“Food is a beautiful thing because it connects us to the natural world and shows us our place in it. When you really geek out on one thing that you love, you feel more connected to the whole process.”

Lots of great books have been written about living off the land, but they all seem to me too much of a pastoral pipe dream. “Sure,” I always think, “if I had all the time and space and money in the world, and was a totally perfect person.” Or, apparently, if I were Novella Carpenter. She started her farm, complete with gardens and livestock, in an abandoned lot in Oakland, California. Green acres, it is not. She raises her piglets among prostitutes, her shallots amidst shootouts. She makes mistakes. She gets tired, angry, even murderous. This is a chick I could hang out with.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is her chronicle of Ghost Town Farm from inception to success—and pig to prosciutto. With a sense of humor and a marked lack of sanctimony, she shares her adventures as a locavore, dumpster diver, farmer, butcher, and neighbor to some of the quirkiest real-life characters imaginable. And it’s all smartly contextualized with a light touch of agricultural history and a debt of gratitude to her hippie upbringing. Read the first chapter here, and see why The New York Times liked it almost as much as I did. Then hear it straight from the farmer’s mouth: Read more »

“I didn’t start out to do this intentionally, but as I wrote, the structure of the narrative took the shape of a trip, moving from one place to the next, sometimes by plan, sometimes by whim, just as we move around in actual travel…in that sense, the shape of the book reflects its subject. “

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new memoir, Not Now, Voyager, weighs the pros and cons of travel as she relates her own misadventures around the globe. Schwartz’s mixed feelings about leaving home change in the telling of her personal history, and her memoir in itself comes to represent a journey. The author recently sat down and answered a few of my questions on her writing.

Not Now, Voyager could be called an anti-travel polemic. Is that too extreme? How would you describe it?
When I first began writing it, it did feel like an anti-travel polemic. I’d just returned from a trip I really didn’t feel like making, and was feeling rather grumpy about traveling in general. But as I continued writing, I realized that was much too narrow a view. I’d had some trips that were quite wonderful, and probably I’d have some good trips in my future. And the pleasures of travel are undeniable. So the book shifted into an exploration of travel—why people keep running around, what they’re seeking and what they’re fleeing, what they discover, and above all, why I find it so difficult and anxiety producing. It became a kind of memoir seen through the lens of travel. Read more »

The following is an excerpt from Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new memoir, Not Now, Voyager. Be sure to read Rebecca Touger’s interview with the author on writing, travel, and living abroad.

Orkos

I woke abruptly, to a darkness so thick I could breathe it in. My mind was ominously alert, none of that blurry, dream-clogged puzzlement that usually comes with the return of consciousness. It was an alertness I often wished for in daylight—sharp, energetic, skimming through the past hours, the boat trip, the long taxi ride through flat scrubby countryside under a wide white sky, everything that had brought me here. I knew exactly where I was. I remembered the light switch on the bedside lamp even though this was a new place, my first night. I switched it on, but nothing happened. I remembered a row of square plastic buttons on the bed’s headboard and fumbled around until I located them. None of them produced any light.

Now I was baffled, with panic creeping towards me like a little battalion of mice. I got up and groped my way around the room, feeling for the furniture—there wasn’t much of it, as I recalled. It was pitch black and I had no idea what time it was. Read more »

“I love to write about life, from an offbeat but incredibly human perspective. I’m not one of those humorists who view everything from a distance, or objectify things. I’m emotional.”

Wade Rouse headed for the woods with a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and a vision of remaking himself in rural life. He and his partner Gary would leave fast-paced jobs and lives in the city to live off the land in rural Michigan, detaching themselves from materialism and pop culture and really expensive shoes. Rouse wanted to create what he called “Wade’s Walden,” and he set goals to achieve emotional and spiritual fulfillment in the woods.

Needless to say, things didn’t exactly go according to plan. Life lessons are learned (you cannot clean eggs in the dishwasher) and locals are won over (rednecks love a good karaoke performance). Rouse describes himself as the world’s unlikeliest Thoreau, but even Thoreau had his false starts (like the 300 acres of the Concord Woods he accidentally burned to the ground in 1844). Rouse is persistent, and the resulting account of his great experiment is At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream. The memoir, subtitled “Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life,” is sweet, good-natured, and oftentimes hilarious.

I recently asked Wade Rouse a few questions about the book, his writing process, the life he hoped to find in rural Michigan—and the life he actually found. Read more »

The following is an excerpt from Wade Rouse’s new memoir, At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream. Be sure to check out our interview with him about the book, his writing process, and life without designer shoes.

Coonskin Cap

There’s a raccoon on my head.

And I don’t particularly look good in hats.

Especially when they’re still moving.

I certainly wish this were one of those “Hey, look at me standing here on vacation in Wall Drug wearing a fifteen-dollar coonskin cap pretending to be Daniel Boone, so hurry up and take the goddamn picture!” moments, but it’s not.

No, my cap is very much alive, very much pissed off, and very much sporting a bad stink, a head filled with razor fangs, and a lot of painfully sharp claws.

But I guess I’d be pissed off, too, if someone interrupted my late-night dinner reservation. Read more »

“I wanted to tell the story that would be accurate, true to the lives and deaths of my Marine brothers, and give a non-military reader an honest, nonjudgmental look at what might have happened if he’d gotten swept up into the events of the time as I did.”

Several years ago, Jack McLean began transcribing the over one hundred letters he had sent home to his family while serving in the Marine Corps. He was hoping to pass the story on to his daughters. Shortly after, he let a few fellow veterans read some of them and realized that he had something important on his hands that needed to be shared. Deciding that the book had to be completed, Jack did what any disciplined Marine/writer would do: He put the rest of his life on hold and moved into a friend’s garage until the job was done. The result was Loon: A Marine Story, Jack’s fascinating first-person account of his long and unpredictable journey from confused teenager to Marine to, finally, student at Harvard University.

I recently sat down for an IM conversation with Jack about his writing process, revisiting old memories, and his editor’s demands for full disclosure.

Chris Teja: What made you want to share your story?
Jack McLean: The book began as a simple legacy for my three daughters. As I wrote and several years passed, I realized that it was having a powerful impact on Vietnam Veterans and their families.

You were sharing it with other Veterans while you were writing it?
Yes. I began my transcribing the 100+ letters home that I’d written while in the Marine corps from 1966 to 1968. I then shared them with several of my Charlie Company buddies that I’d recently found. This was six or seven years ago. They then passed virally through families, kids, etc., and they always came back saying they wanted more. So I kept writing and sharing along the way. Read more »

The following is an excerpt from Loon: A Marine Story, Jack McLean’s memoir about joining the Marine Corps in the mid-sixties. Be sure to check out Chris Teja’s interview with McLean.

Chapter One

June 6, 1968.

It had already been a long day, and dawn had yet to break.

On his hands and knees, Bill Matthews scampered up over loose rocks and jumped into Bill Negron’s hole. Out of breath, he gasped, “They’re diggin’ in. They’re right in front of my hole, Skipper. I can hear ’em.—They’re all over the fuckin’ place.”

“Now, hang on, marine. Cool it. Catch your breath. Who’s digging in and where?” Negron was calm.

“The gooks, for chrissake. The NVA, just like they did at Con Thien before they came through the wire, and, in case you haven’t noticed, we ain’t got no fuckin’ wire…sir.” Matthews caught his slight sarcasm and tried to temper it. Read more »

Danzy Senna’s new memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, is an account of a childhood complicated by divorce and racial identity, and of a search through both sides of her family’s history for answers. She recently sat down and answered a few of Rebecca Touger’s questions on her family, her writing, and the man reshaping the dialogue on racial politics, Barack Obama. -Elizabeth Minkel

Danzy Senna; photo credit: Anne Fishbein

When did you first hear the folk song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Why did you choose it for your title?
Many years ago I heard the haunted Leadbelly song, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Black Girl)?” I had just begun working on my book—which I think of in some ways as a history book passing as a memoir—and the song reminded me of my grandmother. She was in many ways the catalyst for this book. She was a secretive and brilliant black woman who had all these children children by an unknown father or fathers—and the lonely quality to the song really made me think of her. Plus, she was a musician from the south who could play any kind of music—and I wanted to pay homage to the southern black music tradition that she grew out of. Read more »

The following is the opening passage from Danzy Senna’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night: A Personal History. The memoir chronicles her family’s history and their complicated racial identities. And be sure to read Rebecca Touger’s interview with Senna.

In 1975 my mother left my father for the last time. We fled to Guilford, Connecticut. It was a rich town, but we rented an apartment in a tenement that the town’s residents referred to only as “the welfare house.” The backyard was a heap of dead cars. We lived on the second floor. Below us lived the town’s other nonwhite residents, a Korean war bride and her two half-Italian sons. Beside them lived an obese white woman and her teenage son.

I don’t know if we were officially hiding out from my father there—or if he knew where we were all that time. In my memory it seems that a long time passed before we saw him again, long enough for me to forget him. And I remember the day he reappeared. I was five, and I heard the doorbell ring. I raced in bare feet to see who was there. I saw, at the bottom of the dimly lit stairwell, a man. His face was hidden in the shadows, but I could make out black curls, light brown skin. Read more »

“A memoirist friend of mine told me that good memoirs are written not just to tell a story, but to work something out in your own life, something that’s as yet unresolved.”

Andy Raskin’s new book would best be called “unique.” Consider: How many memoirs have you recently read in which the author attempts to control a crippling tendency toward serial infidelity by embarking on a vision quest to seek the counsel of Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen noodles? Not so many, I’d dare to guess.

The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life (read an excerpt) is indeed a tale rife with extreme behavior: Raskin bounces from bed to bed like a latter-day Wilt Chamberlain. More than once, he flies to Japan on a moment’s notice in hopes of ambushing his way into a meeting with one of Japan’s most famous and wealthiest businessmen. He routinely frequents Japanese eateries whose chefs insist on strict adherence to codes—and culinary rites of passage—so severe as to seem abusive.

I am, myself, no stranger to extreme and mystifying habits. It would be a conservative estimate to say that I’ve eaten about five bricks of instant ramen noodles a week, on an average, for the past 20 years—and not, mind you, out of budgetary need, but as something of a lifestyle choice. For this reason, the SMITH editors apparently considered me a perfect interview pairing for Raskin. At the very least, I figured, we could bond over a shared love of saturated fats. Read more »