Cookbook Goes Public

Printed copies have arrived! Just Add Shoyu is filled with Japanese-Canadian recipes, foodie stories and gorgeous photos.

This hardbound cookbook is a community project, and for us, a family one. Vince shot many of the images including the pour shot at your right, and I co-edited the recipes and especially the stories.

Inspired by our fresh copy, I cooked up okonomiyaki pancakes yesterday, made with a sweet potato and cabbage batter. I'm a sucker for shredded and fried vegetables, and these pancakes went down real nice. Editing a cookbook can make a person extremely hungry, so this week I'm cooking all-Just Add Shoyu recipes all the time. Next up? The kids' favourite: gyoza (pork dumplings).

Copies of Just Add Shoyu are quickly disappearing from the Japanese Cultural Centre (www.jccc.on.ca) on Garamond Court in Toronto.

Latest Read: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing (Volume 1: The Pox Party)

M.T. Anderson pushes the boundaries of disturbing, fictional settings. In his novel Feed, he pitches himself into a technologically-perverse future. In Octavian Nothing, the author visits the past--the slave trade in 18th century America.

Octavian is a boy who lives with his mother at the College of Lucidity, where his tutors investigate whether their black subject can learn a classical education as well as a white one. When the men aren't lavishing Octavian with Latin and violin lessons, they terrorize him. Deliberately-inflicted smallpox ravages Octavian's home. He rebels against his owners and flees. Octavian Nothing is a coming-of-age horror, a perverse moment in history set to fiction, and a treatise on subjugation.

At my local library, Octavian Nothing is filed under teen fiction, but anyone who can stand the pain will appreciate the antiquated language and powerful story.

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Latest Read: Our Lady of the Lost and Found

Carrying a suitcase-on-wheels, the virgin Mary shows up at a middle-aged writer's home. Mary stays a week. The two new friends visit the mall. In the lingerie department, a mannequin models underwire bras. "Not my type," Mary says. "More suited to that other Madonna, the really famous one." Diane Schoemperlen's "Our Lady of the Lost and Found" (Harper Collins) also muses about Life, Time and History. I loved meeting the Virgin Mary, and although we don't have a spare bedroom, I would gladly shift my writing schedule to accommodate a visit, and could offer our Coleman blow-up mattress.

Since I'm working on a novel about a girl who invokes the ghost of Queen Victoria, I'm drawn to authors' anachronistic characters. Or maybe others' renditions only confuse the writing issues. Either way, when I read Our Lady, I felt like the Virgin Mary was in my livingroom--which in a way, she was.

Signpainting and Novelwriting

This week I caught my first glimpse of the book cover design for Signs of Martha, my novel coming out in the spring with Great Plains Publications. I emailed my publisher a scream of delight.

The novel features a misguided signpainter. A few years ago while I was first-drafting the story, I painted a sign for my kids' annual school fall fair. The school needed a sign. I needed an excuse to evoke the smells and actions of signpainting.

The school fall fair happens tomorrow, so the sign went back up and reminded me of the novel's early beginnings.

Writers' Retreat

Five writers of fiction-for-kids-and-other immature-people converged in a cosy chalet on Georgian Bay this weekend.

We could do that because of a Very Nice Woman who let us write, eat and sleep at her place. Thank you to her. Merci. Danke. You rock.

We are all women. We are mothers. We don't roar (much) but we like writing and oh the luxury of waking up, swinging one's Apple onto one's lap and putting in a few hours of tapping chapter 3 before breakfast.

We five covered almost every genre: historical fiction, fantasy, dystopian sci-fi and quirky realism. (Two of us were needed to cover that one.) At last year's retreat I outlined a new novel and this year I launched into its second major draft. The book starts starts like this at the moment:

The first time I'm haunted by the ghost of Queen Victoria is on the day of my boyfriend's funeral.

and goes on from there.

Thinking Inside the Box

What's up with this "thinking outside the box" business?

I like boxes. Boundaries. Edges. Challenges within limits.

Kids are back in school. Ask any teacher how much they'll get out of their students when they suggest working without limits. A few students will run free with their brilliant minds. The rest will stare blankly. Sigh and scratch their noses.

At the Toronto Ex recently, a performer folded herself into a box. Just look at her thumbs-up happiness. She likes boxes. The crowd went wild. They liked the limits too.

My current box is time. I'm combing through the final edits of Signs of Martha, due to my editor ridiculously soon. Like, this week. Soon I'll see a cover design. An image in a box. I'm nervously waiting.