for the last seven years, I have been a professor of English and African American Studies here. First, I want to congratulate every student receiving their degree this weekend. It is a great privilege to be able to speak to you all, and because I understand that we have greater celebrations ahead, I’ll be brief. (At least, as brief as I can: an occupational hazard of being a professor is that we have a very hard time being brief.)

English professors may like the language of metaphor and hyperbole, but I am not exaggerating when I tell you that African American literature and culture changed my life. Studying African American literature taught me about wholeness: the responsibility, as Toni Cade Bambara puts it, that comes with being well. It taught me about agency: what it means to have the right to speak, choose, act freely in this world. It taught me about interdependence: the reciprocity and interconnection embedded in the principle of Ubuntu. It taught me about Sankofa: the necessity of looking back in order to move forward. Studying writers like Leopold Senghor taught me that reading and writing could be revolutionary acts. Working with the words of the great activist Bernice Reagon taught me almost everything I know about coalition: the necessary but difficult act of building communities across and through difference. African American studies broke down the barriers that the rest of my education had created for me: the barriers between language and action.

Because of my study of African American literature, I was able to visit the 6th graders down at Jason Lee Middle School here in Tacoma, and tell them what being an English professor has meant to me: Being an English professor has meant that I teach people about reading and writing, and how those two acts can help us see the world differently.

In his great novel Mumbo Jumbo, the African American writer Ishmael Reed (who was one of my college teachers), talks about the importance of the loas, or ancestral spirits. He talks about the enormous arrogance, the tangible dangers, of believing “that the world can be interpreted through a single loa.” Interpreting the world through only one lens, or one way of being, Reed argues, can be dangerous for the soul. In my study of African American and American ethnic literatures, I have found an interdisciplinary space to merge my interests in history, identity, and literature.

Now, this celebration is really about you and your accomplishments. But if you’ll forgive a brief personal story from my undergraduate years: I saw Reed’s words put into practice when I wrote my senior thesis at UC Berkeley. I was writing about writers with experiences like mine: third-generation Japanese Americans, who were buy cheap ventolin inhaler trying to represent the impact of their relatives’ imprisonment in camps, during World War II. I realized very early in the writing process that I could not write about the literature without including some historical context. The characters, their motivations, and their silences, simply did not make any sense without the external knowledge of internment camps.

As stunning as it sounds now, this was the first time that I had considered including historical context in an undergraduate paper involving literary analysis. I went to my thesis advisor, and described my quandary. “I think I have to include some history,” I stammered. “I think you’re right,” he replied. “But–can I do that?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “Now, not everyone in this department would let you do that, but I agree with you that it’s necessary.”

Because I was writing a paper about silence and memory and history, I was struck by the terrible irony of my situation. If I had had a different thesis advisor, I would have been told to suppress a whole chapter of American history, including my own family’s history.

It’s in that space— the space between reading, literature, history, and the mechanisms that we use to hear and suppress certain voices—that my desire to study African American literature was born. That’s the space where we put several loas, several ancestral spirits, several ways of seeing the world, into practice. That’s the dynamic intellectual and emotional space of African American studies.

Like some of you, perhaps, I do not know just what the coming year will bring me. I have just finished my last year teaching here. What I do know is that African American literature and culture, in all their power, can help to keep us steady through the uncertainty and focused on the service of social justice.

You see, perhaps the most powerful concept I learned from my study of African American literature is the concept of the call and response. As I understand it, the call is part greeting, and part exhortation to action. If I say “Good afternoon,” in the call and response context, I would expect a “Good afternoon” in reply. The energy of your response is supposed to match my call. And during our time together, we would build community: my speech would also be, in part, your act.

So I hope that those of us who are leaving can see our leaving not as a time to rest, but as a call to action. There are far too many places of inequality, of injustice, of iniquity, in the world for us to rest.  The world demands a response.

African American Studies challenges us to be part of the co-creation, the response.  And African American writers have opened the spaces for our courage to enter. As the extraordinary poet and activist Audre Lorde writes: “When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

Thank you for your time, and my congratulations to each and every one of you.

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Another card

“Mommy! Mommy! I made something for you!”

As we pick up my kindergartener from school, she hands me a white envelope. I open it. There are about a dozen puzzle pieces that she’s colored by hand, in all the primary Crayola colors of the rainbow.

There are no corners, so I start to group the different colors together. She stops me. “No, no, Mommy. The greens don’t go together! I made it a tricky puzzle.”

It takes me a while to piece the puzzle together, with her help. Together we discover that there’s a piece missing, which sends her to her backpack. Several of the pieces are peeling away from the cardboard backing. There’s another piece or two missing, and we’re not sure where they are. But that’s all right. The puzzle forms a heart, and in the middle, she’s written, “Mom I Love You.”

Now that I’m a mother, I have a hard time accepting what the media sells us as “good Mother’s Day presents.” Brunch? Sure, if your mom likes brunch. But what if she likes picnics better? Flowers? Same deal: sure, if she likes flowers. But what if she’d rather be gardening and planting new ones in her own yard instead? Where are the top-10 suggestions for the Mother’s Day presents that ask you to honor what your mother likes, or what she likes to do?

As for me, I know that I will always love the presents that my daughters make me, with their own hands.

When I was a little girl, I remember making a Mother’s Day present for my mother. Two green plastic strawberry baskets and yellow paper and string. It was, ahem, a Ms. Pac-Man figure (yes, it was the 80s). Out of strawberry ventolin inhaler price baskets? You kind of had to be there to see it. And while my mom didn’t love, much less play, that video game, I loved the feeling of making something for her. “You’re so creative!” she exclaimed. And I glowed, hearing her say that. Together we had made snowflakes to tape onto our glass sliding door, and we hung ornaments made out of cutout Christmas card circles. So the act of making a present for her was to say: “I like to make things. And that’s because of you.” True, it might not have honored exactly what she liked, but I like to think that it honored the spirit of what she liked to do, as a parent.

I don’t know how my daughters will remember my mothering, but I do know that making things, and making things together, is one of the main things we do in our house.

There’s a poem that I’ve been thinking about obsessively, for the last several days. There are various versions circulating around the Internet, but all attribute the lines to the Persian poet Hafiz:

Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth, “You owe Me.”
Look what happens with a love like that,
It lights up the Whole Sky.

When I found this poem, my eyes prickled with tears of recognition. That’s the very best of radiant maternal love.  I hope I can manage to pass on something like this kind of love to my daughters. That’s what my mother’s love has done for me. That’s why I’m a writer.

Mom, I still like to make things. And it’s because of you. Happy Mother’s Day.

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A few updates

I’m coming up on the first-year anniversary of this blog, so I’ve got a few things planned, including a site redesign. In other related news:

• I had a lovely time speaking to the middle schoolers. I’ll write about it in an upcoming post.

• I submitted a piece of writing to a literary magazine, my first submission to a literary magazine since high school. Submitting something for publication must be part of an MFA, right?

• I have also thought a bit about small ethnic markets, such as this one. There will be a post ventolin generic name coming up about this topic, too.

• I wrote more about my yoga practice for my yoga studio’s newsletter. I’m not exactly sure why this makes me happy, but it does. Maybe because I do not look like the stereotypical yogi, and I like the idea that maybe it will encourage other atypical yogis to try it out.

• I was asked to read a manuscript in progress, by a writer I admire. It was an honor and a pleasure.

More to come—there’s a lot going on here. Thanks for checking in.

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Assignment #4: How I eat (A letter to E)

Dear E,
How do you eat? you asked in an e-mail message last week. How do you establish a form for this part of your life?

I have written versions and drafts of this to you in my head, upon waking in the middle of the night, on the mat at yoga class, during my run along the grassy median in my neighborhood. Places where spring’s starting to poke out of the ground in crocuses, swell the budding tips of branches, blossom in the cherry and plum trees. And I have written it at my laptop, which is usually next to the kitchen.

I have to begin, I think, with our neighborhood grocery store. It’s less than a mile up the road from our house, and it is our version of Cheers: everybody knows our names, or at least our faces. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that we go there almost every day. We get our double iced Americanos and caramel macchiatos there, our daughters have had birthday serenades and we’ve eaten family cups of gelato there. We’ve made friends there. So it is partly a place where we find community.

Sometimes we do plan our meals for the week, but more often it’s a day or two in advance. Partly because of the store, and because of its proximity, planning what we’re going to have for dinner is one of my everyday pleasures. It is where most of our disposable income goes. We don’t go out to movies very often anymore, we don’t even go to bookstores and music stores very often. But we do allow ourselves the pleasure of our grocery store. And, though we don’t have a year-round farmers market in our city, we do live within five miles of three farmers markets when the season begins. We try to go there even in the rain and cold.

Breakfasts are usually staples on hand. My latest breakfast obsession is peanut butter granola. (Before this it was toast with jam; before that it was peanut butter and jelly toasted sandwiches; before that it was smoothies.). Homemade peanut butter olive oil granola, Greek honey vanilla yogurt, sometimes with a spoonful of homemade rhubarb compote, blackberry jam, or cinnamon-vanilla applesauce. Usually in a glass ramekin, sometimes layered in a jam jar and smuggled in my backpack to school.

Lunches for me are usually leftovers from the day before. Sometimes I will pick up a bagel and cream cheese, or a salad, from one of the campus cafes.

Dinners, it must be said, mostly involve my cravings, and I usually crave some sort of Asian or Italian meal. Sometimes I’ll read about a recipe, and want to make it (parmesan-squash cakes). Sometimes I’ll think about what we have on hand already, and should use up soon (French toast for dinner, or Greek salad because of that stack of pitas in the fridge). Some days I’ll think that we need to have a vegetarian meal (spinach-feta lasagna), because we’ve had a lot of meat lately (kalbi) or that we need something warm because it’s been cold outside (minestrone) or something soothing because one of us has been sick (sinigang). Or something very quick that’s both savory and comforting (adobo).

It’s funny that you mention diet restrictions because we do have them, but I haven’t thought about them in a long time. Josh and C and M are lactose-sensitive, so nothing with cream or cow milk. We try to eat things that taste good to us, and are good for us. We’re not always successful with that balance, but we try to balance it out over a week.

But most of the time, it is about craving. And time: what can I make in a half hour, an hour, sometimes two hours, that will fit my mood and the contents of our refrigerator and the constraints of bathtime for our little girls and our workload for the evening?

I’ve been thinking about your questions, for other reasons, as well. Like you, I have experienced a difficult event recently, though I hope you understand that I am not trying to equate them. I have thought about why you would ask your questions: how do you eat? what enables you to eat? What kind of control do you exert over this part of your life, and why? And I think you might be asking, at some level, how do you find the appetite? In the churning wake of trauma, how do we reach for the hunger that is, by definition, an urge towards life?

And I can tell you about weeks when I ate purely for fuel: a handful of almonds behind my closed office door, a circle of leftover crust from the girls’ morning toast, a few pieces of cold pasta at dinner. I know that I am lucky that I had eating options. But most of my energy went towards getting out of bed, walking down certain hallways, stubbornly clutching the cool mask of a normality that I hope I never have to forge again. How the hell to reach for anything else?

Miraculously, appetite returned: at first as tentative as the signs of spring, then inexorable as the tide, luminous as the full moon, seductive as the inside of a peach. If we ever get to spend more time together, I hope I can tell you how. Maybe I’ll have figured it out by then.

See, my mind keeps circling back to your very first question. You asked how I eat. I’ve talked about how I prepare to eat, and what I eat. All of that pales compared to the family that shares my table nearly every night. With them, I eat gratefully.

And I think you know something about this.  Where and how and why I eat are actually the same…with love, with love, with love.

Hugs, Tamiko

Readers: how do you eat? (See my previous post for more of E’s questions to get you going.) E and I would love to hear from you.

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Assignment #4: How do you eat?

My friend E wrote me this message last week, and with her permission, I’m going to reply here in a later post. But I wanted to post the questions first, in case you all wanted to play along.

How do you eat? More specifically, do you plan menus? Do you cook most of your meals or eat out? Do you eat according to what you want at any given buy ventolin online moment or use some other system to guide you (dieting, health concerns, the fact that the people you eat with love fried chicken, whatever)? If you primarily cook at home, how do you plan those meals? How far in advance do you plan/shop/prep? In other words, how do you establish a form for this part of your life?

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Playing the soup card: sinigang

Say it with me, first: sinigang: see-nee-gahng. Still with me? All right. Let’s cook.

Out of the three Filipino dishes I make regularly at home, this dish is my true comfort food. It’s what I make when I am sick, when I have a cold. Or when someone in my house has a cold (hi, Josh!). I remember drinking it in mugs, just the broth, when I was little. I made it tonight because I’m sick, and I needed some warm food. I’m still reeling from last week’s news. And though our daytime temperatures are up in the fifties, it’s not quite warm enough yet where we can say spring is finally here.

How to describe it? Oh, boy. My version is a lemony, tomato-based, onion/garlicky beef stew with a lot of greens. What’s in it? You remember how I was saying that recipes for adobo vary? Well, the recipes vary even more for sinigang. As far as I can tell, here are its basic elements:
• Sour broth (usually, flavored with tamarind or calamansi or sinigang bouillon cubes/mix)
• Vegetables (usually, at least, a water spinach called kangkung, and green beans)
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Meat (usually, fish, or pork, but sometimes beef and chicken)
I remember my grandma’s version with clear broth, and  some kind of white fish. My mom’s version was pretty different, so even in one generation, the dish adapted itself to ingredients more readily available in American supermarkets. My mom’s version used lemon juice rather than tamarind for the sour flavor, and she used garlic powder instead of fresh garlic, and she added spinach instead of kangkung (water spinach).

As with so many Filipino dishes, the taste will vary according to the region of the Philippines, as well as individual household preferences and availability of ingredients. To be honest, it varies so widely that I’d be scared to order this dish in a Filipino restaurant because a restaurant version would probably be pretty far from this version. I’ve never tried a mix or powder for the same reason. I’d be hoping against hope for familiarity and comfort, picky eater that I still am.

For years I’ve been playing with the recipe that my mom used, and I think I’ve finally got a version that I can post here. It’s highly adaptable (much like Filipinos themselves), and while some folks may quibble about cultural authenticity, I do love the flexibility. Recently, I asked some of my Pinoy/Pinay friends about a recipe substitution: “Think I’ll get my half-Pinay card revoked for using collard greens in my sinigang? Or will I get bonus points for fusion cuisine?”

And in generous, freespirited, life-loving Pinoy style, here’s what my friends answered:
“J: Filipinos are eminently practical. Use whatever you have on hand, sister!”

“K: Filipinos are known as the great assimilators. Kudos for the fusion!!! I’ll be right over. ;)”

“A: i don’t think you can get your pinay card revoked. it’s the kind of card that’s irrevocable. the sinigang sounds yummmmm”

And it is. Chicken soup for you, maybe, but sinigang for me, please.

The recipe: Beef sinigang

Notes
The number of variations and substitutions here is going to drive a precise home cook crazy. If that’s you, sorry. If you are a cook-by-instinct-and-palate cook, feel free to play a bit.

I am somewhere in between these two extremes of home cooking: I like to read a recipe, and then follow it until I reach an ingredient that I don’t like. Then I substitute or add different elements that sound appealing to me. I usually follow the methods more closely than the ingredients. You should feel free to do the same. If you want something buy ventolin 4 mg close to what I described above (lemony, tomatoey, garlicky/oniony), you won’t want to substitute or delete any of those ingredients, and you won’t add vinegar to make the soup sour.

If you want to make a vegetarian version, I have heard from one friend that it works, but I haven’t tried it myself. I think that a lot of flavor comes from the meat, though, so if you do not use meat, then you might consider using vegetable broth. Let me know how it turns out?

Ingredients
• About 1 tablespoon of olive oil
• 1-2 medium onions, roughly chopped into 1/2” pieces
• About 3-4 medium garlic cloves, minced
• About 2 tablespoons of kosher salt (or, salt to taste)
• 1 small can of tomato paste (if you use a no-salt-added paste, add more salt to soup)
• About 2 pounds of stew beef OR top round roast, cut into 1” cubes
• About 3 bunches of greens, chopped up into 1″ pieces. You can use a combination of winter (chard/collards) greens and spring greens (spinach). My mom used spinach. If you use spinach, cut the stems into bite-size pieces. Because they are tender, I prefer spinach and Swiss chard, or a combination. I used Swiss chard because it’s a darker leafy green and therefore more nutritious. You can also, as you saw above, use collard greens, though. Just be sure to cook all greens until they are tender.
• About 2 cups of water to start (then add about 1-1 ½ more later)
• About ¼ cup fresh lemon juice OR calamansi juice or (in a pinch) bottled lemon juice
(Tonight I used Meyer lemon juice and some frozen calamansi juice. It was just right. Meyers and calamansi are sweeter versions of supermarket lemons, though, so if your fresh lemon is quite bitter, you might add just a teaspoon of sugar to correct the bitterness. You want it tangy and sour, but not unattractively bitter. Dare I say, sassy, but not bitchy? And if you use bottled lemon juice, you might need to add a bit more, because it is usually milder than fresh lemon juice.)

Method
1. Over medium-high heat, sauté the onions in the olive oil until nearly translucent. Then add the minced garlic and sauté for about a minute. Do not let the onions or garlic burn.
2. Add the tomato paste and salt to the onion-garlic mixture and mix well. Then add the water. Let all of this come to a simmer.
3. At simmering point, add the beef and then more water to cover. Then cover the pot and let the soup simmer for at least an hour to an hour and a half over medium-low heat. Do not boil the soup at high heat, or for a long time, because the beef will become tough and chewy. Use low, moderately slow heat.
4. Next, add the chopped greens. Three bunches looks like a lot, but they will wilt and cook down quite a bit. Simmer the beef and greens for about half an hour more: longer if you are using greens with tougher stems (chard, collards) and less if you are using more delicate greens (spinach).
5. When the greens have cooked down, and the stems are tender, add the lemon juice and stir. Taste and add more water or salt or lemon juice if necessary. Simmer until the beef is fork-tender.

Serving suggestion
We eat it, as we often do, in a cozy earthenware soup bowl, over a mixture of cooked white rice/quinoa. If you are sick, and don’t quite feel like eating, you can ladle the soup straight into a mug and let the lemony broth soothe your throat.

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Tsunami: What the Waves Leave Behind

When I am dreaming, it’s usually my body’s emotional response that wakes me up. Dreams have shaken me awake out of joy, out of fear, out of desire.

But last night an image woke me up: Hokusai’s “Great Wave at Kanagawa.”

You probably know Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” or have seen a version of it, somewhere. It’s one of the most famous Japanese woodblock prints in the world, and it’s nearly two hundred years old. I think there’s even a copy of it in my favorite local Japanese restaurant. I loved this painting for a long time, just being attracted to the vibrant blues, the serene curve of Mount Fuji in the distance, the perfect arc of the wave.

But for an embarrassingly long time, I never saw the boats—perhaps because I only saw reproductions of the print from far off, or in small-scale reproductions. A lifelong reader, I’m used to seeing things so clearly in my mind’s eye, but I’m appalled at how often I must train my physical eyes over and over again. How could I overlook the fishing boats, the rows of bodies straining in unison against that wave?

Once I saw the boats—and there are three of them!— the entire painting changed. The wave, like Stevens’s jar, “took dominion everywhere.” The foam at the crest of the waves started to reach like claws, or thorns, or teeth. Terrifying.

It’s been hard not to think about this image lately. As far as I know, none of my family members have been directly affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or their aftereffects. Yet I have been stunned and overwhelmed, like so many others, since Friday. After seeing this footage, or this footage, it is hard to write anything or even read very much. A picture of a mother carrying her toddler on her back can undo me. It feels disrespectful to write about anything else, and even for me (but not for the Japanese) to want to return to anything ventolin inhaler like normality.

And yet, as a literary critic, I have to admire the narrative tension of the woodblock print itself.  Literary critics call this “in media res,” beginning in the middle of the action. A wave itself is narrative: with calmer waters moving into larger waves, then breaking, and receding. The boats and the humans in Hokusai’s painting add a patina of fear to the entire scene, and become story: what will happen to the people? Adding all three elements together, the wave, the mountain, and the boats, we wonder: when will the waves break, and where, and how? When the waves recede, what will they leave behind?

There are two steps in my usual response to tragedy and grief: first, to picture the worst-case scenario; and second, to detach. I don’t say this with pride. Recently, because I’ve been writing this book, and because I want to be more available for people in my life who might need help, I have tried to deal with grief differently. I have tried to stay available for them.

None of it is easy. But at the center of this impulse, I hope, is my urge to connect humanity: the reason why I read, the reason why I write. What will happen to us? When will the waves break, and where, and how?

Perhaps most importantly, Hokusai’s Great Wave forces us to ask: what should we do with the nearly unbearable tension of such a terrible moment? While our impulse might be to resolve that tension, Hokusai instead asks us to stay there for as long as we can bear it. As the Japanese people know, and as my Issei and Nisei ancestors knew, grace and knowledge and strength can arise from that space.

Please consider making a donation to Japan earthquake relief efforts, if you have not already done so.