Archive | November, 2012

Road Trip: Garlic Capital of the World

16 Nov

The first road trip I ever took to San Francisco was with my best friend on spring break during college.  As we were driving up from LA, she pointed out Gilroy, telling me that that’s where all the garlic is grown.  She told me they even had a garlic festival!

Here’s a bit about Gilroy, California:

Gilroy is well known for its garlic crop and for the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, featuring various garlicky foods, including garlic ice cream. … Gilroy’s nickname is “Garlic Capital of the World,” although Gilroy does not lead the world in garlic production. While garlic is grown in Gilroy, its nickname comes from the fact that Gilroy Foods processes more garlic than any other factory in the world; most pickled, minced, and powdered garlic come from Gilroy. 

Garlic ice cream?!  Uh, no thanks.  Although I have had olive oil ice cream, and it was amazing.  I do love garlic, though.  So naturally when my recent road trip from San Francisco to Monterey and back passed by Gilroy, I had to get out and take some photographs.

 

 

If Jack Kerouac’s road trip sustenance was all about apple pie, perhaps mine was about gaaaaaaahhhhhrlic!

If you have any good recipes for dishes with garlic, let me know!

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Road Trip: The Salad Bowl of the World

15 Nov

One of the reasons I was excited to travel the California coast from San Francisco to Monterey was because we’d pass Salinas.  John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac wrote about Salinas Valley.  Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was set in Salinas.  In 1960, Kerouac published a piece called “The Vanishing American Hobo” in Holiday magazine, which in part said:

I myself was a hobo but only of sorts, as you see, because I knew some day my literary efforts would be rewarded by social protection — I was not a real hobo with no hope ever except that secret eternal hope you get sleeping in empty boxcars flying up the Salinas Valley in hot January sunshine full of Golden Eternity towards San Jose where mean-looking old bo’s ‘ll look at you from surly lips and offer you something to eat and a drink too — down by the tracks or in the Guadaloupe Creek bottom.  

Kerouac also wrote about Salinas in Big Sur.  Even though it was in Selma, California (called Sabinal in the novel) — the Raisin Capital of the World — that Kerouac wrote about picking crops with “the Mexican girl,” Terry, in On the Road, I imagine it to be very much like Salinas.

The Salinas Valley, which begins south of San Ardo, and runs all the way to Monterey Bay, is known as “the Salad Bowl of the World.”  Most of the green salad produce you eat in the US comes from the Salinas Valley.  Named during California’s Spanish colonial period, Salinas means a salty lake or marsh.  The climate and growing conditions make the valley particularly fertile.

I saw signs promising 7 avocados for $1.  Do you know how much I pay for an avocado here in New York City?  $2 for a single avocado!  I was super excited — “stoked” to use the lingo I picked up while living in Cali (yes, people really talk like that there).  However, in keeping with the everything-going-awry theme of the trip, we did not get to make the stop because our bus had broken down earlier on the trip and we were already two hours behind schedule.  I took these photos from the window of the bus.

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10 Quotes for Writing When You’re Staring at a Blank Page

14 Nov

The blank page.  So full of potential, yet perhaps the most intimidating for some people.  If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo or just starting a new writing project, you may be facing the blank page wondering where to begin your story or what you even want to say.  Here are some famous quotes by authors who have come before us to inspire and encourage us when we’re faced with a blank page:

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.  ~Harold Acton

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.  ~Vladimir Nabakov

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it.  ~Jules Renard

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages. ~William Campbell Gault

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~William Wordsworth

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.  ~William Makepeace Thackeray

Write down the thoughts of the moment.  Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.  ~Francis Bacon

First thought best thought. ~Allen Ginsberg

Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller

 

How do you approach a blank page?

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She Threw Out Her Cell Phone and Packed On the Road

13 Nov

This young woman gets up to the microphone.  She speaks confidently but not in a rehearsed manner as she tells her story.   She’s been in New York City only for a few months now, since sometime this summer.  Unlike many people, she wasn’t intent on staying here.  New York City wasn’t her dream destination.  She had run away from home.  Her plan was to flee the East Coast for the West.  Californ-i-a.  She packed her bags and hit the road.  Along the way, she met a guy and became involved with a church in Manhattan.  She decided to stay.  She decided to share her story with others.

Afterwards, I approach her.  I want to know more.  Why had she left, throwing out her cell phone so no one could even get in touch with her?  Has she reconciled with those she left behind?  She answers my questions and asks about the book — Burning Furiously Beautiful — I had read from at the same microphone as her.  She tells me that of the few possessions she packed with her when she left home, one of them was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

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Reading Recap: I Got Upstaged

12 Nov

I was completely upstaged at my last reading.

The last time I read at a Storytellers event at The Penny Farthing, I read a portion from my memoir about growing up Greek American.  I decided to mix it up a bit this last time.  Since I’ve been working really hard these days on Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I selected a snippet from one of its chapters.  The reading itself went well.  A friend I hadn’t seen in forever surprised me by showing up, so that was super encouraging.  And one of the other performers shared their own travel experiences before it was my turn, so that was a nice little connection.  All of the performers — poets, musicians, monologists — were incredible.  Everyone was so talented and their artistry felt so effortless.

But we were all upstaged when the last poet takes to the mic.  The entire evening the MC had been playing the role of standup comic with eye-roll-inducing pick up lines.  When she announced the last poet, he started reciting a love poem to his girlfriend.  Then he stepped away from the microphone and opened a little box.  The room went wild!  His girlfriend went wild!  He had proposed!  It was like something out of a movie.  So sweet, so beautiful.

He stole the show.

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Jack Kerouac and NaNoWriMo

8 Nov

Jack Kerouac claimed to have written On the Road in three weeks.  That’s only partly true.  My coauthor, Paul Maher Jr., and I tell the less marketable but more realistic story in Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Part of the way Kerouac wrote his novels was to sit down at a typewriter and write, write, write til the story was told.  There’s something to be said about this.  The intensity of writing a whole novel in a short time span drives the work.  It’s so easy as an author to get distracted, to start something and never complete it, to get so caught up in getting syntax correct that the story never moves forward.  The “backspace” button on the computer keyboard is all too familiar to most authors, struggling as self-editors.  We want to get it right.  Sometimes this happens at the expense of getting it done at all.

While many would disagree, some authors believe that the key to writing is to push out a first draft.  Once the backbone of the story is there on the page, the author can always go back and edit it.  Most times, the editing process is the longest and most arduous.  Whole sections are moved or deleted.  Characters are killed off if they’re not important.  Diction is tightened.

I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — this year to gain a better sense of what Kerouac went through when he wrote his books.  Call it “method writing” to understand the subject of my book better.

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Election 2012: Hunting with the President

7 Nov

 

Hunting the Grisly:

One of the nation’s most beloved presidents, Theodore Roosevelt’s connection to nature continues to be seen today: 150 national forests, five national parks, and fifty-one wildlife refuges are a result of his conservation efforts.

I wrote an introduction to this Nook book.  It was interesting following the topics relating to the environment during the election debates.  Considering the plight of our wildlife and natural resources, I’d say we have more work to do.

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Election 2012: The White House Landscape Artists

6 Nov

In honor of the upcoming election, here’s a bit of trivia:::

The grounds at the White House in Washington, D.C., were designed by Calvert Vaux and Andrew Jackson Downing.  While Downing was American, Vaux was British.  After Downing was killed in a steamboat accident (I kid you not), Vaux went on to work with Frederick Law Olmsted.  Together they designed Central Park and Morningside Park in Manhattan and Fort Greene Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Is it any wonder that he cited the Transcendentalist author of “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, as one of his influences?

I took a group Church Hopping to the Church of the Intercession in Washington Heights, part of New York City, where Calvert Vaux was commissioned to to do landscape work on the cemetery grounds.  You can read about it here.

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Election 2012: Colonel Washington and Me

5 Nov

 

Part of what I love about being a writer and editor is getting to work with other authors who have important stories to tell.  Jeffrey E. Finegan Sr. was one such author.  He wrote a children’s book called Colonel Washington and Me: George Washington, His Slave William Lee and Their Incredible Journey Together!  The book, beautifully illustrated by Preston Keith Hindmarch, tells the story of the founding of the United States through the eyes of one of the slaves of our first president.  It’s a story I certainly don’t remember hearing when I was a child, and Finegan brings light to how George Washington struggled with the issue of slavery.  I was enlisted to write a curriculum for the book so that teachers, librarians, andhttp://www.colonelwashingtonandme.com/for-teachersparents can ensure children comprehend the subject matter and also to provoke dialogue for further reflection.

Do you talk to your children about the election and about politics?

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Election 2012: Church of the Presidents

2 Nov

As we gear up to Election Day 2012, one of the main considerations voters have is: how do the candidates’ religious beliefs influence their leadership?  Do their economic plans care for the widows and orphans?  Will extending money to those in need unfairly take away the rights of others to the money they worked hard for?  Do their healthcare plans help all people?  What do family values really mean?  Do they look out for the poor in spirit, the disenfranchised?  Do they protect all people’s rights?  Do they try to play the role of God?  Does their faith make them weak?  Do their beliefs do more good or more harm to the country?  How should we vote when it seems that upholding one of our values leads to hindering one of our other values?

A few years ago, I visited what’s become known as The Church of the Presidents.  St. John’s Church Lafayette Square has had every president of the United States come through its doors since its first service in October 1816 was held.  You can read about it in my Church Hopping column on Burnside Writers Collective.

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