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Black Chokecherry Syrup
When you live where we do, you cannot hope to landscape likes folks in a warm suburb. First of all, at 6,000 feet with a min temp of -30 Fahrenheit you can’t grow a lot of warmer climate plants. Second, the deer seem to eat everything else you do grow. So we’ve been looking and I think I’ve found a tree to add.I actually found it earlier when I was biking around the beautiful Round Valley and had to stop and go back to revel in the delicious fragrance. But I didn’t know what it was at the time. I do now.
It’s the black chokecherry.
It grows naturally up here. Has beautiful fragrant blossoms in the spring. And it produces fruit that can be made into a delicious syrup. Oh, the raccoons like it as well.
Now when you eat the raw berry, unless you eat it late in the fall, you’re in for an astringent, alum after-punch. But we picked the berries up a canyon behind our town after the first frosts. In fact, many of our berries were wrinkled. They just fine raw. Even Lilia, my pickiest eater, enjoyed them.
We picked about 1.25 gallon ice cream buckets of the stuff. Then we followed this recepie and made about 4 quarts of syrup.
- 3 cups chokecherry juice (see first step)
- 3 cups apple juice (not from a store, but cooked from apples)
- 6 1/2 cups sugar
- (I’ve heard some folks add 1/4 teaspoon almond extract for a stronger cherry taste)
- Wash chokecherries, place in a large kettle, barely cover with water and cook, covered, for about 30 minutes till the cherries are soft. Mash gently and strain the chokecherry juice through a sieve or cheesecloth.
- Do the same with the apples.
- Pour the juice into a large kettle; stir in the sugar.
- Cook on high, stirring constantly.
- Boil hard for 1 minute.
- Remove from heat and skim foam.
- To can: Pour hot syrup into sterilized hot jars to within 1/8th inch from top.
It’s absolutely delicious on pancakes.
Good Stuff! Three Days in Moscow
I just finished Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire by Bret Baier. It’s a New York Times bestseller that takes you into the world of Ronald Reagan, his rise to power in politics, and his role in ending the Cold War. And it does in a personable way with gentle humor throughout.
I enjoyed the fascinating behind-the-scene insights about the personalities involved and the clarity about what really happened. And how the book brings Reagan to life, as if he’s almost there. Along the way you’ll also get insight into Mikhail Gorbachev, the assassination attempt on Reagan, and more.
Baier is the chief political anchor for Fox News. In 2001, he became the station’s chief Pentagon correspondent and ended up traveling to Afghanistan 11 times and Iraq 13 times. In 2007, he became the station’s chief correspondent to the White House. More importantly, Baier seems to be one of the few journalists these days who is simply trying to get and report facts instead of spin. And that’s exactly what he’s done here.
If you like biographies or history, if you want to know how the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. stepped back from decades of mutually assured destruction, if you want to get a view into how diplomacy is done, then I think you’ll love this book. And you’ll probably love it even more if you can listen to the audio book version, read by Baier himself, which also includes a recording of Reagan’s speech to the students at Moscow State University. I listened to it via the Overdrive account my public library provides. Baier’s reading was terrific.
Update and The Shape-Changer’s Wife
Assassin is moving along. I’m heading into the last quarter of the book, which is where the fireworks start. I appreciate all of you who have been so patient. My goal is to end this arc of the series with a bang.
In the meantime, I’d like to recommend a fantasy novel. I enjoyed it many years ago and recently reread it, finding myself swept away with as much intrigue and delight as the first time.
It’s The Shape-Changer’s Wife by Sharon Shinn.
The story follows an aspiring wizard named Aubrey who is nearing the end of his training. He asks his mentor, the wizard Cyril, to teach him transmogrification—the art of changing form—but Cyril refuses. Aubrey protests. Cyril knows the spells. He has cast them himself. Still, he refuses.
Eventually, however, Cyril’s conscience gets the better of him. A well-rounded wizard should know every branch of magic, even the ones Cyril dislikes. So he writes to another wizard, a shape-changer named Glyrenden, and asks if he will take Aubrey as a student. Glyrenden agrees.
As Aubrey sets off, Cyril gives him a warning: “Learn everything he teaches you so well you can cast his own spells back at him. Glyrenden respects only those stronger than he is, and those he hates. If you cannot beat him, he will destroy you.”
And so begins the tale.
There’s mystery, wonder, betrayal, loss, battle, and even love. Best of all, it’s a complete stand-alone novel, a rarity these days.
If you’re hankering for a fantasy adventure that can be read in one volume, I think you’ll be very pleased with this one.
Happy reading,
John
Interview with Author Kelly Barnhill
Kelly Barnhill is a writer, teacher and Mom from Minneapolis. Her fiction has appeared in Postscripts, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld and other publications. She’s also published a number of high-interest science books for children. They have wonderful titles like Sewers and the Rats That Love Them, Blood-Sucking, Man-Eating Monsters, Sick, Nasty Medical Practices, and The Wee Book of Pee. She states that “I’ve had like nine million jobs before this, including being a janitor, a park ranger, a wildland firefighter and a bartender (among others).” Kelly’s first novel, The Mostly True Story of Jack, will be published this year. I had the opportunity to interview her about the book and writing, and have to say I had a delightful time. Enjoy!*
JB: I have to start by saying I love the title of your book. It raises all sorts of questions in my mind. Was that part of the inspiration of the story or was it something you had to arrive at after a lot of hard work?
KB: On the first question: Oh my. Titles. This title is the culmination of a whole lot of blood, sweat and tears. Okay, that’s not entirely true. Neither blood nor sweat, just tears – mine specifically. This book was originally called The Boy Without A Face, then Jack Be Quick, then The Curious Face in the Cornfield, then Uprooted, then the House at the Far Edge of Town, then the A Child of Earth and Magic, then…..oh lord, I can hardly remember.
The thing is, I typically don’t have a problem naming pieces. The title usually comes when I’ve untangled the first knot of text and the beating heart of the story is just starting to assert itself. This time, not so much. I was stymied from the beginning. I asked my kids their opinions, my agent, my agent’s assistant, every editor I’ve ever heard of. I asked my students, my Sunday School kids, kids on the block, kids at the park.
But that’s the thing when you have a title that doesn’t work – no amount of wanting it to be right will make it right. So I was bound to struggle and I was bound to hate – well, everything – because I just hadn’t hit on the right one yet. Until I did. And the fussing stopped (much to the great joy of everyone involved).
JB: (laughing) That’s hilarious. I can see the desperate author hounding some kid on a swing. Of course, it shows persistence. And I’m betting it isn’t just a title that’s defied you. Have you run into plot or character snags that have been especially troublesome? If so, what do you do as a writer, how do you approach that?
KB: Oh, clearly. I am one of those authors who does absolutely no planning before starting a project. Instead, I’ll get a little knot of text stuck in my head (usually when I’m out for a run) – something pleasing to the ear or gentle in the mind’s eye. And then I spend a whole lot of time figuring out the story behind it. What that means is that when I begin, I typically don’t know what exactly I’m writing. Is this a short story? A novel? A children’s book? A poem? It takes me a while to figure that out.
Insane, you might say. Absolutely barking mad, you might mutter.
Well, obviously, says I. But it’s fun.
Anyway, I did a lot of select-all-deletes over the course of this novel (sometimes, deletes to the tune of 300 pages), retaining the characters, retaining the little bright spots that I managed to scrawl onto some note cards, but recomposing largely from memory, and re-engaging with the story in a fresh, new place.
It’s a process I can’t really recommend. Except that I do. Whole-heartedly. There’s something thrilling about entering into a manuscript that doesn’t have any mistakes in it yet. Of course, it typically doesn’t have any words in it either at that point, but never mind.
Along the way I’ve had to remove some fairly major characters, which forced me to completely re-imagine and recompose the book (again), but as I did so, the story was better, the writing was better, and I learned a lot doing it. So, I don’t like to call them “snags”. I like to call them “learning opportunities”. (Okay, fine, I also call them “throw-my-computer-in-the-creek-while-shouting-obscenities moments” but that’s not very nice to talk about.)
JB: Kelly, I have to say, to find a simmering joy in the dreaded select-all-delete (folks, she’s wild, WILD!) Although I will say that starting a new project is always a thrill for me as well. So maybe we’re not too far apart, although I do enjoy my planning. So, what was the knot of text that started this story? Is it even there anymore? And how did it develop into the fantastic magic that’s at the heart of the tale? (Folks, as an aside, I have to tell you that the magic in this book is unlike anything I’ve read.)
KB: Okay, you asked for it. Here is the original page. I’ll make the letters green, just because:
Outside the house, a girl stood on the darkening street looking up. Her hands were shoved deep in the pockets of her ratty cut-offs, and her red-brown curls struggled out of the long braid that hung down the length of her back. Her bike lay on its side on the ground, the front wheel still slowly spinning around and around, until it finally stopped.
Two boys walked slowly down the quiet street, their sneakered feet scarcely whispering against the pavement. One boy wore a bright orange seed cap over his even brighter blonde hair. He smiled at the girl as they approached. The other boy was very tall and he walked with a limp. Half of his face was obscured in a red knot of scars that bloomed over his skin like roses. He kept his eyes on the ground and did not speak. He never spoke. Both boys stood next to the girl. The boy with the cap tilted his chin towards the attic.
“That kid get in today?” he asked, his eyes on the silhouette of the stranger in the window.
“Yep,” the girl said.
“Think he knows?” He turned to face the girl. His face, handsome and tan from so much time out of doors, shone in the last weak rays of the orange and pink sky.
“How could he?” she asked. She reached over to the boy on her left, who was taller than her, though his pronounced slouch made it difficult to tell. She put her arm around his shoulder, and he, in turn, laid his face, bad side down, good side up, on hers. Only when they stood like this, could people see that they were brother and sister. “But he will,” she said.
I wrote this while on a positively lovely run through Fort Snelling State Park in Minnesota. Well, that’s not exactly true. I thought it while I was running. I wrote it when I got home. But that’s how a lot of stories start for me – a bit of fluff twists into a thread and thickens to a cord and winds into a knot. And then I have a hell of a time figuring out where the thing leads.
Now, that actually wasn’t everything that led me to JACK. There was another bit that I can’t find anywhere that was a conversation between a kid and his mom as they drove in a rental car towards a farm house in Iowa, where the kid would be staying while his parents worked through the details of their divorce. I didn’t realize that the kids on the street would occupy the same story as the kid in the car. Indeed, I had no idea that the kids on the street were talking about the kid in the car. I also had no idea that I was writing a book with magic in it either. That was a surprise.
But to answer your earlier question, neither the conversation nor the bit about the kids looking at the house are in the book anymore, though little images and descriptions have drifted into the later drafts and taken root. That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows. And sometimes the bits of your novel that once were broken and wobbly and weak transform into some very pretty bits of fiction. It’s the transformation that gets us every time – or me, anyway. Honestly, it’s why I keep coming back to the page: I like change.
And as far as the magic at the heart of the story – I can’t really say. I think that the magic was simply there, waiting for me to find it. Everything I know about the strange history of that town, the terrible events that happened in the past and the necessity for Jack and his friends to set things right – I only discovered those things by accident. I discovered them because I cared about Jack, and cared about his loneliness and his lack of place, and I wanted to understand him. (And yes, I totally get it that he’s not real, but in the end that doesn’t really matter, does it? I’m a mother, and a child in need is a child in need.)
(Did I even answer your question? Why is it that every question sends me tumbling in all directions? I think I might be a dreadful interviewee. Maybe you should ask me easier questions. Like about darning socks.)
JB: (laughing) You’re a wonderful interviewee. I love these answers. And I think my readers will appreciate very much what you’ve shared. In fact, I’m betting they’d want me to keep asking questions for quite some time, but I’ll limit myself to two more. First, the prose of your book has a flow to it. I haven’t pinpointed what it’s doing yet (I have noticed some parallelisms), but the prose is compelling. Just picks you up and carries you along. Is that flow important to you? Do you labor over it, or is it just something you enjoy, maybe seek out in other authors, and, therefore, seems to come naturally? Tell us your thoughts on this.
KB: Oh, John, I am so glad you asked me this question! (Also, that you noticed, because I worked really hard on it!)
Let me back up before answering that, though, because I think it’s really hard to separate how a writer builds text and uses words from how they think. There are people on earth – lots of them – who are visual thinkers. I am not one of them. In fact, I am not a visual thinker at all. Even now, when my house is quiet and my kids are at school, it is difficult for me to call up a mental image of their faces – but the texture and timbre of their voices is with me all the time. And it’s always been like that for me as a reader – I’m much more attracted to books with a strong aural sensibility. I like prose that is rhythmic and rich. I think language works best when it is a sensual experience – not just in what it evokes (though that’s clearly important) but how it feels in the mouth, how it feels in the ear.
Now I think part of the reason for this is that, as a little girl, I was a delayed reader. And when I started reading, I was stuck in the bottom group (they never tell you you’re in the bottom group, but oh! As children we know. We know!). This is not to say I wasn’t experiencing and engaging with stories. Every night my dad read to us – first the Grimm stories, then Narnia, then Tolkein, then Dickens. I also had a little fisher-price record player (that I bought at a garage sale with my own money, so of course I thought it was awesome) and a bunch of dramatized books on records – Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Watership Down, Call it Courage, Anne of Green Gables, and some others that I can’t remember.I would listen to those things so often that my siblings threatened to throw my record player out the window. So I’d lock myself in the closet and listen some more. And even now, I love stories out loud. My husband and I read to one another every night, I read to my kids, and I read my own work out loud as I revise, over and over and over again.
My book sounds the way it does because I’ve read that thing out loud, cover to cover, approximately nine million times. Actually, that might be a conservative estimate. I want my stories to feel like a whisper on the skin, an insistent voice that you can’t shake. Now, mind you, I’ll probably never actually reach that goal, but it’s good having a target, anyway.
JB: Wow. That’s lovely. You know, I’m not a style over substance guy, but I like sound. I’m attracted to prose that sings, even if it’s softly. This seems to be what you’re suggesting you look for. Not prose that necessarily stands up and shouts for people to look at it. But prose that, well, as you said, is a whisper on the skin. Oh, there’s a whole interview right there. In fact, I think, if you’ll agree, I’m going to have you back, maybe around the time Jack comes out to discuss that. In the meantime, I see you have a whole bunch of projects slated to come out. The Final Exile of the Insect King is another killer title. But Iron Hearted Violet is the one coming out next after Jack. Tells us about that one or anything else you think readers should know about. And since Jack is a ways off, tell us which of your published stories you’d suggest readers try while they’re waiting. I see a whole bunch you’ve linked to on your site.
KB: Thanks John! This has been really fun, and I’d love to pop back over to your corner of the internets around launch-time (August 2! Mark your calendars!).
Anyone who is interested in reading any of my fiction online can head over to my blog for a list of links (www.kellybarnhill.com). And any of you who are interested in buying some pretty cool collections could check out Sybil’s Garage #7, which has my story “The Dead Boy’s Last Poem” or Apex’s recent anthology Dark Faith, which has my story “Hush”. Another story that I feel pretty good about is called “The Taxidermist’s Other Wife”, which appeared on Clarkesworld in December. That particular story came from an experience I had up in northern Minnesota (about ten miles south of the Canadian border), when I was teaching a fiction workshop to a bunch of hockey-playing high school seniors. One boy was telling me that it took him over an hour each way to get from home to school and back again. He said he’d been doing that for the last six years, ever since his town closed down the school. I asked him if all the kids in his town had to make the same kind of crazy commute, and he said, “Those of us who’re left, sure. There’s not many of us anymore. You kill the school, you kill the town. Everyone knows that.” The idea that the lifeblood of a town is bound up in its school – and indeed, that a town can be killed, stuck with me, and transformed into an odd, mournful little piece. There is a deep love as well as a devastating sorrow that binds the people of my beautiful (and very cold) state to the land that surrounds them – and I feel that this story is the closest I’ve ever come to actually pinning those twin emotions down onto the page.
As for Iron-Hearted Violet – that has been a devilishly tricky book to write, but I’m pretty happy with it. How to describe it? Hmmm. It’s the story of a girl who unwittingly releases an imprisoned, wicked god, and must sacrifice all that she knows and all that she loves in order to stop it from enslaving her – and every – world. There are banned stories and dragons with missing hearts and a grieving girl and friendship and a magic book and sleeping gods and a multitude of universes gathering in great foamy waves and crashing against the shore. Mostly, getting the language and tone just right was incredibly tricky, and I went through something like a million drafts, so for me to say that I’m feeling happy with it is a pretty big deal.
JB: Well, that gives us all some great things to try out. I’m personally looking forward to Jack.
*
John Sez: now there is someone who just loves to write. I love her sense of adventure in discovering the story and her willingness to generate a lot of stuff to get to the final story. And the sound of her prose. Not that all books have to have this, but it is nice. Furthermore, Kelly was just enjoyable to talk to. That fun voice comes out in her blog. She’s going to be someone to watch. In the meantime, for the rest of us, it’s back to work.
LINKS
How to be a hero in your own house
I have four daughters.
My four daughters have long hair.
That long hair finds its way into our drains. (Yes, despite our telling them to get it into that thing called a waste basket.)
Said hair might flow down the pipes. But said hair does not. Life is not that easy. Instead, some evil house spirit catches the hair just as it begins its voyage and turns it from a luscious thing of beauty into a gunky demon of drain death.
You would think that Drano could defeat this black magic. But Drano gets its butt kicked every time. Drano is in the pee-wee league against this thing. Drano is like a kitten. And gunk demons don’t listen to kittens.
So for the last few years, we’d blast with Drano and then still have to stand up to our calves in water when we took a shower. Or wait as the sink decided it might finally slowly empty and leave soap scum, whiskers, and toothpaste on the sides for everyone’s viewing pleasure. And then we had to do the slow clean (I hate the slow clean).
Recently, I was strolling along in a hardware store and saw this.
Click on the picture. Get a good look. I bought ye handy yellow flex sword. And I did verily slay the monster lurking in every drain in our house.
I am the MAN!
If you have drain issues, let me suggest you be the hero and buy your own sword. It’s called the Zip-It drain cleaning tool. If you’re a weird-o, in addition to being the hero, you can also use it to draw forth disgusting things to scare nieces and nephews with. Just saying.
Good Stuff! Simply Three
The joy of music. Pure, unadulterated joy–this is what I recently stumbled across on YouTube.
I was watching the The Piano Guys and thought I saw something new from them. I clicked, but it wasn’t The Piano Guys. It was Simply Three doing a cover version of the popular “Wake Me Up” by Avicii.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a “cover” or “cover version” is a reworking, updating, or interpretation of an existing song. And this cover simply blew me away.
Simply Three is an electrifying trio made up of cellist Zack Clark, bassist Nicholas Villalobos, and violinist Glen McDaniel, although they have switched in other violinists, including Alex Weill and Olivia Lemmelin. But don’t let the instruments fool you–this isn’t some stuffy classical music gig. And it’s not muzak in the elevator. Not even close.
They are doing what Lindsey Stirling and The Piano Guys are doing: taking modern songs in wonderful new directions and, in the process, making these classical instruments cool again.
I went on to watch a number of their other covers, and then I had to purchase the songs because I simply had to be able to listen to their great beats and interpretations on the road.
Here’s their cover of “Wake Me Up.” The joy Zack Clark (the cellist) exhibits sells the whole thing for me.
Here is their cover of “Demons” by Imagine Dragons.
And finally their cover of “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic.
If you like them, you can get each of these on Amazon for less than a buck with these links:
- “Wake Me Up” by Simply Three
- “Demons” by Simply Three
- “Counting Stars” by Simply Three
Buying them not only supports the artists, but it lets them know there’s a demand for it and encourages them to make more. And I hope they make more.
***
By the way, “Counting Stars” has some interesting lyrics. Ryan Tedder, the songwriter, is a professed Christian. He grew up in a Charismatic household and graduated from Oral Roberts University.
However, you might look at some of the lyrics and think he’s given all that faith up.
I feel something so right
Doing the wrong thing
I feel something so wrong
Doing the right thing
I could lie, could lie, could lie
Everything that kills me makes me feel aliveBut you need to look at the lyrics in context of the rest of the song and the artist’s statements about the song to see he’s singing about something totally different.
Some poets, and songwriters are poets (song is where poetry lives these days), think being obscure is cool. Tedder follows that more obscure approach in this song, which is unlike the immediate clarity he put into the lyrics of the fantastic “Halo,” performed by Beyonce, or his own OneRepublic’s “Apologize.”
Sometimes the artist writing gnomic lyrics doesn’t want to pin down a message for the listener—they think it’s cool for each person to make up their own message (I prefer clarity). Other times they do have a message, but they want the listener to work for it, and so they try to be subtle. Or sometimes they simply goof and don’t realize their lyrics are being so vague.
I have no idea which path Tedder was trying to take with these lyrics, but I do know that he’s made statements about the song. And these statements give us a guide.
In an interview with 5280, the Denver magazine (Denver is where Tedder lives) we get the first glimpse.
At 15, he began writing his own songs. “I obsessed over music and just loved it,” Tedder says. “But I never considered it as a career. Where I grew up you go to high school, you go to college, you find a wife in college, you get married, you have 2.3 kids, and if that hasn’t all happened by the time you’re 24, some people think there’s something wrong with you—or the assumption is that maybe you’re not into the opposite sex.”
But he couldn’t keep away.
Back in Oklahoma, at Oral Roberts University, the largest charismatic Christian university in the world, Tedder majored in public relations and advertising. At least that’s what his diploma says. Based on the time he put into sneaking into the Timko-Barton Performance Hall’s piano rooms, he probably could have been a double major. He spent hours on the piano and the guitar deconstructing his favorite albums—like Eric Clapton and B.B. King’s Riding with the King—figuring out the chords and then trying to write new songs using those same chords. He was skipping classes—even meals—to write songs.
No one knew. Not friends. Not his roommate. He sang in secret. He was in the school choir, but his friends always thought it was odd that a person who didn’t seem overly musically inclined would be taking a singing class. When he was in one of the piano rooms he would tape a piece of notebook paper over the small window in the door so that no one could see him.
Tedder says there were two reasons he hid his passion. The first was that he believed there were so many bad singers and bad songs in the world that he didn’t want to add to the noise. He wanted to be certain he would be successful before he revealed himself. The second reason was more deep-seated: Being raised in a religious home, Tedder had been taught that there was a purpose for his life, and that because God had ordained that purpose, he should live the life expected of him—one that was pious and humble. “Deciding you want to go into the music business is about the most narcissistic thing in the world,” Tedder says. “I had this constant battle—and to some degree I still do.”
So Tedder felt “wrong” about songwriting. But he eventually began to see it as his gift to share.
In an interview with Billboard magazine, we learn that he wants his OneRepublic to sing about different themes than the norm.
Billboard: Given “Counting Stars”‘ uplifting, faith-based message, it must be gratifying to be connecting with such a meaningful song.
Tedder: I think it’s our responsibility as a band, and what separates us from everyone else. I took that from being a fan of U2 for two decades now, since “Achtung Baby.” To this day, they might be the only band on that level who sings about things other than just boy-girl troubles or the kind of selfish, “I’m a badass” stuff. I’ve spoken with Bono about this when we toured with him, and he said the same thing. I felt a responsibility to actually write and sing about things that have a level of human gravity to them. If everybody else sings about sex and love and lust and money, then somebody’s gotta be singing about life and faith and hope and things of that nature.
So if “Counting Stars” isn’t about sex, lust, and money, what’s it about?
In another interview with Radio.com, he indicated that the whole counting stars bit was for anyone who loses sleep wondering how they’re going to be able to afford their rent or provide for their family. When he was first starting out, things were rough.
“A lot of time I just lay in bed awake, stressing out,” Tedder said. “Everybody does it. And I just thought, I can’t wait until I’m counting stars and not counting dollars anymore. Things will be so much better.”
To me, it’s clear that Tedder is singing about his story. And he’s singing for people like him who have a passion, but society says it’s not the practical thing to follow or dedicate your life to. Songwriting is what makes him feel alive. Furthermore, he had flashing signs indicating that if he sought, he would find—in other words, it was the thing God wanted him to do. And he just had to have hope, a four-letter word for those who are practical- and money-minded, and follow that passion.
We can argue the merits of that follow-your-passion message, but I think we’re all happy Tedder followed his.
***
And while we’re talking about the joy of music, how about this baritone saxophone and drum.
