Ms. Lust will visit the Norwich Bookstore at 7 pm on Wednesday, March 11th to discuss her latest book -- A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy's Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche. The book consists of portraits of the people who served as her culinary guides in her exploration of authentic Italian cuisine. Ms. Lust's first book, Pass the Polenta, a culinary memoir, is also available at the Norwich Bookstore.  

1) What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher. I received this slim volume as a gift from the
chef/owner of The Ark Restaurant and Bakery, where I held my first cooking job on
the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington State. My duties included shucking several
hundred oysters a day, so I had indeed spent much time considering oysters. I went
on to discover the rest of M.F.K. Fisher’s works, most of which appear in the
anthology The Art of Eating. Fisher confirmed for me that food was a subject worth
writing about. She echoed my appreciation for recipes as more than just lists of
ingredients and sets of instructions. I was struck by how she wove history, culture,
and personal anecdote into her writing, and her approach helped me see the layers of narrative contained in even the simplest dish.

First Person Rural by Noel Perrin (currently out of print). I took a class on Nature Writing from Noel Perrin while I was studying at Dartmouth, and he was instrumental in affirming my belief that eating is an environmental act. He found beauty and worth in the small things others overlook, and his evocation of these pleasures on the page helped me find merit in my own subject matter. He encouraged me to say what I had to say in words that suited me instead of in words I thought a real writer should use.

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, especially when viewed through the lens of The
Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. I read Charlotte’s Web over and over as a
child, and it was always a favorite. When I picked it up as an adult to read aloud to
my children, I realized how carefully constructed it was. It has a perfect narrative
arc; there’s not a single unnecessary word, not a phrase out of place. Of course, this
was the message of Elements of Style. Some people now think Elements is a
musty old book for fuddy-duddies, but it helped me learn to construct a sentence, and then a paragraph, until finally I had enough momentum to complete an essay or
chapter. As a child, I always cried at the part where Charlotte dies. But as an adult,
the closing lines are what bring tears to my eyes: “It’s not often that someone comes
along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” Those are two
traits I aspire to myself.

2) What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?

I’d welcome a cup of coffee with Grazia Deledda. She is the only Italian woman to have won a Nobel Prize for literature, which she was awarded in 1926. She received only an elementary school education, as was the custom for girls at the time, and she taught herself after that by reading everything she could get her hands on. She evoked the people, traditions, and rural landscape of her native Sardinia with an unvarnished clarity, much as the writer Wendell Berry captures the agrarian rhythms of his beloved Henry County, Kentucky. In fact, I’d love to facilitate a conversation between the two of them, for in different eras and continents they both maintained a spiritual connection to the land, they demonstrated an appreciation for family and rural communities, and they put a premium on cultivating a sense of place. Of course if we held this meeting in Nuoro, Deledda’s native village, the coffee would assuredly be good!

​3) What books are currently on your bedside table?

Too many! I’m currently reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. While visiting my cousin in Monterey, California in the fall, I felt a rush of emotion as we passed through the Salinas Valley and other landmarks in Steinbeck country. My cousin gave me her copy of East of Eden, which I hadn’t read since just after college. I’ve found myself lingering over sentence after sentence, admiring his descriptions of landscapes and inner character at once rugged and fragile. Steinbeck has been said to have a unique ability to unite the human heart and the land, and that quality is very evident in this novel.

Next up is The Song of Trees, by David George Haskell, which has been described as “a love song to trees.” I’m looking forward to the interplay of biology, philosophy, and lyrical prose. Then: 

• Dubliners, by James Joyce
• Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain-- her classic memoir serving as a nurse for the
• British armed forces during World War I.
• Both Flesh and Not, by David Foster Wallace
• Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elizabeth Tova Bailey
• The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman (volume 2 in The Book of Dust)
• The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri​

I like to slip in an Italian title every few books to keep my language skills in use. The first book in the Italian pile is currently Marcovaldo, by Italo Calvino. This is a collection of connected short stories that I keep on my dresser to read and reread. Marcovaldo is the book’s main character. He is a poet and dreamer at heart; the stories chronicle his appreciation of and yearning for nature and his discontent at being trapped in the city.

Other titles in this stack include L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island) by Elsa Morante, and Passaggio in Ombra by Mariateresa Di Lascia. This coming of age story, published after the author’s death in 1995, won Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize. An English language translation is due out soon, with the name A Walk in the Shadows (not yet available in the USA).

1. What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

The shaping of a writer is an ongoing process, so the first book that comes to mind is not one I read as an aspiring writer but as I was finishing This Brilliant Darkness: The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison, one of my favorite essayists. There's a phrase in TThe Recovering, which is meditation on creativity, addiction, and sobriety that I think better explains what I'm trying to work toward with my writing these days than anything I could say myself: "the saving alchemy of community."

Leslie and I became friends years ago over our shared love for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book of words and pictures published in 1941 by James Agee and Walker Evans. It's been thrilling to see This Brilliant Darkness compared to Agee, not least because I'll never be anywhere near the writer he was. But there is, I hope, an affinity of ambition, a hope that one might find a different, or "new" nonfiction language for representing the real.

There's a related affinity with Joseph Mitchell's portraits of a man named Joe Gould in his collection of 1940s-60s New Yorker pieces, Up in the Old Hotel, my copy of which I bought for $5 from a homeless street book seller around two in the morning, after leaving St. Vincent's Hospital in the West Village, to which I'd taken a friend in a crisis. This was back in the early 90s, I was just out of college, I think, and I was taken by Gould's delusional dream of an Oral History of Our Times, which would be the longest book ever written, neverending, "'the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude,’” as Gould told Mitchell, “‘what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows,'... a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey." A story in which the ordinary is extraordinary, and everything matters. ​

2. What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?

I'm working on a chapter about the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz for a new book about the books that can never be finished. Schulz was a strange, lonely little man who almost never left his hometown of Drohobych, where he worked as an art teacher and wrote two astonishing collections of stories of fantastical worlds contained within his family's apartment, The Street of Crocodiles and Under the Sign of the Sanatorium, and struggled to finish a vast novel called The Messiah. The novel was scattered to the winds when the Nazis killed him, but it lives on in fiction about the missing novel by Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Roberto Bolano, Philip Roth. I don't imagine Schulz would reveal too much of his oceanic imagination over coffee, but I think of a line from his story "The Booke" (an awkward translation of the Polish, ksiega, for a sort of sacred book, which to Schulz was the book yet to be written: "under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?" A little creepy, sure! So were his stories. But even more they were beautiful. I'd gladly hold Bruno Schulz's hand. ​

3. What books are currently on your bedside table?

Walking up the stairs... let's see... it's crowded...
​
Are You Listening, a new eerie and gorgeous graphic novel of a road trip through the West Texas night by Tillie Walden (purchased at the Norwich Bookstore).

Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams, who just gave a deep and powerful reading in Norwich that bowled over both me and my ten-year-old daughter.

Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. Smith, purchased at the Norwich Bookstore, not yet read, which I bought not because Smith was the Poet Laureate of the United States but because one of my students, completely unaware that she was famous at all, fell in love with her poems. 
​
Up the Junction, by Nell Dunn, a great little book, of reported sketches--drawings and in rich vernacular prose--of everyday working class life in early 1960s London, given to me by James Napoli, the founder of the Upper Valley's Junction Magazine. 

Casting Deep Shade, the poet C.D. Wright's last book, just published, with photographs by Denny Moers. It's about beech trees, which sounds, to me, very boring. If you think Moby-Dick is boring, you'll probably find this boring, too, but if not -- well, beech trees are Wright's white whale.

Agee on Film: In the 1940s James Agee was legendary-in-his-own-time film critic for The Nation. He didn't like much of what he saw and I've seen almost none of the movies about which he writes, but together his criticism is a story of an increasingly broken-hearted man trying to remember love.

Lilith's Brood, by Octavia E. Butler, a single-volume set of one of Butler's afrofuturist trilogies. Butler will be the final chapter in the new book that will begin with Schulz. Her unfinished book, which I wish I had on my bedside, was The Parable of the Trickster, meant to be the final volume of her final trilogy. All her books had been "NO" books, she said, dystopian, deeply critical of the world. In the final one, she said, she wanted to write a "YES" book, to imagine freedom and in doing so make it real. She died trying. ​