If it doesn’t fit, it’s probably a blog post.
[UPDATE July 27, 2021: I briefly called it “The Split-Second Forever” but the title has gone back to being The Stones of le Santucce.” Just so you know.–ct] I’ve been working on The Stones of le Santucce nearly four years. People are starting to wonder. I saw Professor Alpini this morning, standing near the gate to our little walled garden, talking in the driveway with a...
As I mentioned in a post from the other day, when I decided to create an Amherst Writers and Artists-style workshop centered on food, I started reading the Stories from the Kitchen collection and then someone sent me to this interesting and helpful piece in Poets and Writers. The writer attends a class about food writing, and Corrine, the instructor, says to describe a lemon. “Look again,” said...
In my Amherst Writers and Artists-style workshops sometimes we write using only one-syllable words. It’s really really fun! So I’m thinking up prompts for this “Writing is Delicious” workshop we’re having in October and thinking about using one-syllable words only to describe food, and … We can’t say the word for how we can just have one of them, because it has...
Each piece in the Stories from the Kitchen collection has something interesting to offer about craft. Take for instance the Virginia Woolf piece, the dinner scene from To The Lighthouse. It makes you think about the craft, the way she does things, the way she has her narrator move from inside one person to the next around the table, and how deftly and interestingly she does it, even at one point...
When Norma and I decided to do it, we had just had a really great meal. We were in that heightened state. We saw endless possibilities. I think that’s why it happened. As to the meal, it could have been at Muzzicone, or at Regiro, or Gallo Nero, or la Sfizieria, or Ristorante Rogi, or Il Passaggio, or Antica Pieve or La Piana or Pietro or Buon Gustaio or Il Ristoro di Via Dante or Le Bindi...
I wrote this in 2013 and didn’t do much with it because at the time it felt a tad unpatriotic, insufficiently optimistic, kind of alarmist. Now it just feels like, duh.
I wrote this in 2013 and didn’t do much with it because at the time it felt a tad unpatriotic, insufficiently optimistic, kind of alarmist. Now it just feels like, duh.
Standing in the living room of the house we’d just renovated at considerable expense, the magnitude of what I’d done, debt-wise, was crashing in and I just thought, This is a beautiful space! People ought to come in here and create in this space! Then began this life-changing endeavor, the workshops. The thing is, it was a dream, it was a gesture of solidarity with other writers, and...
This morning at Caffe la Posta in Castiglion Fiorentino, as I was trying to read the Italian newspaper, I ran into professor Giuseppe Alpini. He asked me how the book is coming. Oh, you didn’t know I’m writing a book? The idea for the book came in the early morning darkness in June 2015, when I awoke at the Residence Le Santucce in Castiglion Fiorentino after a very vivid dream. I...
In our little town in Italy there is a cool little theater like something out of a Wes Anderson movie called Teatro Mario Spina and since I was a boy I always wanted to have a box seat in a theater and whereas you’d have to be a Getty or a Blum to have one in San Francisco here in Castiglion Fiorentino we just had to go chat up Paolo at the edicola, wading through the Italian jazz magazines...