Twitter 101 in San Miguel de Allende: August 20

Hello! Lucky's custom letterpress Twitter icon.

I'm heading down to San Miguel de Allende to visit my mom and will offer a "Twitter 101: They Don't Call It Social Media for Nothing" how-to/why-to/what-to workshop on Thursday, August 20, 10am to noon, at our house in Colonia Guadalupe. I will cut through the Twitter hype with clarity, a rockin' tutorial handout, and excellent snacks.

US$25 or peso equivalent. To reserve a spot, please send me an email at ginahyams@gmail.com.

My New Gig: Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF) Tweetmaker in Residence

Posting in a hurry as I've got lots to do today, but want to let you know about my fun new gig as Tweetmaker in Residence for the Berkshire International Film Festival. Leading up to the festival, I'll be tweeting about the films and filmmakers (this year's BIFF schedule includes 70 films from 13 countries) and then I'll be a live micro-blogging fool during the event itself, May 14 - 17 in Great Barrington, MA. To follow along and add to the conversation yourself, please see http://twitter.com/BIFFMA.

Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius

I've not read Eat, Pray, Love and resisted watching Elizabeth Gilbert's much-touted TED talk, as I thought I'd dislike her out of envy, but she's smart and charming and this lecture is inspiring.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...

My new website: TA DA

Details on My April 5 Berkshire Intro to Blogging, Twitter, and Facebook Workshop

“Blogging is…to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” –Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic

Author and editor Gina Hyams (www.ginahyams.com) will teach a one-day Intro to Blogging, Twitter, and Facebook Workshop in Housatonic on Sunday, April 5, from 1pm to 4pm.

Topics: Nuts and bolts how-to with helpful hand-outs galore, savvy marketing/community-building tips, and oodles of creative inspiration to keep you fired up and cranking out compelling blog posts, tweets, and/or status updates. US$50. To sign up, send a note to ginahyams@gmail.com.

About Gina:

Gina Hyams is a writer and editor who specializes in travel, parenting, and the arts. Her books include the bestselling travel-design titles, In a Mexican Garden: Courtyards, Pools, and Open-Air Living Rooms and Mexicasa: The Enchanting Inns and Haciendas of Mexico, as well as Pacific Spas: Luxury Getaways on the West Coast, Day of the Dead Box, The Campfire Collection: Thrilling, Chilling Tales of Alien Encounters, and Incense: Rituals, Mystery, Lore – all published by Chronicle Books. She is also co-editor of the anthology, Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Write About the Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies (Hudson Street Press and Plume, divisions of Penguin U.S.A.).

Gina is a contributing editor to Berkshire Living. Her essays and articles have also appeared in Newsweek, San Francisco, Organic Style, Ideal Destinations, Healing Lifestyles & Spas, and Salon.com. She has contributed to Fodor's Travel Publications, National Public Radio, and numerous anthologies.

Her background also includes extensive experience in marketing and public relations on behalf of Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Berkshire Theatre Festival, The Mount, Mother Jones magazine, HarperCollins Publishers, Victoria Kirby Public Relations, and San Francisco State University Poetry Center. She is co-founder and editorial director of the newly-launched marketing and publishing firm, Blue Wing Creative.

Berkshire Living "Rest of the Story" Free Event About Healthy Eating

Well, don't I feel special...as it happens, the March Berkshire Living community event is also an off-shoot of an article I wrote. The press release follows below. This event is free and the two panel members are both super smart and lively. Hope to see you there!

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Kripalu executive chef Deb Howard and Dr. Nina Molin, founder of Ananda Health Center for Integrative Medicine, will discuss strategies for health and wellness through healthy cooking and eating in "Eat Right," part of Berkshire Living's award-winning Rest of the Story series of free public forums, on Sunday, March 22, at 11 a.m., at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington.

An outgrowth of the story "Kitchen Aid," by writer Gina Hyams -- who will also participate in the event – in the March-April special Food and Dining issue of Berkshire Living, the event, moderated by editor-in-chief Seth Rogovoy, will focus on nutrition, ingredients, food selection, and healthy preparation methods, and include a question and answer session.

Each month, Berkshire Living, a regional lifestyle and culture magazine, and the Triplex join forces to present "The Rest of the Story," free public forums based on an article running in the concurrent issue of the magazine. The series was awarded a Gold Medal for Community Service by the National City and Regional Magazine Association.

For more information, call Berkshire Living at 413-528-3600.

New Year, New Glasses

First things first: Here's a photo of me in my new glasses. They were designed by Frenchman Cyril Dray of I See GB in Great Barrington and manufactured by Zip+Homme in Japan. I've been wearing them for a couple of weeks now and like them very much, even if they're not magic like my much-lamented former green pair.

My family didn't warm to them until we toured the Sol LeWitt wall drawing retrospective at MASS MoCA. We were taking in LeWitt's middle period work, the drawings with the softer geometry and vibrant, not yet screaming color, and Annalena turned to me and said, "You know Mom, your glasses are starting to grow on me." Dave looked around the gallery, "Yes, they make sense here."

They seem to be preaching to the choir of good glasses lovers glasses rather than ones that promote world peace by uniting all of humanity with their mystical rightness. So be it. I'm grateful that I can see and that my little New England town is home to such an excellent eyewear shop.

I'm in professional limbo at the moment, having recently drafted a proposal for a new publishing project and waiting to hear what my agent thinks of it. I hate waiting, but love being at a beginning again.

I want to keep the sense of uncharted territory and freshness going with this blog as it enters year two. The more people read my blog (8859 visitors in '08), the harder it becomes to stay loose with it, but that's the key.

And since this is my blog where nobody's the boss of me except me and, as many editors have noticed, I don't care much about formal transitions...

Dave and I met on January 3, 1989 at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and moved in together three weeks later. I remember telling a friend at the time that our blazing romance was "not trivial." Here we are 20 years down the road. It's a miracle and a mystery.

My heart goes out to Ericka Lutz, whose marriage in many ways seems to have mirrored my own. Her husband, Bill Sonnenschein, died unexpectedly over the holidays and she wrote this incredible blog post about it. I don't know how she found the strength and clarity to write it...except that I do...words are solace.

Gina's Blogging Boot Camp in Mexico

Casa Sierra Negra del Sur

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be teaching a one-day Blogging Boot Camp in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico on Friday, February 20, 2009, 10am to 2pm at Casa Sierra Negra del Sur (Black Mountain South House…i.e. the fabulous Hyams-Barrett family compound).

Topics: Nuts and bolts how-to with helpful hand-outs galore, super savvy marketing tips, and oodles of creative inspiration to keep you fired up and cranking out compelling blog posts. I'll also reveal the meta and mini blog mysteries that are Facebook and Twitter.

$65 (includes snacks!)

To sign up, please send a note to ginahyams@gmail.com.

Writer Procrastination

I stumbled upon this useful article about ways of thinking that lead to writing procrastination while "researching" Twitter. Those of you procrastinating by reading my blog might want to read it, too. Ahem and amen.

Discipline, Anyone?

Jenny Holzer
from the Survival Series
Times Square, New York, 1985–86

Jenny Holzer has 2626 followers on Twitter, while she herself is following only one person, Guy Debord, who is dead. Hmmmmmmm. No wonder she's so productive.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

I don't know how long I'll keep it up, but for now you can find me on the road to ruin...http://twitter.com/ginahyams

To Twitter or Not to Twitter?

There's a wave of Twitter washing over my world these days and much seductive peer pressure to join the action. Twitter seems like the Facebook status line on steroids, like 21st century haiku, like something I'd much prefer to do than, say, earn a living.

Novelist Tayari Jones posted on Facebook last week that she was cutting back on Twitter. She un-installed the application TweetDeck from her computer, as her life had started feeling like a constant cocktail party (and she loves cocktail parties).

I'm tempted and conflicted. For those of you who tweet, here's my question: Is there any point to doing it in moderation? Is it even possible to do in moderation or is Twitter heroin for people like us?

Interview with James Collins

James Collins is the author of Beginners Greek, which the New York Times dubbed "a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel." His beautifully crafted, literate romantic comedy was a New York Times bestseller and published in the U.K., as well as translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Israeli, Hungarian, and Dutch.

James was formerly an editor at Time and Spy and has contributed to The New Yorker and other magazines. He grew up in New York City and now lives in Virginia with his family. Beginner's Greek was his first novel.

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Gina: I know this is your first published novel, but had you written other fiction? How long did you think about writing this book before you finally sat down to write it?

James: About twenty years ago, when I was in my late twenties, I was encouraged by a friend to write a short story, really just for fun, which I did. (I can still remember the first line: “On a clear day in early spring, the buildings in New York, seen from a distance, seem oddly still, flat and unreal.”) Other than that, though, I had written no fiction since twelfth grade before starting work on the novel.

I guess you would say that I had been thinking about writing a novel since I was seven years old. As for this novel specifically, there were a couple of germs of ideas that I was turning over in my mind for a couple of years, but I didn’t really concentrate on the book or start thinking it through until I actually started writing it.

Gina: How did your background as a journalist and editor impact your approach to the novel?

James: I think my experience as a journalist and editor was important in a variety of ways. Most simply, the training of writing on deadlines helped me to force myself to get the words down, even if I was struggling. Then, I had had a lot of practice cutting and rewriting pieces quite dramatically, heartlessly and quickly, and having those muscles, I think I was able to work over the manuscript of the book much more effectively. I think too that it was good to have written a lot of expository prose. That was especially useful in my case, since the novel is in the third person and it has fairly long expository passages, but in almost any novel except the most impressionistic the writer is presenting information or making an argument at certain points, so being able to write expository prose well is a good skill to have, even if you use it only to make the skeleton of the passage.

Also, I think working in journalism helped my sentences. Poets are supposed to be the most precise writers and journalists are supposed to be the loosest, but I am astonished how often I read lines in poems that are far vaguer and poorly written than would be allowed in a good piece of journalism. In journalism, you have to be pithy, you have to be precise about details, and you have to dump the images that are just too awkward and wordy—all good habits for a novelist.

What I have said above relates to the mechanics of writing, but I’m sure the reason you asked was because you were interested in the broader and deeper ways in which working in journalism affected my writing of the novel. That’s harder to describe. I guess the simplest thing to say was that journalism reinforced the bias I already had toward narrative and realism. In journalism you go out and find out stuff about the real world and then you use that material to tell a story. I enjoyed doing that and I suppose that over the years I became more convinced that in novel writing, too, it was important to tell a story and to bring in aspects of the real world, or at least for the author to show some knowledge of the real world. I am not dogmatic about this, and Beginner’s Greek is by no means totally realistic, but overall, I prefer novels in the realistic, narrative tradition.

Gina: What were your models/inspirations for the structure of this book?

James: My inspirations for the structure were Shakespeare, Wilde, Wodehouse, Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and any number of others. Really, I just took what I thought was the basic structure of comedies: two young people in love; perhaps another couple that serves as a contrast to the first; complications and twists and surprises.

Gina: I find the cover of the hardback to be singularly appealing and I'm not entirely sure why. Retro, yet not and the surprising green hair. Did you have a hand in the design?

James: I agree that it is a wonderful image: sort of pop and bold but also elegant. I can’t take any credit at all for it, though.

Gina: Have the movie rights sold?

James: There have been discussions but nothing has happened.

Gina: What's next?

James: I have just begun work on what I think is a promising reported story for the New Yorker, and I hope that works out because I definitely want to continue to do journalism. Then I have a lot of ideas for fiction and have started working on a couple of things, one which would probably be a story and the other a shortish novel. They are set in New York among the same kind of people as the characters in Beginner’s Greek, but they aren’t comic—to the contrary, in fact. One reason people seemed to like Beginner’s Greek was that it was so optimistic, and I worry about alienating my legions of fans by revealing my true pessimistic self, but for the moment I’m carrying on.

Festival of Books at Spencertown Academy Art Center

September 5-7 and 12-14, 2008

The third annual Festival of Books at Spencertown Academy Art Center (located just over the border in Spencertown, NY) is a celebration of books and reading for the whole community. The theme this year is "The Immigrant Experience in American Literature and History." Over twenty distinguished writers of memoir, poetry, fiction, and journalism will read and discuss their work within a larger conversation about previous generations of immigrants who came seeking the American Dream and the experience of more recent immigrants in the post 9/11 world.

The stellar lineup includes Yassin Aref, Russell Banks, Da Chen, Laura Chester, Stephen Downes, Mary Gordon, John Fass Morton, Rebecca Flowers, Alan Gelb, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Elizabeth Hess, Lucia Nevai, Julia Pomeroy, Ariel Sabar, Sadia Shepard, Carl Strock, Mark Teague, Lily Tuck, and Shelia Weller.

There will be panel discussions, readings, and book signings, a gallery exhibition of book art by Buzz Spector, children's events including a visit from Clifford, the Big Red Dog, and a giant book sale of over 10,000 new and gently used books. Lots of free events. Click here for the full schedule.

New York State Writers Institute Offering Free Workshops with Rebecca Wolff and Lydia Davis

The New York State Writers Institute is offering the following free workshops led by Rebecca Wolff and Lydia Davis. The noncredit workshops are open, on a competitive basis to the community-at-large, as well as to members of the University community.

Mixed-genre or Hybrid Writing Workshop
offered by Writer-in-Residence Rebecca Wolff

New York State Writers Institute Writer-in-Residence Rebecca Wolff will conduct a workshop in mixed-genre, or hybrid writing during the fall 2008 semester. Too often we find ourselves distracted from the real work of creative expression by over-concentration on definitions of form and style. Is it a prose poem or a very short story? A poem or an interview? A memoir or a novel-in-verse? Journalism or creative nonfiction or could we call it simple “prose”? In this workshop participants will view texts with generous eyes that see more similarity than difference. Participants are encouraged to bring in projects that have already begun, as well as to develop new ideas within the context of the group.

The workshop is scheduled for eight Monday nights (October 20, 27, November 3, 17, 24, December 1, 8, 15) from 6 to 9 p.m. The class will take place on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. The workshop is offered free of charge for non-credit, and will be limited to ten writers. To be considered, submit manuscripts to the Writers Institute according to the guidelines listed at the link below. Due to the volume of manuscripts received from previous workshops, we must insist that you follow the guidelines exactly.

Fiction Master Class Workshop
offered by MacArthur Fellow Lydia Davis

New York State Writers Institute Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and MacArthur Fellow Lydia Davis will conduct a Fiction Master Class Workshop during the fall 2008 semester. The workshop is intended for advanced writers —writers who have at least one publication in a literary journal. It will be an intensive five-session workshop.

The Fiction Master Class Workshop is scheduled for Tuesday evenings (November 4, 11, 18, 25, December 2) from 6 to 9 p.m. Classes will be held on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. The workshop is offered free of charge for no credit, and will be limited to ten writers, made up of both non-University writers and a few UAlbany students who are enrolled in the English Department’s Masters or Doctoral programs. This workshop is not open to students who have taken it previously.

For application guidelines, click here.

Thanks to Bess for the forwarding the info. I won't be able to attend the workshops myself, but they seem like wonderful opportunities for somebodies.

Interview with Nani Power

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Nani Power grew up in a small town in Virginia. She studied fine arts/painting in her youth, at Bennington College, and later at Nadia Boulanger’s Ecole des Beaux-Artes Americaines in Fontainebleau, France. In her late thirties, she took a writing class at Georgetown University with Liam Callanan and went on to publish Crawling at Night (Grove/Atlantic Monthly, 2001), a New York Times Notable Book of The Year and a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award, as well as the British Orange Award. It has been translated into seven languages and is in film production.

Her first novel was inspired by a brief stint working as a chef at a Japanese restaurant. She felt haunted by the cultural difficulties an old chef encountered. She explains, “Although he had been educated so well in the art of sushi, because of his faulty English he was treated like an old fool and I could see the pain in his eyes.” From this emerged a powerful tale of urban alienation and love set in a Manhattan cityscape. She adds, “I was deeply affected by the respectful Japanese attitude towards food as a cultural icon. The intense dedication and perfection amazed me. And the chefs were mindful of my respect, teaching me as much as I wanted to learn.”

Her second novel, The Good Remains (Grove/Atlantic Monthly, 2002), was also a New York Times Notable Book of The Year, and a finalist for The Virginia Library Award. “In this book,” she explains, “I strove to paint an entirely different landscape than Crawling at Night. While Crawling at Night was about urban alienation, The Good Remains was about the connectedness of a small town. I also wished to pay tribute to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.”

The Sea of Tears, her third novel, was published in January 2005 by Counterpoint Press. “I felt a need to explore the only still ‘forbidden’ territory in writing—exploring the realm of true sentiment and feeling, without being hackneyed. A certain cynicism has been lauded in our culture as intellectualism, and I reject that concept. I also wanted to humanize characters from the Middle East, who I felt were being pigeonholed and overlooked culturally in the post 9/11 era.”

Her newest book is a travel/food memoir titled Feed the Hungry. It was published this summer by Simon and Schuster.

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Gina: What inspired you to write a memoir after three novels?

Nani: I started thinking about family recipes and what they meant to me, which led me to remembering lots of things surrounding those recipes. And I’ve been really interested in all my writing in how food creates and fosters memory. That even a bad recipe can be as loved as something good, because it’s churned in nostalgia and love. I had a friend who loved burned food because his mother couldn’t cook. I kind of like the taste of an unmelted slice of butter on cold toast because my grandmother made it that way. Makes you wonder whether we actually "fall" in love or create love around reality.

I also love reading books with recipes because somehow you become involved in the world of the book even more. And then, lastly, I found myself looking at my family’s methods of coping and wanting to understand it more closely. I don't know if I understood more, but I saw my family more three dimensionally, and therefore with more compassion.

Gina: What is a Yellow Bird cocktail?

Nani: Well, it’s this luscious tropical yellow salve my family gulped down by the gallons when we would go to the Bahamas. It has lots of fruit juices, Galliano, and banana liqueur and as kids we loved to suck down the last bit left in my parent’s glasses. Plus, it always had a maraschino cherry in it, which, I’ve learned as a parent, produces some kind of ineffable food euphoria in kids.

Gina: Please share with my blog readers some of your thoughts about rice.

Nani: It’s amazing the many coats that lil’ ol’ grain can wear. I discovered it's really important in sushi culture, maybe more so than even the fish, if that is possible. Sushi chefs initially suss out the quality of a sushi bar by the rice and the omelette (tamago) preparation. Perfect rice tossed with the right combo of vinegar, salt, and sugar really complements the right slice of toro, a mushy version degrades it. Then, later on, I discovered Persian cuisine and found a new style of rice—basmati rice melded with so many flavors—saffron, rosewater, barberries (think tiny cranberries), sour cherries...a typical Persian feast would include at least four different rice pilafs. I think rice has a soothing quality as well. Both of the above cultures eat a thin rice porridge when they are sick, and feed it to their children as their first food.

Gina: We met at the Sewanee Writers' Conference nine years ago. It's incredible to me how many people from that summer went on to publish books. In what ways did participating in that conference impact your life?

Nani: Basically, it kicked my ass energetically. I had kind of just started writing, had about 30 pages of a novel on my computer. When I saw the level of ambition there, I realized I had to get serious if I was going to do this. I kind of lost the amateur spirit and kicked into high gear. Everyone there seemed so driven and accomplished (including you, I remember that). Plus, I felt so at home. I loved that everyone there loved writing as much as I did.

I also learned that I really love air conditioning.

Gina: What are you writing now?

Nani: I’m working on a novel and also a book about Indian vegetarian cooking that I’ve learned from various Indian women in my neighborhood.

Nani Power's Feed the Hungry: A Memoir with Recipes

Nani will be visiting this blog soon for an interview. In the meantime, I have an extra copy of her new memoir to give to anyone who'd like it. The first person who posts a comment or sends me an e-mail requesting it, gets it.

Nani on cooking and writing: "These impulses, cooking and writing come from the basic seed of love. We have been moved, touched, by the sensual experience of a great meal, a moving book. We would like somehow to harness this power and give it to others…stories start to tumble out as quickly as the memories of food, because they are all intertwined, food and memory, love and taste, all piecemeal of this lovely sensual world we live in…"

You can read more excerpts and see family photos on her father's blog.

Cover Story, Baby

I wrote the cover story for the latest issue of Berkshire Living BBQ (Berkshire Business Quarterly). The magazine's website is, ahem, in need of updating, but if you're curious you can read a few excerpts from the epic (3,000+ word) profile of hotelier-philanthropist Nancy Fitzpatrick on Berkshire Creative's new blog. The best thing about the story is that it's mostly actually about the Burning Man gift economy.

What's My Motivation?

A reporter from the local daily paper contacted me for an article she's writing on Berkshire bloggers. On one hand I'm flattered, but on the other I'm worried. The question I constantly ask myself as a journalist is: Why does this matter? If I were her interviewing me tomorrow, that's what I'd be trying to figure out.

I started this blog as a lark seven months ago and 105 posts later am still having a good time and am pleased that the random things I've chosen to blog about seem to be of interest to others. As of this evening, the stat counter reports that I'm up to 1,497 returning visitors (out of 3,678 total unique visitors -- lots of people obsessed with Jello and/or Daryl Hall). These aren't huge blogosphere numbers, but considering that I'm only linked to in one place that I know about (a kind stranger in Trinidad), it's miraculous. If I imagine you all in my backyard, it's quite a party we have going on here.

So, thanks for showing up. The one thing I'm clear about is that this blog has to stay fun and loose and not become an ambitious, pressurized form of expression for me. If it ever stops feeling like a lark, that's when I'll stop.

A Note from Kim Sunée

Kim wrote last night that she hasn't forgotten about that promised blog interview. Really, it's fine...I don't want this blog to be stressful for me or anybody else...but I appreciated her note and since I know many of you are stumbling upon this blog by searching on her name (almost as many as who are looking for Jello recipes and chocolate games), I'll share her news.

She's now in Korea appearing on a television show that tries to reunite adoptees with their birth families.

"It has been an emotional journey so far. I had to 'audition' for the adoptee show and, standing in front of the azaleas in a perfectly manicured garden, I felt like an orphan all over again--as if I had to prove I was worthy of being 'chosen.'

On a lighter note, I met a Japanese chef in Itaewon who uses his cellars not for fermenting vegetables, but for curing duck prosciutto.

Today I am visiting the Star of the Sea orphanage and the markets...then on to meet a national treasure--a woman in her 70s who is the last to know the recipes of 'the King's Cuisine.' It seems the king did not want to be known as a savage so all of his food was minced and hidden among the leaves of cabbages and lotus leaves.

I'm not a good 'blogger' but I am trying to post now and then on my site, mainly when I am not able to sleep--like every moment of every day since I've been here...

Monday, I will be doing press conferences for the Korean edition of my book. The Korean title is Recipes in the Age of my 30's (even though it's about my 20's): Provence in the middle of Summer, I was a lonely traveler, though I always had Love."