Dear AMC, 

Thank you for coming to your senses and uncanceling one of the best shows you’ve ever put on television. I know your fans made a big to-do regarding the fact that they still didn’t know who killed Rosie Larsen by the end of season one, but I for one think that Veena Sud is one of the gutsiest gals in TV for this very reason. You took a risk, AMC, and that risk shall be rewarded. Now I do understand that technically, you were rewarded with little more than low ratings in season two, but that’s not your fault. It’s ours.

The problem is that we crime show lovers have been weaned on Law & Order and CSI; we’re spoiled enough to expect satisfaction in under an hour. But you and your show chose to challenge your viewers, to challenge those of us who’ve become a little too comfy in formulaic storytelling. And sure, maybe the middle of season two was a bit of a taffy pull simply because we knew that a clue introduced in episode five was probably a red herring because we still had miles to go before the finale, but I for one was able to look past that. How? One word: character. And then two more words: Joel Kinnaman.

But what I’m trying to say is thank you. Thank you for ignoring the complaining consensus and instead listening to your writers and producers and putting together another season of this terrific show that dares to defy the expected. Here’s to another season of excellent writing, flawless performances, and a whole lot of Seattle rain. 

As previously mentioned, I’m still trying to figure out the POV for my next novel and am therefore attempting to read as many books as possible that fall into two categories: first, written by a female author, and second, tackle the simultaneous subjects of family and religion (and I’m still taking suggestions). Next up, Maile Meloy, and her first novel, Liars and Saints.

I originally came across Meloy in the anthology I sometimes use in my classes, where I got into the habit of using her short story “Ranch Girl” as an example of 2nd person. The story pulls the reader right in with a strong voice of a teenaged girl marooned on a ranch, and I was delighted to discover that Liars and Saints delivers that same level of intimacy. What’s even more impressive here, however, is that the narrators are many. The POV is a rotating 3rd person limited, and we get seduced into each one. We begin with Yvette, the Santerre family matriarch: we understand her as a pretty young wife with a husband at war, her high heels tiptoeing into confession to come clean. We get to know her, love her. And then the chapter ends and we move on to Teddy, her husband, who struggles with his own demons behind the controls of a fighter plane. And so it goes—the family members, the secrets, the years. The characters are many, but the constants are two-fold: first, the Santerre blood, and second, the presence of God.

Meloy’s prose is clean and clear: you sit up in your chair neither for confusion nor beauty. Still, it’s an absolute pleasure to read, and the pages click by. Her POV choices allow so much access to various characters and voices, reeling the reader in to every nook and cranny of this family, which is certainly a beauty of its own. But somehow, after a few hundred pages, it begins to feel almost list-like. Sometimes I just wanted to stop starting new chapters and instead cozy up to a single voice—truthfully, any one of them would do, which is testament to how good Meloy is at her job—which is likely more indicative of my own personality and preferences than anything else.

Perhaps the good news is that Meloy seems to have sensed my doubts ahead of time, as her second novel, A Family Daughter, returns to the Santerres. Not only does this book focus in on one of the characters—Abby, Yvette’s granddaughter—but it goes out on a literary limb by redefining Liars and Saints as a semi-autobiographical novel written by Abby herself. Fun, right? Perhaps needless to say, this is next on my list. Stay tuned. 

Fun fact: Maile Meloy is the sister of Colin Meloy, the lead singer of The Decemberists. The siblings recently showed up on NPR’s All Things Considered to discuss the music they listened to during the road trips of childhood (and p.s. it’s fun to discover that a few of these songs make their way into Maile’s work).   

We caught the tail end of Southern California’s apple picking season in mid-November, trekking down to Oak Glen to procure cups of steaming apple cider, wax paper bags of apple cider doughnuts, and a mile-high apple pie. Incidentally, we also visited a taxidermy museum, fed deer handfuls of corn kernels, and met a pink-barretted baby llama on the leash of a crazy woman who introduced her with the following: “Her is my pet llama, and her is one-month-old.” But the point is this: apples. They’re perhaps the most staple fruit we have here in the U.S.—although fyi: the only three fruits native to North America are the cranberry, the blueberry, and the concord grape, but you remember Johnny Appleseed—as ubiquitous in a brown bag lunch as peanut butter and jelly. But the truth is that the apple, like any fruit, isn’t really something you should be eating all year. In Los Angeles, we’re spoiled to live in a place where farmers markets occur every day of the week and year-round, but I grew up in New England, where the notion of farm-to-table is far more challenging come February. Most of us have been tempted to buy off-season produce in the grocery store—asparagus from Peru in November, strawberries from Mexico in March—and I mean, every once in a while, what’s the harm in that?

Enter Hugh Acheson. You might recognize him as the hip dad of the Atlanta restaurant scene or as a sometimes judge on Top Chef, but I’ve been most inspired by his cookbook, A New Turn in the South, which is as cute, cozy, and community driven as can be. In addition to the 123 delicious, accessible, and ingredient-driven recipes that fill its pages, this book makes very clear Acheson’s philosophy of food—“local first, sustainable second, organic third”—and he uses apples to illustrate his beliefs: 

“Let’s think about an apple in February. The apple is picked in Chile by a migrant picker. It goes onto a truck and then into a sorter. The apple gets graded, cleaned, waxed, and stickered. It gets packed into a box and then sits for a day or two. It goes onto another truck and is off to customs. It clears customs and then gets onto a very big boat. It floats on the water for a week. It arrives in New York and goes to a warehouse. A broker buys the fruit and then moves it, via truck, to another warehouse. A produce wholesaler buys a bunch of it and ships it down to the commercial vegetable market near the airport in Atlanta. A local company buys the product there and trucks it to a grocer. The grocer packs the apples into a cooler and after some time the apples get onto the shelf. The apples, shiny and waxy, cost $1.99 per pound.’

“Let me tell you how I like to order apples. First of all, the key is to order apples in season. Apple season in Georgia is from August to November. So, say in September, a fax comes to me on Tuesdays from a small cooperative of farms called the Northeast Farmers of Georgia. It is sent by a dear man named Bill. I put a check next to a box for Arkansas Blacks, a wonderful Southern crisp heirloom apple. Bill gets the fax and calls the farmer. The farmer picks the apples and delivers them to Bill, and Bill drives them to me in Athens. It is so simple.’ 

“This process supports Bill. It supports the farmer. It supports my local economy. It lessens the consumption cost. It lowers the amount of non-renewable resources used to ship the items to me. It reduces the number of hands that touch my product. Oh, and the apples taste better—much better.”

Kind of hard to argue with that, right?

So back to those recipes, dozens of which I have plans to make: Lemonade with Vanilla, Mint, and Rosemary; Marinated Anchovies with Grapefruit and Pepper; Fava Beans with Mint, Proscuitto, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Brown Butter Vinaigrette; as well as his take on Southern classics like Fried Chicken, Cornbread (“Cornbread should not have sugar in it. That’s cake.”), Shrimp & Grits, and Lemon Chess Pie. For my first foray, I gravitated toward the Italy-Atlanta mash-up Southern Carbonara—which substitutes country ham for pancetta and adds collards to the mix—as well as a first course of Local Lettuces with Feta, Radishes, and Dill Pickle Vinaigrette:

Both recipes were simple, snappy, and delicious, and I’ll definitely make each one again. My honest advice for you is to buy the book yourself and explore the myriad of yumminess it has to offer, but if you’re not convinced, click here for the Carbonara recipe, and here for the salad (bonus: with the salad you’ll also get recipes for Medjool Dates stuffed with Parmigiano-Reggiano and Celery (yep, so good) and Smothered Pork Chops with Chanterelles (next on my personal list), plus a nifty little interview with the chef himself.) This addition to your cookbook collection will make those weeknight meals more delicious, those backyard dinners more unique, and it will certainly inspire you to buy, eat, and cook as locally as possible.

Case and point: just yesterday I had to make an apple pie for a second Thanksgiving dinner, and fresh on the heels of Acheson inspiration, I went all local: Braeburn apples, a lemon, an orange, even eggs. And that little fact continued to warm my conscience as the pie filled my tummy all the way from last night’s dinner to this morning’s breakfast:

Alas, Acheson’s book doesn’t include an apple pie, so here’s a shout out to Apt. 2B Baking Co. for the recipe used above.  

I’ve already posted poetic about my love for and admiration of Nick Flynn and his work. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City spoke to me in ways I will never be able to articulate (though you can click here to read my attempt), and in the handful of times that I’ve heard Flynn read and speak, he’s come across as incredibly sensitive, bright, funny, and humble.

Of course that’s not to say that he isn’t kind of fucked up. He certainly is—as most of us are—it’s just that he happens to have an otherworldly ability to express those innermost complexities on the page. In his second memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, he takes that ability a step further, weaving his personal struggles with love, family, and fatherhood alongside his problems with our country’s stance on a more political issue: torture. You might wonder just how the heck that might work. Trust me: it does.   

Perhaps it’s because Flynn is a poet, because he possesses a certain poetic sensibility that permeates his views of the world and allows his trademark vignettes to shine on the page. To use a cliche, he just has a way with words. An ability to distill a moment or image down to its absolute essence, whether it be the kick of his unborn daughter, a photograph from Abu Ghraib, or a torn sheet of notebook paper found on the floor of an elementary school:

“For those few years when I worked in New York City public schools as an itinerant poet—Crown Heights, Harlem, the South Bronx—I’d lug a satchel heavy with books on the train every morning. Much of what I taught was directed toward finding out what the students saw every day. It was a way to honor their lives, which isn’t generally taught in public schools. The beginning exercises were very simple: Tell me one thing you saw on the way to school this morning. Tell me one thing you saw last night when you got home. Describe something you see every day, describe something you saw only once and wondered about from then on. Tell me a dream, tell me a story someone told you, tell me something you’ve never told anyone else before. No one, in school at least, had ever asked them what their lives were like, no one had asked them to tell about their days. In this sense it felt like a radical act. I tried to imagine what might happen if each of them knew how important their lives were.

“In the schools I’d visit, I’d sometimes pick up a discarded sheet of paper from the hallway floor, something a student had written in his notebook and then torn out. Sometimes, i could tell that he’d been given an assignment, and that he’d tried to fulfill it, and by tearing it out it was clear that he felt he had somehow failed. Out of all the ephemera I’ve bent down to collect from black and green elementary school linoleum floors over the years, one has stayed with me. Likely it was part of a research paper, likely for biology. It started with a general statement, which was, I imagine, meant to be followed by supporting facts. The sentence, neatly printed on the first line, was this: All living things have shoulders—after this line there was nothing, not even a period, as if even as he was writing it he realized something was wrong, that he would never be able to support what he was only beginning to say, that no facts would ever justify it. All living things have shoulders—the first word is pure energy, the sweeping “All,” followed by the heartbeat of “living”—who wouldn’t be filled with hope having found this beginning? Then the drift begins, into uncertainty—“things”—a small misstep, not so grave that it couldn’t be righted, but it won’t be easy. Now something has to be said, some conclusion, I can almost hear the teacher, I can almost see what she has written on the blackboard—“Go from the general to the specific”—and what could be more general than “All living things,” and what could be more specific than “shoulders”? He reads it over once and knows it can never be reconciled, and so it is banished from his notebook. All living things have shoulders—this one line, I have carried it with me since, I have tried to write a poem from it over and over, and failed, over and over. I have now come to believe that it already is a poem. 

“All living things have shoulders. Period. The end. A poem.”

See what I mean? Flynn is the kind of writer who makes me want to simultaneously sit down and write—to mine my own history for those nearly forgotten moments and connections worth remembering—and go out and live so that I may succeed and err and laugh and drink and explore and come home to sit down and have something interesting to say. I think that’s the kind of writer that all writers should be reading. And quite frankly, that’s the kind of writer that I aspire to be. 

P.S. Flynn’s third memoir, The Reenactments, hits shelves in January 2013 and explores the surreality of being on the set of Being Flynn—the 2012 film adaption of Another Bullshit Night—and watching iconic actors such as Robert DeNiro and Julianne Moore reenact the pivotal events of his life. Umn, I can hardly wait.

Don’t worry. This isn’t me encouraging you to watch The X Factor. Well, not exactly anyway. This is me saying, “Hey, friend, if you’ve already found yourself secretly addicted to the bazillion-dollar train wreck that happens every Wednesday and Thursday on Fox, then I really do encourage you to wake up the next day, roll out of bed, and obsessively refresh Vulture—New York Magazine’s pretty awesome arts and culture blog—until Dave Holmes’ weekly recap finally appears. You might remember Holmes from his years as an MTV VJ, but I believe that recapping The X Factor is what this man was put on Earth to do. To say he is hilarious is as understated as saying that something about Britney is not right; his weekly renderings are what keep me watching this insanity week after week (or at least that’s what I tell myself). Well, that and Carly Rose Sonenclar. I mean, seriously, people, if you haven’t seen this 13-year-old freak of nature belt one out yet, just click the above link and take seven minutes out of your day that you will not miss. If she doesn’t win, I’m quitting life.

The other day I received a letter in the mail from my 7-year-old cousin Adam. In his penciled penmanship, he discusses several subjects: his Halloween costume (turtle), how many pieces of candy he gathered (91), and a few things he’s learned in second grade (new land forms). He also told me that he’s begun writing coloring books, one of which is called “The Two-Minute Cheez-it.” In his own words, “It was about me eating a Cheez-it so slow it took me two minutes to eat so I wouldn’t have to brush my teeth this morning.” Yeah, the kid’s a genius. 

The point is, sometimes it’s just important to stop reading so many things by adults and listen to the natural brilliance of kids. Hence, Written by a Kid, a web series in which “original sci-fi, fantasy, and horror stories by real kids are transformed into stunning shorts by some of today’s coolest directors. These original live-action and animated pieces truly capture the madness and magic of the 5-to-10-year-old mindset.” Click here for enticing episodes such as “Ginger Potato,” “Sorta Friends,” and my personal favorite, “Cold East,” in which a wild west world exists amongst fruit in a refrigerator. As I said: genius. 

Special thanks to the talented Miranda Nero for turning me on to WBAK, and to the one and only Adam (see below) for making mail as fun as that trampoline last summer:

piano&scene is the (mostly) literary musings of Jennifer Cacicio, a freelance writer, editor, teacher, and button-maker who lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Bust Magazine, and elsewhere, and her short story, “The Jackson Six” has just been published in the latest issue of Lemon. Her first novel, Tree Listener, is forthcoming, as is a curated reading series that will take place on the eastside of LA. Additionally, she is at work on a cookbook, a television show, and a novel about miracles. Stay tuned.

Cloud Atlas is coming.  

And for those of you who have been with me for a while, and by a while I mean blogspot, then you know from way back when that this David Mitchell tome was not among my favorites. To (most annoyingly) quote myself: “There are things in life that I do not understand, one of them being how a writer can write a whole book without loving his or her characters, much less a 500-page book. If there are 500 pages now, chances are there were probably at least 1,000 at one point or another, and so then the mind is boggled further.”

Should you choose to read the rest of this spirited review, you will discover that Mitchell’s novel is made up of six disparate voices that didn’t fully come together for me in the end. But it’s exactly for this reason that I’m excited to see the movie. I mean, if a 500+ page book can’t make an awesomely beautiful and complex French braid of this insane story, then how can a two-hour cinematic retelling?

Enter the Wachowskis, the brother-sister team behind The Matrix franchise. After reading their recent profile in The New Yorker, I learned that they’ve been fighting the seriously good fight to get this project made, and I must admit that I found their enthusiasm catching. Even David Mitchell himself—who angered me to the point of book-hitting-wall—came across as downright inspiring and lovely. Hence, if the adaptation gets me in a way that the book didn’t, perhaps I’ll give that novel another go. So come October 26th, you’ll find me ready and waiting in my theater seat, caramel popcorn in hand, willing to be wrong.  

As a child, the only pop star who even came close to surpassing my love for Whitney Houston was Michael Jackson. Two moments stand out: first, my father walking into the living room and presenting me with my very own vinyl of Thriller after I’d long-expressed my undying love for the song “Beat It”; second, sneaking into the basement with my cousin to watch the music video for “Thriller,” despite the fact that my mother had forbade it for fear of the nightmares I inevitably had only hours later. (Months later, when I admitted to this same cousin that I planned to marry MJ when I grew up, she gasped and covered her mouth. “You can’t,” she explained. “He’s black.”) Thus, I was super excited when the very talented Micah Nathan assigned me the task of writing “a short story inspired by—but not about—MJ, and the weirder the better” for the award-winning and mind-bendingly awesome LEMON Magazine. The issue hits stores this month, and I’m beyond excited to report that my short story is within its beautiful pages.

LEMON is the annual undertaking of Kevin Grady and Colin Metcalf, a couple of ridiculously talented dudes who created this labor of love for a higher pop cause: “In a snark-infested media landscape, LEMON appeals to the best in human nature. Content curated through the filter of curiosity and creativity leaves little room for cynicism. LEMON is an antidote to a toxic mindscape.” Here, here!

Previous issues have focused on the likes of Stanley Kubrick and David Bowie, but this one pays homage to perhaps the greatest pop star of all time: ”In this, the fifth installment of LEMON, we’ve checked ridicule at the door and invited an eclectic cast of contributors to celebrate the pure pop magic that Jackson embodied when at his best. Much of the work was created especially for this issue, and all of it is a distinct departure from the usual retrospectives which have filled the shelves—ad nauseam, ad infinitum—in the days since his death. This is Michael Jackson as you’ve never seen him before.” 

Check your local B&N or the God of all websites to get yourself a copy!

Our buttons aren’t just for authors anymore. Most recently p&s took its craftiness to the cranberry bogs of Carver, Massachusetts, where wedding guests celebrated love in the sunshine by donning our original buttons made for the bride and groom.

Email pianoandscene@gmail.com to order a bagful of tailor-made favors and fun up your next shindig, wedding, or event.

I remember so clearly the moment I considered the notion of truth in fiction writing. And when I say considered it, I mean really considered it.

It’s winter, 1998. Morning. I’m sitting in a classroom near the corner of Boylston and Tremont, a second semester freshman at Emerson College. A cup of Dunkin’ Donuts sits on the table before me, alongside my notebook, pencil, and worn copy of The Things They Carried. My fingers reek of Camel Lights. Our professor, the inimitable Frederick Reiken, paces before the window, trying to keep us awake. Behind him, snow collects in sheets over the Common.  

Before Tim O’Brien entered my universe that week, I’d never before read a book where the author gave his protagonist his own name, playing with his own reality in order to create a more authentic fantasy for his reader. I’d never considered the complicated notion of truth in fiction writing, how sometimes we must tell lies in order to get at a deeper truth. I remember that some of my classmates hated the book. They complained of feeling betrayed by O’Brien, by feeling as though they’d been got. But I felt just the opposite. I’d been writing since childhood, filling notebooks with poetry, songs, and bits of memoir because I fancied myself interested in telling the truth. But after that morning, that book, that discussion, it was made clear to me that if I wanted to tell a more complicated truth, it was time that I turned to fiction.

Of course many writers before and since O’Brien have played with the idea of a narrator’s identity and authority, and among them is Gordon Lish. Lish is perhaps best known as the editor charged with shaping Raymond Carver’s minimalistic style, but he’s an incredible writer in his own right. In My Romance, Author Lish gives his protagonist the name Gordon Lish, then allows him to deliver this so-called “light novel” as an impromptu speech to a roomful of literary peers.

The reviews were not favorable. Publishers Weekly called it “an exercise in narcissism,” “a sustained whine about the difficulty of expressing love and the essential human inadequacy in the face of death.” And perhaps this is true. Narrator Lish has a drink for the first time in years and embarks on what is essentially the story of his life: he touches on the deaths of his sister, mother, and father, the latter for which he may be partially responsible; his lifelong battle with a skin disease that covers his body in lesions and necessitates countless bottles of mineral oil and daily nude jaunts in the sun; his career as a writer and editor; his failures as a son, husband, and father; and so on. The title itself presumably links to a romance shared with a fellow Random House employee, an unnamed female who catches him in the act of sunbathing in only his birthday suit and shoes, then responds by taking off her own clothes: “She saw everything. It made me feel good to have someone who saw everything. It was not sex, there was no sex—it was just seeing everything. It was just seeing everything and having everything be seen.” 

I find this moment of the book to be quite beautiful, and it reminds me of three things: first, Leo Gursky, Nicole Krauss’ aging protagonist in The History of Love who fears an anonymous death: “I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll buy a juice even when I’m not thirsty. If the store is crowded I’ll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.”

Second, it reminds me of Narrator Lish’s father. In an earlier scene, Lish takes his ailing father to the doctor for one of his regular treatments in which a series of tools are shoved down his his throat in an attempt to stretch his shrinking esophagus. The tools seem to squeak upon insertion, and Lish returns to this detail again and again, clear proof of the moment’s trauma for both father and son: “Truth to tell, I think I actually remember Dad doing something to get me to go with him—but I do not remember what it actually was. But it was like ‘A son should see’—even though there was never anything actually said like that, of course. Yes, yes, standing up here saying all of these things, you suddenly think you know everything, I keep feeling I know everything, that what has been forgotten, or was never even known, is suddenly revealed.” I consider this another moment of “seeing everything,” of seeing a person you love—a person you are supposed to protect—at their most vulnerable and disgusting.

Third, it reminds me of the narrative itself: an esteemed and admired man gets up on a stage to read from one of his great contributions to the literary world, but instead he launches on a narcissistic rant of guilt, fear, love, secrecy, and failure. He admits everything, comes clean about the man he’s been all these years, the bits he’s been hiding. And yes, it is at times annoying, disgusting, boring, and repetitive, but it also has its moments of honesty, beauty, and humor. Isn’t this act, this narrative, in and of itself, the very definition of seeing everything? And, to take it a step further, perhaps the very definition of the romance that each of us has with ourselves?

I think Gordon Lish is asking us to be the Random House employee, to be the eyes that see his narrator—and if you like, him as an author—at his absolute worst, at his most vulnerable and disgusting, and yet find a way to accept what we see, an act that just might be the most profound thing that one human can do for another: “Shame, the absence of shame, this was the very thing of it, I think. Which was why it was such a miracle for me, her acceptingness of me. I mean, I really mean acceptingness—not acceptance but acceptingness.”