Nancy Rommelmann

Advice to a Young Freelancer

I posted a new essay on Medium.com, Advice to a Young Freelancer. Sample Q & A:

How do you find your stories?

I sometimes find story ideas in the Metro section of the newspaper, one-inch items with headlines like, “Man Nails Girlfriend’s Fish to Floor.” The short-shrift given to these stories will spark my wondering, what is this about? Usually the story doesn’t make complete sense; I want to look more deeply. I wrote about mushroom foragers in Alaska after reading one line about them in Bon Appetit. The reference started an itch that I needed to scratch; the scratch bloomed to a topic, the topic to a pitch, the pitch to a story. Follow that itch.

I am loving Medium.com, and am grateful to Hillary Johnson for the invitation, and for her brilliant essays, and for the Dymaxicon collection she built on Medium, as captivating to me as the grand department stores of my New York City childhood, the ceilings so high, and everything gleaming, perfumes and gossamar scarves and brass elevators going up.

How Others See You - Concrete Blonde Edition

Today received an email from Michael Totten, with the below video embedded, and the message, "It sounds like the soundtrack to a book you might write, especially the second two-thirds."

Thank you Michael xx

So This Is Love

Last night, we had our all-staff-and-friends Ristretto holiday party. Usually, we do this at a dive bar, keep an open tab, get some food and karaoke. This year, it was not an option, for financial reasons; because we were busy opening a third location; because I was flying back and forth across the country, and because the week between Christmas and New Year's, Din and I were both hacking our brains out. The staff was fine with no bash, except they kept saying, "We can just do it at your house, it will be better, we will bring everything." And we thought, yes, great, but not this week, we are just so sick...

About a week ago, I got a text from Rachel Goldstein, our first-ever employee, now manager and art curator at the Williams cafe. She wanted to set a date for the party -- how about the 7th? I thought it was a little funny, not really Rachel's style to text, but I was grateful: it was on. The staff, again, kept saying, you guys don't have to do anything; we're going to bring everything. Well, okay!

Din and I really laid in very little. I made two spanokopita and some cookies. He bought three bottles of booze and some ice. And we had a case of cheap wine. And the music turned on. At 6:45, our crew started to arrive: Stephen with homemade salsa, Steve with wine; a few bottles of bourbon appeared. Alyssa carried in the best cake ever made in the history of cakedom. They were homemade salted truffles from Natalie and Rachel; there were homemade empanadas from Josh and his girlfriend Anna. Homemade bread, homemade gin, bourbon; a killer mac & cheese; beer. Wine. More wine. Champagne. Friends. The house was glowing. It was full, twenty of us crammed in the kitchen...

"Rommelmann! Come spend some time in the fucking living room." This, from Josh Gibby. Okay! We started talking about marriage; we were in Josh and Heather's wedding, about how...

Ting ting ting ting ting!

Someone was tapping a glass. It was Natalie, standing in front of the stereo, calling for quiet. Forty people quieted down. I noticed they were all already gathered around, and behind her, Dave Allen was shooting video with his phone.

I can't remember her exact words, so here is a paraphrase:

"We are here tonight at Nancy and Din's and we want to say thank you to them for having this party, and for having such an awesome company, and for treating us so well. We love Ristretto, and we love you guys, and so we got you something from all of us."

And then, from stage right, Rachel and someone (and forgive me, I don't remember who because I was so startled) walked in carrying this huge... something, covered in a blue sheet, and they take off the sheet, and it is what you see above, a beetle carved from wood that was part of an art show at Williams that Rachel curated several months ago. Din and I, at the time, had loved this piece, but it cost something like $1200, and there was no way, not with building out the new shop...

"We knew you guys loved it," Natalie continued, "and so we all chipped in, and some of the customers, too, Keith and Justin and Andre, and Tafv, too, when she was here, and we got it for you."

I don't know what Din and I looked like, seeing this, listening to this, but I can tell you what it felt like: I was floored, and flooded. And so Din and I took a moment to tell them what is absolutely true: yes, Din has a good idea, and he works hard, but we are nothing, Ristretto does not exist without these people, and that we love them, and consider ourselves beyond fortunate.

Cheers. We toasted some more. Jennifer told me, I'd lost her ten bucks because she'd bet I would cry and I didn't, and what up with that? We drank more wine, and ate more cake. The room was happiness qua happiness. It was a wonderful party, they made it all so.

Tafv in Screen Shot from Movie Her Roommate Seb is Making

Tattoo

Based on Ed Ruscha's Parts Per Trillion. Thanks to Allyson Bennett at Scapegoat Tattoo for taking on an image that the boys at Atlas Tattoo were afraid of.

 

Wordstock is Coming

I will be reading (from The Bad Mother), with author Jennifer Lauck, at 5 PM, Sunday, October 9, on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage. (Sounds pretty fancy, huh?) My publisher, Dymaxicon, will have a booth [#705], so I will be around much of the weekend. Ristretto will be there, too, by the Beer Garden. Full list of readers, events, vendors on the Wordstock site.

Speaking of The Bad Mother: As of last week, you will now be buying the second edition, with author blurbs on the cover (thank you Madison Smartt Bell and David Rensin and Erica Schickel and Mark Ebner), as well as a photo of the author.

Author Author

My work life has become completely about books: writing them, editing them, reviewing them (latest: A Covert Affair: The Adventures of Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS, by Jennet Conant), reading them (currently, Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, which is spectacular), and doing research for the next two books of my own.

There is also time to interview authors about their work, for instance, Molly O'Neill on her latest book, One Big Table, and what's wrong with $8 bunches of organic arugula tied with twine, and why she needed to get out of "the little girls' ghetto" where cookbook writers tend to be corralled. The interview posted today, on Culinate.com, and it is one of my favorite ever. All props to Molly, for being so smart and so tart.

And then there is the author elbow-rubbing, such as last night's, with John Sayles, before his reading at Powell's from his latest novel, A Moment in the Sun.

 

Sayles and Maggie Renzi are friends of my mom's. I told her yesterday, I would be going to the reading, and she insisted I introduce myself. I told her, mom, it's going to be mobbed; I am not going to bother them. And then I walked in and Sayles was standing right there, so I did, and he was very nice, and Maggie put her arms around me and said, "We've heard so much about you," and insisted a photo be taken of she and I, to post on the blog for the book and their latest film, AMIGO.

"Now you and John," Maggie said, and scooted us together, making me as you can see very happy, and prompting a woman in the audience to ask, "Are you one of the actresses in his movies?"

 

 

Back to the Future

Another must-see photo project: Back to the Future, by Irina Werning. We are glad you became a little obsessed! So good, SO good. The power of art.

 

Loggernaut Reading Series at Ristretto Roasters

Ristretto is thrilled to host Loggernaut Reading Series, featuring three outstanding writers -- Carl Adamshick, Debra Gwartney and Mary Rechner -- responding to the prompt, "wild." Two dollars at the door, coffee and wine inside. Come; it's going to be a great evening.

Wednesday, February 23, at 7:30 PM

Ristretto Roasters Williams

3808 N. Williams Ave., Portland, 503-288-8667

 

 

Carl Adamshick's debut collection, Curses and Wishes, was selected for the 2010 Walt Whitman Award. The recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, his poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, the Harvard Review, and Narrative. He lives in Portland.

Debra Gwartney is the author of the memoir Live Through This (2009), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the PNBA award. [I met Debra and her daughters and had the privilege to write about them.] She is also the co-editor, along with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Triquarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Salon, The New York Times "Modern Love" column, and elsewhere. She is a faculty member at Pacific University's MFA program. 

Mary Rechner is the author of the story collection Nine Simple Patters for Complicated Women (Propeller Books, 2010). Her stories, criticism, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Believer, and New England Review. She is originally from Long Island, lives in Portland, and directs the Writers in the Schools program at Literary Arts.

Drowning Beautiful

Go look at this. I promise you, you are going to be wowed.

 

The Lives They Lived: David Levine, 1926-2009

The last issue of the year of the Sunday New York Times Magazine is always, The Lives They Lived, short profiles of notable people who have passed away in the past year. My stepfather, David Levine, died December 29, 2009, a little after four in the morning. His son and I were with him. Today, David is the Times' last profile in the magazine, a place of prominence, which he undoubtedly would have made a silly joke about. He was a great artist, as the opening by Walter Bernard tells us:

“Hands down, he’s the greatest modern-day caricaturist and one of the great artists of the last half-century,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in The Times after David Levine died almost a year ago. And it’s true: he was." 

Dave, love and miss you xx

 

BHAGWAN SHREE RAJNEESH: TWO OPPOSING BOOKS AND VIEWS - RISTRETTO READING SERIES

RISTRETTO READING SERIES, DECEMBER 8, 7 PM  

 

Please join us this Wednesday at 7 PM for what will be a fascinating and perhaps heated discussion about one of the most explosive issues and incidents in recent Oregon history, the spiritual guru/cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and Rancho Rajneesh, the compound he and his followers established in Antelope, Oregon. 

 

Win McCormack, publisher and editor in chief of Tin House magazine, will read from, “The Rajneesh Chronicles: The True Story of The Cult that Unleashed the First Act of Terrorism on U.S. Soil,” his newly re-released book on the rise and fall of cult leader, including the sex, the drugs, the Rolls-Royces and the poisoning at The Dalles. 

 

Also appearing will be Lewis F. Carter, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Washington State University and author of the 1990 book, “Charisma and Control at Rajneeshpuram,” his field study of the compound and the followers of Rajneesh. Professor Carter will present a Power Point of images from Rancho Rajneesh during its heyday. 

 

To say that McCormack and Carter are on different sides of the fence regarding Rajneesh is an understatement. We would love to have you there, to join in the conversation.

 

The series is held at Ristretto Roasters Williams, 3808 N. Williams Ave., Portland.

 

This event is free and open to everyone, as are all Ristretto Reading Series events. For more information, please see the Ristretto Roasters website, and the Ristretto Reading Series on Facebook. 

 

 
Rajneeshee and student interviewer, 1984. Courtesy of Lewis Carter

Alone Forever, Together: Minh Tran and Portland Nightlife

Wonder what Portland's pretty, [p]arty people do late at night? Fashion/nightlife photographer and filmmaker (and good friend of my daughter's) Minh Tran shows us, in his latest series. Tavie well represented, including in this shot, doing one of her very favorite things. I once scrolled through the several hundred text messages we've exchanged, and 70% of them involved Tavie saying "yum!" about something.

On Writing Badly, or, Joy [Part 2]

I have sitting on my library ladder a book called, "On Writing Well." I haven't opened it, which you might guess were you to read the piece I have been working on all week. Driving this morning, I thought how I would characterize the writing-so-far: "joyless, leaden and long." I saw myself standing above a channel of liquid concrete; jesus, even I didn't want to dip my toe in there. I am only grateful that I have been writing long enough to know how opaque and wrong it is. Also, that I could turn it into my editor and he'd be fine with it, with a few tweaks. Scary. He will never of course see this draft.

I can't speak for any other writer, but I tear quotes about the work and what it should be, and stick them on my bulletin board. Here is one, from William Langewiesche, "You have this precious, incredibly privileged thing, which is the reader's attention for a little while. And you can make the slightest misstep and the reader will put you down. People will say that the reader lives in a busy world. But that's not the reason why. The reason is that the writer blows it, and loses the reader's trust."

Earlier this week, reading "Hitch-22," I came upon this: "In writing and reading, there is a gold standard. How will you be able to detect it? You will know it all right."

I ran into this standard this week, when I started Rebecca Skloots', "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." You know it all right. I also had the spectacular good fortune to see that Skloots has structured her book very much the way I am structuring mine, and hers is a bestseller, so.

We'll get to the eggrolls another time, but a last thought, which I stuck to my bulletin board this morning: duty v: joy.

Joy [Part 1]

We began receiving the NYT Weekender this week, thus avoiding my driving to the two Ristretto locations and cherry-picking the sections I want before anyone snags them. Most of the paper wound up on the sofa, where I can read it at my leisure throughout the week. This morning at 6:30, over a cup of Nicaragua coffee my husband roasted yesterday, it was the Sports section, an article about John Updike's essay on the great Ted Williams. It was nice enough to read about how Updike came to be at Williams' last game, and the reverence and playfulness and seriousness with which he wrote his first and last piece on baseball, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960, but what I really took from it was a renewed sense of joy, via this quote (emphasis mine):

[T]he essay is never precious or self-consciously literary, the way a lot of subsequent Fenway prose became, penned by earnest, heavy-breathing scribes clustered in Updike’s shadow. Roger Angell, who began writing about baseball for The New Yorker two years after Updike, and whose career has had an astonishing longevity — he’s the Ripken or Gehrig to Updike’s blazing youthful phenom — has said that “Hub Fans” most of all supplied him with a tone: colloquial, attentive, unashamed of feeling or of striving for an elegant turn of phrase. It seems obvious now, but Updike was one of the first to show that you don’t have to write down about sports or empurple them, either. 

I have a library ladder in my office, just to the right of where I sit at my desk. Currently occupying its second rung is "The Thinker's Thesaurus," which Ilearned existed when I saw it on the bookshelf in which Christopher Hitchens was posed at his desk. The only thesaurus I have ever owned is a generic copy of Roget's, printed on pulp paper and bought from a street vendor in New York in the early 1980s for five dollars. At its worst, a thesaurus is a faux form of productive procrastination; at its best, it gets you out of the word-rut you plopped yourself in and helps you think. Or so I thought. The Thinker's Thesaurus turns out to be series of illustrative and author Peter Meltzer-subjective journeys, via other authors' quotes. The funniest comment I read about the book is that the quotes show consistentanti-Bill Clintonism (note: "pepperpot" is not listed as a qualifier for "portly," though there is "stomachy," which I adore). The book has provided me with much pleasure, and last week, made me remember that I love to write.

It's been a little easy to forget this. Only those still lying abed with their pillows over their heads do not acknowledge that the venues in which to run 6,000-essays about baseball grow slender and slenderer still. Fear not, I am not here to complain, only to admit that perhaps the experience of seeing five of my seven favorite editors dismissed in the past year; of writing solid pieces for one-sixth the money, felt like a punch in the eye. Feels pretty much healed today.

To come: Joy [Part 2], wherein I wonder whether anxious wives start making homemade eggrolls

The Stuff of Inspiration, or, Nana Strike 2010

What is it about our mothers, and specifically my mother: Generous to a fault, bright and funny, ready to defend you to the ends of the earth, and yet possessing the ability to instantly provoke irrational anger. The fault may be with me, and if so, is one I apparently passed to my daughter, who currently lives with my mother in New York, and while they cross paths only a few hours each week, this week this proved too much, my daughter becoming furious about something, a fury she roared a bit about at work, which apparently inspired the film's art director.

"As soon as I heard you say it," he told my daughter this morning, upon presenting her with a roll of stickers with the image below, "I knew what I had to do."

 
 

Bad Day Movie

Back in the day, back in LA, everyone was making videos and short films. I wrote "Drive Baby Drive" for Paul Rachman, and this L7 video (which is sounding freakin' good this morning, seriously) for one of my best friends at the time, Modi Frank. Modi has a huge body of work, including a film she made with Exene Cervenka, called "Bad Day," which I think they started in about 1987...

It's just been digitally released. You can see in its entirety if you hit the link. I watched a million bits of it over the years, during editing. Go ahead and download it -- there are some big big stars in it, though back then, they were just the people sitting in your yard at night drinking beer and smoking pot. 

An email Modi sent reads, "Viewers will be able to pay whatever they want for the download in order to view AND a portion of the proceeds from “Bad Day” are going to Gulf Coast aid organizations that help the people affected in the Gulf region."

By the way Modi: you look totally hot in that photo xx

How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell

You could use a laugh, right? Click here for the whole strip

Draw Mohammed Day, Part 2

I did not get a chance to draw yesterday, due to 14 hours of plane travel (don't ask) and then, within 30 minutes of landing, having to be in court (on a story).

It's just as well, as words are my medium. And we are going to continue this conversation.

Just reread Reason's post about DMD -- which includes (as I could not see yesterday on my iPhone) the shocking images drawn by the imams, shocking not for aesthetic reasons but because it was the imams who created them in order to throw gas on a smoldering fire. As Nick Gillespie writes,  "It is as if the pope created 'Piss Christ' and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism."

Also included is a May, 2010 Guernica interview with Paul Berman (whose #1 fan I am apparently becoming) in which, astonishingly (or maybe not), he needs to explain to the interviewer that, no, Theo van Gogh is not responsible for his own murder; the murderer is. 

The Reason post also led me to this interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, controversial, yes, and parts of her book drove me batty, but look at this quote in relation to what we're discussing here, or better, read the whole thing:

I accept that there are multitudes seeking God, seeking meaning, and so on, but if they reject atheism, I would rather they became modern-day Catholics or Jews than that they became Muslims. Because my Catholic and Jewish colleagues are fine. The concept of God in Jewish orthodoxy is one where you’re having constant quarrels with God. Where I come from, in Islam, the only concept of God is you submit to Him and you obey His commands, no quarreling allowed. Quarreling or even asking questions means you raise yourself to the same level as Him, and in Islam that’s the worst sin you can commit. Jews should be proselytizing about a God that you can quarrel with. Catholics should be proselytizing about a God who is love, who represents a hereafter where there’s no hell, who wants you to lead a life where you can confess your sins and feel much better afterwards. Those are lovely concepts of God. They can’t compare to the fire-breathing Allah who inspires jihadism and totalitarianism.

...

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Reason: Militarily?

Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.

Reason: Are we really heading toward anything so ominous?

Hirsi Ali: I think that’s where we’re heading. We’re heading there because the West has been in denial for a long time. It did not respond to the signals that were smaller and easier to take care of. Now we have some choices to make. This is a dilemma: Western civilization is a celebration of life—everybody’s life, even your enemy’s life. So how can you be true to that morality and at the same time defend yourself against a very powerful enemy that seeks to destroy you?

Reason: George Bush, not the most conciliatory person in the world, has said on plenty of occasions that we are not at war with Islam.

Hirsi Ali: If the most powerful man in the West talks like that, then, without intending to, he’s making radical Muslims think they’ve already won. There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don’t all follow the rules of Islam, but there’s really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God. There’s nothing moderate about it.

...

The Western mind-set—that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away—is delusional. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it’s only going to get bigger.

Discuss.

Draw Mohammed Day

Getting on a plane so this will be briefer and shorter than I want it to be: today, Reason magazine is sponsoring Draw Mohammed Day, for all the right reasons. Reason's Nick Gillespie explains:

It's worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris.

...There comes a point in any society's existence where it must ultimately, to paraphrase Martin Luther (who himself was more than happy to see opponents put to death), dig in its heels and say here we stand, we will do no other. We don't need to be perfectly consistent philosophically or historically or theologically to assert what is special and unique not just about the United States, with its bizarre and wonderful articulation of the First Amendment, but the greater classical liberal project comprising not just the "West" (whatever that is) but human beings in whatever town, country, or planet they inhabit. And at the heart of the liberal project is ultimately a recognition that individuals, for no other reason than that they exist, have rights to continue to exist. Embedded in all that is the right to expression. No one has a right to an audience or even to a sympathetic hearing, much less an engaged audience. But no one should be beaten or killed or imprisoned simply for speaking their mind or praying to one god as opposed to the other or none at all or getting on with the small business of living their life in peaceful fashion. If we cannot or will not defend that principle with a full throat, then we deserve to choke on whatever jihadists of all stripes can force down our throats.

...Our Draw Mohammed contest is not a frivolous exercise of hip, ironic, hoolarious sacrilege toward a minority religion in the United States (though even that deserves all the protection that the most serioso political commentary commands). It's a defense of what is at the core of a society that is painfully incompetent at delivering on its promise of freedom, tolerance, and equal rights. It's a rebuttal to the notion that we should go limp in the clinches precisely because bullies and bastards can punch or blow us up.

Here's my pal Amy Alkon's contribution. Where's yours?