My Year in Lists: 2011

Reading

• Final count: 47 books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry!
• Most fun: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I read twice! I also read the first five sequels in the Mary Russell series in a matter of months.
• Biggest surprise: Eat, Pray, Love. I can admit that I found it profoundly moving when I read it last spring. Sometimes books live up to their hype.
• Greatest accomplishment: Vanity Fair. It was looooooooong. Fortunately, its awesomeness was proportional to its length.
• Highest quality to quantity ratio: Winesburg, Ohio. Written about small town Ohio in the early 20^th century, Sherwood Anderson's tiny little collection of short stories was phenomenally beautiful, sad, and honest. I have no idea why I left it collecting dust on my To Read bookshelf for so long.
• Best poetry: Sleeping Preacher. 
• Fictional character I was most in love with: It’s a tie between Mary Russell’s Holmes or Mr. Thornton from North and South. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this!)

Television

I was all about period dramas this year. My favorites were

• The absolutely brilliant Downton Abbey from Masterpiece Theater.
• Granada’s beautiful 1980s interpretations of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. 
• The VampireDiaries. (Hey, there’s enough Civil War in there that I’m going to count it!) 

All three of these were superbly written and beautifully produced and addictive as all get out. Thank you, Netflix!

Music

What didn’t I listen to this year? Here’s a playlist of a few of my favorite songs from a few of my favorite artists this year. Most of these albums didn't come out in 2011, but they've all spent a lot of time on my iPod in 2011. 

Real Life

This year was tumultuous, at best, and while I was never bored, I was never quite at ease, either. 

The good:

• Three good friends got married and another got pregnant for the first time. 
• I got a new job that I love and am consistently challenged by.
• I traveled to Denver and Winfield and Manhattan, Kansas had a great time with friends at all three locations. 
• I did a lot of yoga and played a lot of softball and even did a bit of belly dancing. 
• I started a book club with my friends.
• I submitting my writing for publication again for the first time in years, and had a poem accepted for publication sometime in 2012!

The bad:

• I had an icky bout of bursitis that kept me on the couch for a good chunk of the fall. 
• My university went through a substantial restructuring process, and not everyone made it out unscathed. 
• My mom was in the hospital twice and recovering from surgery for a good part of the year.
• My grandma was in the hospital for a stroke and had to move to a nursing home with her husband in the fall.
• My grandpa was in the hospital twice, first for a hip injury and again for blood clots a few weeks ago.

The confusing: 

• Even awesome new jobs can be terribly stressful, baffling, brain-addling things.
• I set aside my first savings for retirement and taught myself about a bunch of grown-up stuff like building credit and buying cars and health insurance deductibles. Yay responsibility?
• I spent a lot of time thinking about Occupy Wall Street and the recession and global warming and the crimes at Penn State. The future seems more complicated and challenging than it ever has before.

When I look back on this year, I think that I’ll remember it as the first time that I realized that whenever life gets harder, sadder, or scarier, it also gets more interesting, gains a richer texture, becomes more precious and vital in its complexity. Life is a bit like beer: yes, Bud Lite (i.e. college life) is easy to drink, but it’s the bitter complexity of the hops that makes an IPA (being a 28-year-old) memorable. 

I’m glad I was here for 2011, whatever challenges it’s held, and I’m glad I got the chance to drink it to its dregs. So if you're lucky enough to live in the Midwest, go find yourself a Boulevard Single-Wide IPA and have a happy new year. See you again in 2012!

AWP 2010

This year, AWP did for me exactly what a professional conference should do: it made me feel refocused, motivated, and, in the words of Gary Snyder, famous poet and environmental activist, "way stoked."

In years past, I've spent a lot of time in AWP's panels on writing and pedagogy. The AWP panels are one hour and fifteen minutes long, and they cover a wide range of topics. You can hear talks there on anything from charming magazine editors and teaching poetry in high schools to discussing trauma in a workshop setting and writing effective sex scenes.

This year, I didn't force myself to sit through too many panels. I went to three talks (one on on-line journals, another on writers collectives, and a third on careers in the literary arts), one reading (Anne Waldman and Gary Snyder), and I went to the book fair. The panels ranged from so-so to fascinating, and Gary Snyder was a let-down while Anne Waldman lived up to her reputation as a "human dynamo" with a highly theatric reading of her poems. And, yes, she was wearing one heck of a green and fuchsia scarf!

 Anne Waldman

But, as always, the book fair was my favorite part. It's always an overwhelming/disheartening/inspiring experience due to its size: I would guess there were nearly 250 tables packed into a single warehouse of a room. 

One half of the book fair.

Some of the exhibitors were literary journals, some were large publishers, and some were writing programs. But my favorite tables were the small presses, many of which were publishing visually gorgeous books of fiction and poetry. This year, there were more handmade publications than I'd ever seen before, beautiful books printed on vintage hand presses and bound by hand individually. I found myself lusting after hand-printed calendars of typographic art and chapbooks covered with reclaimed leather covers and literary journals bound in strips of carpet insulation!

The other half of the book fair.

What makes the book fair overwhelming is its size and the impossibility of really examining every book and talking to every interesting publisher. What makes it disheartening is seeing the thousands and thousands of new books printed each year, most of which are purchased and read by very few readers (selling 700 copies of a book of poetry is considered pretty successful). It can make you realize what a saturated, competitive market writers work in, and it can make you wonder whether the world really needs another book ever again.

But it's inspiring to see so many people writing, designing, and printing based purely on love. These people don't hope to turn a profit--even big publishers rarely do that any more. They just hope to create something beautiful and have it picked up by a few admirers. It reminds you what we all write creatively for, anyway: not for money (though it would be nice), not for fame (though it would be fantastic), but because we love literature, enough to travel to Denver and spend too much money on literary magazines and limited edition chapbooks!

Besides the book fair, my favorite part of AWP was meeting people. At past AWPs, I slipped soundlessly through the book fair and never asked any questions at panels. This year, I made the effort to meet my local writing community. I talked to one of the New Letters publishers, shook hands with an NEA program officer, met a slew of Lawrence's Bathtub Writer's Collective members, and even encountered a poet-programmer while chatting with a table full of on-line publication editors. 

I wasn't networking to find a job or create "business" connections. I networked to meet my local writing community and to experience the pleasure of speaking to enthusiastic people. Meeting these new people and getting excited about their ideas was almost--almost!--as rewarding as spending time with old friends from grad school who love writing as much as I do.

Me, Alita, and Stephanie.

My grad school friends and I drank excellent Colorado microbrews, talked about critical approaches to the memoir, bitched about poets who can't read their own poems out loud, and hoofed all over downtown Denver together, and that alone was worth the price of admission!

So, Washington, D.C., watch out! You're next!

" . . . because, without beer . . .

things don't seem to go as well . . ."

The above quote is attributed to Brother Epp, a beer-brewing monk who lived in Kansas in the early 1900s. Once national prohibition hit, his monastery was forced to quit brewing their beloved ale, and Brother Epp famously wondered how they would keep toiling through the sweltering Kansas summers without beer to help them along.

Brother Epp's words are especially appropriate when it comes to Dave Lieberman's Chocolate Stout Cupcakes. I made these last night to disperse some pre-interview nervous energy (I think it went great, btw!).

Technically, things didn't go that great: my butter solidified upon being doused with some slightly-cooler-than-room-temperature stout, then I splattered the watery batter everywhere, then there was the wonky cup incident. Oy, what messes I made!

But these things happen. The most important thing is that I had bought an extra bottle of Boulevard Dry Stout to drink during the baking process, so then it felt like things were going better than they really were.

But at the end of the day, the cupcakes turned out good. They were, of course, chocolaty (they took 3/4 cup cocoa powder, for goodness sake!), but the stout gave the cakes a slight beery bitterness, making them taste like they were made with dark chocolate instead of cocoa powder. And the frosting--oh, goodness, the frosting!--turned out to be so, so good. It combines the mild tanginess of cream cheese with the puffy mildness of fresh whipped cream.

Even without all the deliciousness, aren't these a great idea? They're like delectable little Irish car bombs, only without the alcoholic bomb part: the cake is the Guiness and the frosting stands in for the Bailey's and the whiskey. And while the frosting may be (slightly) less hazardous to your health than hard liquor, I'm pretty sure that it's just as addicting.

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Chocolate Stout Cupcakes

Recipe by Dave Lieberman

Originally posted on FoodNetwork.com

Cake Ingredients

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa, plus more for dusting finished cupcakes
2 cups sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch fine salt
1 bottle stout beer*
1 stick butter, melted
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 large eggs
3/4 cup sour cream

Icing Ingredients
1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened at room temperature
3/4 to 1 cup heavy cream**
1 (1-pound) box confectioners' sugar

Directions for Cake
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the cocoa, sugar, flour, baking soda, and salt.

In another medium mixing bowl, combine the stout, melted butter, and vanilla.*** Beat in eggs, one at time. Mix in sour cream until thoroughly combined and smooth. Gradually mix the dry ingredients into the wet mixture.

Lightly grease 24 muffin tins. Divide the batter equally between muffin tins, filling each 3/4 full. Bake for about 12 minutes and then rotate the pans.**** Bake another 12 to 13 minutes until risen, nicely domed, and set in the middle but still soft and tender. Cool before turning out.

Directions for Icing
In a medium bowl with a hand mixer, beat the cream cheese on medium speed until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the heavy cream.***** On low speed, slowly mix in the confectioners' sugar until incorporated and smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use. Icing can be made several hours ahead and kept covered and chilled.

Top each cupcake with a heap of frosting and dust with cocoa.******

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*Be sure the beer is room temperature!

**Go light on the heavy cream. The recipe makes a ton of frosting, so you can skimp a little on the cream, leaving less liquid for the powdered sugar to soak up.

***Since my butter solidified (which is not uncommon, based on the FoodNetwork.com comments), it might be best to gently beat the butter, vanilla, and eggs together first before adding the stout.

****Mine only took about 15 minutes per pan, and rotating the pan did nothing for my cupcakes. Unless your oven is prone to creating lumpy, misshapen cakes, you can skip the rotating step. 

*****Be sure to beat the cream cheese for awhile to get it fluffy, and then to beat the heavy cream for awhile more after it's been added. You want this mix to be as fluffy as possible, since the powdered sugar actually makes the mixture more drizzly as you add it.

******I apologize for my excessive use of asterisks. They were uncalled for.