The Saudi Marathon Man | Narrative vs. News

Source: The New Yorker, by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.

Last week I mentioned this piece in class when Zac brought up the question of when to use narrative journalism. Re-reading the piece, I still believe this is a strong example of combining timely news writing with a narrative edge and tone.  Maybe it could work as a strong example for our third project. Either way it's a great read. 

How to Poach an Egg | Third Revision

      Home-making is not my forté.  I’ve left the stove on overnight, exploded dishes in the microwave, let carrots fester in the fridge.  I dump my clean laundry on my bed so that I will fold it, and instead fall asleep on top of my already crinkled shirts. I take after my father’s side of the family, the ones who throw out milk a week before it expires, who prefer take-out over farmer’s markets, who sniff their clothes to see if they’re clean.  

     I’ve worried this lack of domesticity has distanced me from my mother’s side, especially my grandmother, Grandy. I’ve assumed the trait has slowly sifted out of the Seiverson line—if home-making activities are something I’d like to pursue, it’s in my blood, but needs to be unearthed.  I lean towards arts instead of craft.  But Grandy’s got it in her genes, which she hang dries in the basement then irons on a small Ikea fold out on her bed. She makes me want to learn to quilt.  She is the archetype, the mother figure, the caretaker. When I was still a kid, I used to spend the night at her old place on the Mississippi and we’d watch “The Little Rascals” and sing about pickles and dollars.      

          In the morning we’d wake up to barely browning english muffin toast—this magical hybrid, airy like Thomas’ but not dense and chewy—and eggs fried quickly in too much butter. Sometimes she whipped up coveted egg-in-a-basket, a small window cut in a slice of bread with the bottom of a juice glass, the perfect frying hole for a small egg.  Sleepovers at Grandy’s were the only times I would eat breakfast. My own mother would force me to drink Carnation Breakfast Essentials, a disgusting ‘chocolate’ protein ‘shake’ that tasted like saw dust and cold Swiss Miss.  

     But I could stomach Grandy’s eggs.  They didn’t have the cold, soggy-ness I had associated with breakfast.  They warmed me, got me going.  I began cooking eggs on my own.  Julia Child taught be how to make a French omelet—it’s in the wrists—I found I like my scrambled eggs barely cooked, as cloud-like as possible. 

      Grandy is oddly egg-like, actually. Taupe-y, almost.  She has a lot of beige and white in her aesthetic, the kind of blue button-up wearing woman who still has my great-grandmother’s sewing kit equipped with thimbles in her bedroom closet. 

      Because of those lazy mornings at Grandy’s, I’ve grown this infatuation with eggs. I love them, actually.  Their off-ness, the way they roll on a counter, the way they ooze and crackle in a pan, how they thicken or poof a dish. Eggs are cheap meal, they can be decorated, pickled or thrown. But I had never learned how to make the most beautiful of eggs, a perfect boiled parcel of gooey-goodness: a poached egg.  Eating them feels rich, decadent, covered in hollandaise or cooked in a homemade tomato sauce. 

     I told myself the simplicity makes dropping eggs into boiling water so difficult. You can find tricks and secret techniques all over the internet, but none of them seemed to work.  The number of eggs I wasted, yolks bursting in bubbling water, egg whites turning into a bland egg-drop soup, has to be at least two dozen. 

     If I wanted to make the perfect egg, I knew who I had to call. 

     “Oh Han, I’m flattered you’d ask me.” Grandy said. “It’s easy, Sweety, come over on Saturday and I’ll show you.”

     We stood in her kitchen, surrounded by heart-shaped black and grey stones she had collected on the Mississippi and on the shores of Lake Superior.  Her spatulas are heart-shaped.  She has framed drawings her mother made in the 30s—my great grandmother drew the fashion designs for Vogue before cameras were commercialized. I never knew my great-grandmother. She had died very young, when Grandy was only nine.  On the counter we gathered a small, 2 quart pan and filled it halfway with water, a tablespoon of vinegar, a slotted spoon, some salt and two slices of english muffin bread.  We were listening to Etta James.

     “You’ve got to get the water just barely boiling,” Grandy said, pouring the vinegar into the pot. “Bubbling up the sides. It can’t be too hot or they will break.”

     “Did your mother ever teach you how to cook Grandy? Was she a good cook?”

     “Oh, she was a beautiful cook. Everything she did was beautiful—she was an artist. And she cooked like one.  The day she died she left meat out, defrosting on the counter.”

     A few months before my Mom had told me Grandy was writing an essay on her mother’s death and how it had affected her life. At twenty I still didn’t know my family history beyond two generations.

     “Grandy, will you tell me about her?”

     As the water heated up, when it was just right, she swirled the pan slightly with her wrist so that the liquid spun in a circle.  

     “I don’t know much, Han. I was so little.  So, so little. She made all my clothes—she loved sewing. I hated it. I wanted the clothes from the store, but all mine had perfect little buttons and pockets.”

     “But how did she die?” 

     She tapped the egg on the edge of the counter, held the cracked vessel over the pan, pushed her fingers through the shell, and lowered the gloppy mass into the eye of the tornado. 

     “She left a note one afternoon. I was at girl-scouts. When I got home, my father was on the steps. He told me the neighbors had invited me over for dinner. It was like she disappeared, it never felt like she died.”

     If your egg looks awful at this point, like an old man with a beard floating on his back, you’re doing it right. 

     “In her note she said she couldn’t be the wife and mother she ‘ought to be.’” Grandy said. “I didn’t know any of this until much, much later, when I was 16 and my step mother died suddenly, when I put the pieces together.”

     Poaching takes patience.  As the filmy strands of egg become opaque and less flimsy, gather the whites with the slotted spoon and tuck them loosely around the yolk. 

     I watched how Grandy made the egg into a neat little bundle with ease. On cue the bread popped up from the toaster. 

     “She was before her time, Hannah. You couldn’t do this. You couldn’t make eggs and be an artist.” 

     She handed me the butter for the toast. 

    “You had to choose.  She wasn’t domestic enough. Wasn’t a mother enough. Cared about her own art more than her children.”

     She set the poached egg on its toast bed. 

     “Of course now we know that’s not true. She just wanted more than she was given. She wanted to get out.”

     I salted and cracked pepper on the tops of both the eggs. We sat down at the dinning room table.  It was before noon and the sun was just reaching the tops of the Minneapolis skyline.

     “Thank you for telling me, Grandy”

     “I could’ve told you sooner. We should know these things about each other. Share ourselves.”

     She lifted the butter knife over our breakfast, and sliced, letting all the insides out. 

Word Count: 1232

Intended Publication: Lives

How To Poach an Egg Franklin Outline

Complication:

• Hannah experiences disconnect

Development

1. Hannah seeks Grandy
2. Grandy teaches Hannah
3. Hannah gleans truth

Resolution

• Hannah connects

Writing for Story | In Response

This book reminded me of my Dad.  At first I thought the book was too outdated and was surprised it was a part of our reading material. I thought about how journalism shifts so rapidly; advice from 1985 seems ancient.  But after Franklin told us about his childhood as the ringleader of a white gang—whaaaaat?—and I got over my initial distate for his prescriptive writing, I realized his voice sounded similar to that of my father's, who worked as a newspaper sports writer from his college and high school years in the late seventies and eventually became an investigative reporter for Kare 11 News in Minnesota. 

In high school I was drawn to journalism because of his work in the field. I liked the idea of really investigating a piece, of getting to draw out the details to make a story more tense, to get the scoop.  But as I veered toward fiction and poetry, I stuck my nose up at my dad's notes on 'integrity' and 'craft' and 'true' story-telling. 

I found myself rolling my eyes in the same way I roll them at my dad reading Franklin's advice to future writers.  But then moments of relevance continued to pop up for me.  The tension between writing as art and writing as craft is one that has always struck me, and Franklin's love of the short story kept me interested.  In "The New School for Writers" he described his love of the form that "demanded the utmost of the writer, both technically and artistically. Yet the shortness of the story—the same thing that made it so difficult—was also its saving grace" (Franklin, 22). 

I thought his diatribe about not being able to find valuable lessons in 'how to write books' books ironic as he opened the first section, but as soon as he began writing I bit my tongue. His piece "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" got me.  Not telling us whether she died  at the end, his use of the ‘pop pop pop repeating. 

How to Poach an Egg Etcetera | Personal Essay Revision

     I’ve got this casual infatuation with eggs. I love them, actually.  Their off-ness, the way they roll on a counter, the way they ooze and crackle in a pan, how they thicken or poof a dish. Eggs are cheap meal, they can be decorated, pickled or thrown. But I had never learned how to make the most beautiful of eggs, a perfect boiled parcel of gooey-goodness: a poached egg.  Eating them feels rich, decadent, covered in hollandaise or cooked in a homemade tomato sauce. 

     Last summer on a trip home to Minneapolis, I called up my go-to egg aficionado, my mother’s mother, Grandy.  She’s oddly egg-like, actually. Taupe-y, almost.  She has a lot of beige and white in her aesthetic, the kind of blue button-up wearing woman who still has my great-grandmother’s sewing kit equipped with thimbles in her bedroom closet.  She’s always been the most domestic of my family members.  My mother loves to cook and entertain and vacuums and windex-es before the cleaning lady shows up.  Myself, I dabble in organizing rooms, folding fitted sheets and making pasta salads, but Grandy—she is the archetype, the mother figure.  I’ve always assumed the trait has slowly sifted out of the Seiverson line, that if home-making activities are something I’d like to pursue, it’s in my blood, but needs to be excavated. 

Grandy’s got it in her genes, which she hang dries in the basement then irons on a small Ikea fold out on her bed. She makes me want to learn to quilt.  When I was still a kid, I used to spend the night at her old place on the Mississippi and we’d watch “The Little Rascals” and sing about pickles and dollars. 

Source | Andrew Filer, Flickr

     In the morning we’d wake up to barely browning english muffin toast—this magical hybrid, airy like Thomas’ but not dense and chewy—and eggs fried quickly in too much butter. Sometimes she whipped up coveted egg-in-a-basket, a small window cut out in the toast with the bottom of a juice glass, the perfect frying hole for a small egg.  Sleepovers at Grandy’s were the only times I would eat breakfast. My own mother would force me to drink Carnation Breakfast Essentials, a disgusting ‘chocolate’ protein ‘shake’ that tasted like saw dust and cold Swiss Miss.  

     “Mom, this stuff makes me gag. I’m going to barf all over the bus and no one will talk to me.” 

     “Well, Hun, we’ll just have to home-school you until you start eating real breakfast.”

     But I could stomach Grandy’s eggs.  They didn’t have the cold, soggy features I had associated with breakfast.  They warmed me, got me going.  I began cooking eggs on my own.  Julia Child taught be how to make a French omelet—it’s in the wrists—I found I like my scrambled eggs barely cooked, as cloud-like as possible.  I made the Barefoot Contessa’s quiche Lorainne, which, let’s be honest, contains mostly cream, not eggs. But I suck at poaching an egg. 

     I told myself the simplicity makes dropping eggs into boiling water so difficult. You can find tricks and secret techniques all over the internet, but none of them seemed to work.  The number of eggs I wasted, yolks bursting in bubbling water, egg whites turning into a bland egg-drop soup, has to be at least two dozen. 

     Grandy had the answer. 

     “Oh Han, I’m flattered you’d ask me. It’s easy, Sweety, come over on Saturday and I’ll show you.”

     We stood in her kitchen, surrounded by heart-shaped black and grey stones she had collected on the Mississippi and on the shores of Lake Superior.  Her spatulas a heart-shaped.  She has framed drawings her mother made in the 30s—my great grandmother drew the fashion designs for Vogue before cameras were commercialized. I never knew my great-grandmother. She had died very young, when Grandy was only nine.  On the counter we gathered a small, 2 quart pan and filled it halfway with water, a tablespoon of vinegar, a slotted spoon, some salt and two slices of english muffin bread.  We were listening to Etta James.

One of my many failed attempts at poaching

     “You’ve got to get the water just barely boiling,” Grandy said, pouring the vinegar into the pot. “Bubbling up the sides. It can’t be too hot or they will break.”

     “Did your mother ever teach you how to cook Grandy? Was she a good cook?”

     “Oh, she was a beautiful cook. Everything she did was beautiful—she was an artist. And she cooked like one.  The day she died she left meat out, defrosting on the counter.”

     A few months before my Mom had told me Grandy was writing an essay on her mother’s death and how it had affected her life. At twenty I still didn’t know my family history beyond two generations.

     “Grandy, will you tell me about her?”

     As the water heated up, when it was just right, she swirled the pan slightly with her wrist so that the liquid spun in a circle.  

     “I don’t know much, Han. I was so little.  So, so little. She made all my clothes—she loved sewing. I hated it. I wanted the clothes from the store, but all mine had perfect little buttons and pockets.”

     “But how did she die?” 

     She tapped the egg on the edge of the counter, held the cracked vessel over the pan, pushed her fingers through the shell, and lowered the gloppy mass into the eye of the tornado. 

     “She left a note one afternoon. I was at girl-scouts. When I got home, my father was on the steps. He told me the neighbors had invited me over for dinner. It was like she disappeared, it never felt like she died.”

     If your egg looks awful at this point, like an old man with a beard floating on his back, you’re doing it right. 

     “In her note she said she couldn’t be the wife and mother she ‘ought to be.’” Grandy said. “I didn’t know any of this until much, much later, when I was 16 and my step mother died suddenly, when I put the pieces together.”

     Poaching takes patience.  As the filmy strands of egg become opaque and less flimsy, gather the whites with the slotted spoon and tuck them loosely around the yolk. 

     I watched how Grandy made the egg into a neat little bundle with ease. On cue the bread popped up from the toaster. 

A drawing for Vogue by my Great Granmother

     “She was before her time, Hannah. You couldn’t do this. You couldn’t make eggs and be an artist.” 

     She handed me the butter for the toast. 

     “You had to choose.  She wasn’t domestic enough. Wasn’t a mother enough. Cared about her own art more than her children.”

     She set the poached egg on its toast bed. 

     “Of course now we know that’s not true. She just wanted more than she was given. She wanted to get out.”

     I salted and cracked pepper on the tops of both the eggs. We sat down at the dinning room table.  It was before noon and the sun was just reaching the tops of the Minneapolis skyline.

     “Thank you for telling me, Grandy”

     “I could’ve told you sooner. We should know these things about each other. Share ourselves.”

     She lifted the butter knife over our breakfast, and sliced, letting all the insides out. 

The American Man at Age Ten by Susan Orlean | In Response

Before reading her piece, I knew I would like Susan Orlean's work. As soon as I read her brief bio and the phrase "I like writing about streets," I felt like I got her.  I also loved how Orlean talked about walking and noted she “dawdles with enthusiasm,” which is something I tend to do myself.  I think that's one of the aspects of narrative journalism I want to embrace and but that also makes me uneasy.  I like the transparency that comes with journalism.  There is nearly always a byline on every piece and you can easily dig through a writer's work and see their opinions and biases, which can be a hinderance or an asset. 

Before delving into the piece, I loved the playfulness of Orlean’s title and lead.  The irony in the break in the title, placing American Man and his age on the second line made me smile, and the odd opening of imagining Orlean’s marrying her ten-year-old subject successfully drew me into the piece. In my modernism and postmodernism class last quarter we talked a lot about the use of lists in post/post-post modernist work and so now I always notice them and Orlean’s repetition of ‘We’ was comical and just fun.  I liked how in the first section it seemed like she could be generalizing about any “American” ten-year-old boy—which means a heteronormative, white, middle class boy—but then went into detail about Colin’s particularities. 

Orlean’s piece, while sweet and sometimes sentimental in her observation of Colin, is also a social commentary through the perspective of a fifth grader.  In such a short space Orlean’s is able to touch on race, gender, death, HIV/AIDS, abortion, and violence. She makes assumptions about who the children surrounding Colin will grow up to be, both with positive and negative outcomes. The comments the boys made about their classmates, especially the girls, frightened me but did not surprise me with their hateful and sometimes violent tone. This recent piece in Jezebel about two fifth graders arrested last month after conspiring to rape and kill a female classmate definitely came to mind.

When the piece shifted to a statistical nature, I was glad Orlean moved into the studies. She rarely spoke from the I throughout the piece, and definitely showed and did not tell her perspective on young boys and gender development, but her stance quickly became obvious, especially with the subtle yet powerful image of her trapped with the dog in the dark, tangled in Colin's fishing line. 

One problematic issue I’ve been dealing with recently as a writer and reader came up for me this week while reading.  Over the past two years I’ve struggled to find male writers who’s work I enjoy reading.  I think it stems from my women, gender and sexuality studies which has made it difficult for me to read without a feminist lens or critique. Last week, while I thought the readings were helpful in terms of craft, I did not enjoy the majority of the speakers. This piece, because of its theme, tone and perspective captivated me in a way others do not. I'm conflicted because I do not think the gender identities of authors makes them intrinsically good or bad for me to read, but it's a pattern I've seen developing among the books I choose to read and blogs I follow. I'm curious to know if anyone else in class has had a similar experience.  

How to Poach an Egg

     I’ve got this casual infatuation with eggs. I love them, actually.  Their off-ness, the way they roll on a counter, the way they ooze and crackle in a pan, how they can thicken or poof a dish. They’re a cheap meal, they can be decorated, pickled or thrown. But I had never learned how to make the most beautiful of eggs, a perfect parcel of gooey-goodness: a poached egg.  Poached eggs are like truffles to me. They are a rare treat, only for special occasions. Eating them feels rich, decadent, covered in hollandaise or cooked in a homemade tomato sauce. 

     Last summer on a trip home to Minneapolis, I called up my go-to egg aficionado, my mother’s mother, Grandy.  She’s oddly egg-like, actually. Taupe-y, almost.  She has a lot of beige and white in her aesthetic, the kind of blue button-up wearing woman who has throw blankets all over the house and still has my great-grandmother’s sewing kit equipped with thimbles in her bedroom closet. I used to spend the night at her old place on the Mississippi when I was little and we’d watch “The Little Rascals” and sing about pickles and dollars. But on cue, five minutes in, Grandy began to slump on the couch, snoring, mumbling in her sleep. 

     In the morning we’d wake up to barely browning english muffin toast—this magical hybrid, airy like Thomas’ but not dense and chewy—and eggs fried quickly in too much butter with coarse salt and pepper. Sometimes she whipped up coveted egg-in-a-basket, a small window cut out in the toast with the bottom of a juice glass, the perfect frying hole for a small egg.  Sleepovers at Grandy’s were the only times I would eat breakfast. My own mother would force me to drink Carnation Breakfast Essentials, a disgusting ‘chocolate’ protein ‘shake’ that tasted like saw dust and cold Swiss Miss.  

     “Mom, this stuff makes me gag. I’m going to barf all over the bus and no one will talk to me.” 

     “Well, Hun, we’ll just have to home-school you until you start eating real breakfast.”

     I would dump the full glasses down the toilet or in my mom’s flower garden depending on how vengeful I felt. 

     But I could stomach Grandy’s eggs.  They didn’t have the cold, soggy features I had associated with breakfast.  They warmed me, got me going.  I began cooking eggs on my own.  Julia Child taught be how to make a French omelet—it’s in the wrists—I found I like my scrambled eggs barely cooked, as cloud-like as possible. I know how to tell when a zucchini frittata is browned but not overcooked.  I made the Barefoot Contessa’s quiche Lorainne, which, let’s be honest, contains mostly cream, not eggs. But I suck at poaching an egg. 

     I told myself the simplicity makes dropping eggs into boiling water so difficult. You can find tricks and secret techniques all over the internet, but none of them seemed to work.  The number of eggs I wasted, yolks bursting in bubbling water, egg whites turning into a bland egg-drop soup, has to be at least two dozen. 

     Grandy had the answer. 

     “Oh Han, I’m flattered you’d ask me. It’s easy, Sweety, come over on Saturday and I’ll show you.”

     We stood in her kitchen, surrounded by heart-shaped black and grey stones she had collected on the Mississippi and on the shores of Lake Superior.  Her spatulas a heart-shaped.  She has framed drawings her mother made in the 30s—my great grandmother drew the fashion designs for Vogue before cameras were commercialized. I never knew my great-grandmother. She had died very young, when Grandy was only nine.  On the counter we gathered a small, 2 quart pan and filled it halfway with water, a tablespoon of vinegar, a slotted spoon, some salt and two slices of english muffin bread.  We were listening to Etta James.

     “You’ve got to get the water just barely boiling,” Grandy said, pouring the vinegar into the pot. “Bubbling up the sides. It can’t be too hot or they will break.”

     “Did your mother ever teach you how to cook Grandy? Was she a good cook?”

     “Oh, she was a beautiful cook. Everything she did was beautiful—she was an artist. And she cooked like one.  The day she died she left meat out, defrosting on the counter.”

     A few months before my Mom had told me Grandy was writing an essay on her mother’s death and how it had affected her life. At twenty I still didn’t know my family history beyond two generations.

     “Grandy, will you tell me about her?”

     As the water heated up, when it was just right, she swirled the pan slightly with her wrist so that the liquid spun in a circle.  

     “I don’t know much, Han. I was so little.  So, so little. She made all my clothes—she loved sewing. I hated it. I wanted the clothes from the store, but all mine had perfect little buttons and pockets.”

     “But how did she die?” 

     She tapped the egg on the edge of the counter, held the cracked vessel over the pan, pushed her fingers through the shell, and lowered the gloppy mass into the eye of the tornado. 

     “She left a note one afternoon. I was at girl-scouts. When I got home, my father was on the steps. He told me the neighbors had invited me over for dinner. It was like she disappeared, it never felt like she died.”

     If your egg looks awful at this point, like an old man with a beard floating on his back, you’re doing it right. 

     “In her note she said she couldn’t be the wife and mother she ‘ought to be.’” Grandy said. “I didn’t know any of this until much, much later, when I was 16 and my step mother died suddenly, when I put the pieces together.”

     Poaching takes patience.  As the filmy strands of egg become opaque and less flimsy, gather the whites with the slotted spoon and tuck them loosely around the yolk. 

     I watched how Grandy made the egg into a neat little bundle with ease. On cue the bread popped up from the toaster. 

     “She was before her time, Hannah. You couldn’t do this. You couldn’t make eggs and be an artist.”
     She handed me the butter for the toast. 

     “You had to choose.  She wasn’t domestic enough. Wasn’t a mother enough. Cared about her own art more than her children.”

     She set the poached egg on its toast bed. 

     “Of course now we know that’s not true. She just wanted more than she was given. She wanted to get out.”

     I salted and cracked pepper on the tops of both the eggs. We sat down at the dinning room table.  It was before noon and the sun was just reaching the tops of the Minneapolis skyline.

     “Thank you for telling me, Grandy”

     “I could’ve told you sooner. We should know these things about each other. Share ourselves.”

     She lifted the butter knife over our breakfast, and sliced, letting all the insides out. 

Intended Publication: New York Times Magazine | Lives

Word Count: 1214

Maurice Sendak, Inspiration and Storytelling

     Just testing out the blog, but also wanted to post this video.  When talking about our favorite profiles in class, I immediately thought of this interview between Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are—who The New York Times called the "most important children’s book artist of the 20th century,"—from several months before he died.  This video is just a brief clip of the interview—which you can find in it's entirety here,—but like the illustrator of the clip I too was driving around aimlessly when the Fresh Air story came on the radio and stuck with me more than any profile piece I can remember.  They were supposed to be discussing Sendak's new book, but Gross and Sendak quickly transitioned to talking about life, writing and all the leaving that comes with dying.  If you like to laugh while sobbing, this one's for you.