I asked Susan at the beginning of the salon to tell her her tale of getting published. It’s a tale of woe, of hope, of disdain, and crashing, curling up in the fetal position and stretching out her legs again. She calls it depressing, I call it inspiring. The group was instantly bonded knowing that success comes from perseverance. Susan proved it to us.
Ten hours, yes you read that right, ten hours later we were still discussing the culture of writing, of living, of success and failure and believing in ourselves, listening, really really listening to our guts, and how intertwined it all is. We talked about we perceive as sacred versus what is truly sacred. What we run up against versus what we run into without looking.
We cried, then we laughed, then we cried some more, then we cried in our pies. Susan saved lives that day, I really believe that.
Susan shared a secret with us: When she’s stuck, she writes her question on a small piece of paper and puts it under her pillow. If the answer doesn’t come to her during the night, then she puts the piece of paper in her pocket and thinks about it all day. Eventually the answer comes to her. I tried it last night with my question. “In my next book, which I’m including recipes, how much should I make the recipes part of the story, how much narrative should be part of the recipe.” I wrote it on the tiniest sticky note, folded it in half and stuck it in my pocket. By this morning, I had a confident answer, “Just niggle them a bit, not too much to be distracting, but enough to make the recipe fit the chapter before it.”
Pie Menu: Susan asked me to make it seem like Summer. She’s been so snowed in in New York. The day turned into a citrus theme, not intentionally, but Susan has a magic and it is citrus season. It was Persian New Year, so we had:
Entree:
Persian Beef Stew Pie with a Lavosh Seedy Crust
Traditional Chicken with a Thyme Cream Sauce and a Lemon
Mache Salad with Avocado and Clementines
Dessert Pies:
Shaker Lemon with a Whole Wheat Crust
Orange & Lime cream with macadamia crust mini-pies