Happy Lughnasadh
Willa Cather, fresh figs, and writing space
Or fig season, as we call it at my house.
If I were in Ireland or some other Celtic locale, I’d have observed Lughnasadh, the Gaelic festival that welcomes the start of the harvest season, yesterday. (It’s a bank holiday in Ireland, for one thing.) Here in Southeast DC, we’re celebrating our own harvest rituals as midsummer tips toward fall.
The human residents of the city don’t love the hot, humid weather, but my backyard basil plants sure do, which means batches of fresh-from-the-garden pesto. The cherry tomatoes are going gangbusters in the community garden.
And the fig tree in our front yard has exploded, once again, with figs. They don’t hang around for long, but that short peak of perfection makes them even more special. The birds and squirrels think so too. Luckily, the tree produces enough fruit for everybody who wants some.
I admire the fig tree. Now at least twice my height, it got its start in our yard about 15 years ago as a two-foot-high sapling from the local garden store. My husband planted it in a sunny spot, and we watched it grow and grow—until an epic snowstorm (remember those?) half-killed it. I took the drastic step of pruning off the dead half. We hoped for the best but braced for the worst. And it came roaring back. There’s a writing/editing analogy in there that I won’t torture you with. I’m too busy enjoying the figs while they last.
I have ambitions to make fig jam (please share recipes if you have faves!), but in the meantime I discovered an amazingly easy and delicious thing to do with fresh figs. This recipe from The Kitchn for yogurt with caramelized figs takes all of 10 minutes to put together, and it’s fancy-delicious and company-worthy—but why save it for company? Fresh figs don’t linger. Enjoy them while they’re here.
What I’ve been up to lately:
I spent part of the spring doing interviews for a Fine Books & Collections feature on Willa Cather’s sesquicentennial. I used Cather’s peripatetic life—her childhood in Virginia and then in Nebraska, her working days in Pittsburgh and then New York, her travels in the Southwest—as a throughline for the piece, which ran in the summer 2023 issue of the magazine. (The story’s not posted online, alas, but if you’re so inclined, you can buy a copy of the issue for $8.)
The Cather story gave me a chance to dust off my humanities-reporter hat and get on the horn with scholars, curators, and archivists working on different facets of Cather’s life and career. They included several folks at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, home to the Willa Cather Archive. In 2013, when I was still at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I wrote about their effort to digitize and annotate Cather’s letters. That work’s been chugging along for a decade, and it was neat to hear how much progress they’ve made in those ten years:
As of this spring, about 2,600 out of some 3,000 known letters had been scanned, annotated, and posted online. The work “probably will never really end, because new letters keep getting discovered,” said Andrew Jewell, professor of digital projects in the UNL libraries, the archive’s home. “There are likely to be sig- nificant collections of Cather materials that have not yet come to light.”
[snip]
The archive team has added valuable context, too, notably annotations about people, events, and places in Cather’s vast social and creative world. A familiar figure like Shakespeare gets a brief note, while a more obscure person, like a Bohemian immigrant neighbor, gets “a more elegant, lengthier annotation to give a full picture of what that woman’s life looked like,” said [Emily J.] Rau. [She’s the archive’s current editor and an assistant prof of DH at the UNL libraries.]…
Such recovery work supports Cather’s appeal as a writer, “with compassion and attention and carefulness about the Great Plains and the Eastern European immigrants trying to make lives here, especially the women,” Rau said.
This summer I came to the realization that I need to get out of my house more. It’s been almost three years since my first book came out, and I have a couple of next-book ideas I want to nudge along in the months ahead.
Coffee shops have long been my go-to third places when I want to get work done, and I’m not giving them up. (I’m parked at one now.) But sometimes I need less white noise and fewer distractions. I don’t have a dedicated home office at the moment. So I signed up for the DC Writers Room, a co-working space across town where a number of writer friends have worked from time to time. It’s a trek (honestly not a terrible one, since it’s almost door-to-door via Metro), but the chance to unplug and focus, and to encounter other writers toiling quietly away, has been worth the commute.
What I’m watching/reading:
Another bumper crop this season: big films meant to be seen in an actual theater. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of going back to the movies this summer. (Another communal experience worth keeping alive.) So far I’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part I, and Barbie, all worth the price of admission. Next up: Oppenheimer.
My reading’s been eclectic, as it usually is: some YA, some SFF, a literary classic or two, some Serious Nonfiction and some less serious NF too. I post mini reviews on my Instagram feed if you’re curious. I can’t tell you what I’m reading at the moment because it’s for a review assignment (yay!).
A forthcoming book I’m excited about: No Meat Required: The Cultural History & Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy.
The vegan diet used to be associated only with eccentric hippies and tofu-loving activists who shop at co-ops and live on compounds. We’ve come a long way since then. Now, fine-dining restaurants like Eleven Madison Park cater to chic upscale clientele with a plant-based menu, and Impossible Whoppers are available at Burger King. But can plant-based food keep its historical anti-capitalist energies if it goes mainstream? And does it need to?
Pub date is Aug. 15. Check it out.
A(nother) social media update:
The Muskmelon keeps thinking up new ways to mess up Twitter. I’m still there, kind of, only because it remains a useful way to share and absorb information, but I’m far less actively engaged than I used to be. Which makes me sad. Twitter really did matter, in substantial as well as frivolous and sometimes dangerous ways, and I mourn that.
FWIW, I agree with Platformer founder and editor Casey Newton’s assessment that EM’s ownership of Twitter has been a deliberate act of destruction, the ransacking of what has been an essential (though fraught) public space. Newton argues that to ask why EM bought it in the first place
misses the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings; and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns; so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.
What will replace it? Trying to answer that question has created platform fatigue for me and a lot of other people as we try out alternative sites. Many have proved disappointing or worse, with too few good conversations and too little moderation.
I have some hopes for Bluesky, which I’ve now joined; come find me there (@jenhoward.bsky.social). You can also find me on Mastodon and, as I mentioned above, on Instagram.
Happy harvesting,
Cheers,
Jen
Jen- I’ve always wondered how DC is now getting along with their coworking space. As it seems, they’ve stuck with their promise. Hope you’re staying warm this winter.