Issue 20: Feasting

Editor’s Note: Issue 20

Welcome to Ruminate’s 20th issue! We are celebrating five years of Ruminate and are thrilled to mark this occasion with an issue on feasting. Thank you, dear readers, for joining us on this journey of chewing on life, faith, and art. Thank you for believing in Ruminate. I lift my glass to you all (preferably filled with my husband’s yummy homebrewed India Pale Ale). And I hope you can sit down now and enjoy the feast of this issue, which we have carefully prepared for you. I love what the work in these pages and the concept of feasting teaches us, how it’s a synonym for delight—that when we feast upon something, we are intentionally choosing to delight in the goodness that has been given to us. Some of our contributors do just this, delighting in pistachios, red wine, tomatoes, potatoes, rosemary, olives, and water—certainly a grocery list worth savoring. Jenn Blair writes about being “happy enough with what is enough / which is right in front of us which is what we requested / in earnest hunger and haste and annoyance and hope.”

Other contributors teach us that when we pursue feasting, we’re seeking a richness and excellence that is greater than the empty shallowness we’re often satisfied by. They feast on the beauty of dead grass and Van Gogh, and even look at life absent of feasting, considering what it would be like to follow a life-promising diet that’s free of high-fructose corn syrup, cell phones, and boys. Each of our contributors teaches us what it means to live with a heart ready to be delighted and with an eye trained to spot moments worthy of a feast.

We are also pleased to introduce our first annual Ruminate Nonfiction Prize, judged by Al Haley. The staff and I give our hearty congratulations to the winner Josh MacIvor-Andersen for his essay “Flexing, Texting, Flying” and the second-place winner A.J. Kandathil for her essay “Van Gogh’s Parable.” Both pieces contain writing you can savor, and with Al Haley’s note about the state of nonfiction, this issue is, in part, a kind of nonfiction feast.

Our featured art for this issue comes from Ruminate’s very own art editor, Stefani Rossi, whose
most recent body of work is concerned with food and drink and the habit of consumption. If feasting represents a joyful state of mind and a heightened appreciation for the good meal set before us (or the art, words, or dear friends set before us), then Stefani’s work points us toward the realization that when we simply consume, rather than feast, that appreciation and joy are tragically missing.

And so, I think we’ve set a nice table for you and hope you enjoy the rich offerings of our contributors. May you feast upon the beauty in this issue and find yourself full, but also left with a desire for more, and perhaps, a desire for the true banquet, the feast of all feasts.

Bon appetit,

Brianna Van Dyke

Editor-in-Chief

Letter to James from the Wavering Highway

Remember the kettle, the smoke flooding
the already dark porch. Remember
your mother, in her grave two years
already that night. What would she say
about the kettle, full of lamb,
carrots, the potatoes we’d cut?
What would she say about the chain
of clouds thick in the sky as we collected
garlic tops, scurrying to finish
before the sharp sky spilled
its own soup and turned the garden
mud, made us blind? Remember,

James, the bruise you got when
you opened the door into your own face,
the animal yelp you let out, the smoke that still
clung to the air and eyes. Remember
us sipping your mom’s stew—two blind,
hungry fools trying to raise the dead.

Saving Waters

EXCERPTED FROM ISSUE 20 . . .

When as children my siblings and I ate oranges, our mother made us scrape off the thick, white underside of the peel with our teeth and eat it, too.

“That’s where all the vitamins are,” she told us, scraping her own peel with her short, yellowish teeth to demonstrate.

It was pleasantly spongy and a little bit sweet—not bitter as just about every recipe I’ve ever read for candied orange peel or orange marmalade claims. You’re supposed to slice the white part off and throw it away. It wouldn’t have mattered if it were bitter, though. We would still have had to eat it. Not to eat it would have been a waste.

It is in the spirit of that scraping of peels—or perhaps in emulation of my father’s equally frugal habits of eating lettuce cores and cooking beet leaves and turning leftover mashed potatoes into potato pancakes—that I have become a saver of waters.

I save the pastel waters in which green beans or squash or greens or even smelly broccoli or cabbage has cooked—saving not only their vitamins but the delicate memory of their peak flavor—and use them to make garden minestrones. I turn every scrap of fat or skin or bone I trim from meat into broth, refrigerate it, skim off the fat, then freeze it and use it in everything. Asparagus I break off as low on the stem as they will break, broil the tender parts, then boil the tough ends to later process in their water and sieve into a silky, green cream of asparagus soup. When I boil corn on the cob or potatoes to mash or make into salad, I save their waters for bread. I painstakingly trim and boil the hard, little worm-eaten apples and pears that fall off my mother-in-law’s trees, press the flesh through a potato ricer to make a tart filling for the half-moon pastries my girls love, made from frozen pie dough scraps, and then turn the thick, pectin-rich water into jalapeño jelly—each little jar sporting three or four suspended peppers, like fish in a bowl—to eat with cream cheese and crackers as summer wanes and we’re starting to tire of the garden’s abundance and want more exotic stuff.

By winter, my freezer is packed full with frozen waters: old yogurt tubs and juice cartons sawed off with a bread knife and the nicer clear plastic takeaway containers from our favorite Thai restaurant, each labeled with its contents. Corn water. Potato water. Apple water. Pear water. Broths of chicken and lamb and fish. Pink, shrimp shell water. Pale green zucchini water and the darker green of combined vegetable waters, which I sometimes boil several times with each meal’s scraps over the course of a week. Opening the freezer door, I feel like a rich woman must feel, surveying her jewels. Yes, I feel rich.

A few years ago, we suffered a terrible ice storm. It came all at once, coating the roads and trees and barbed-wire fences and every raggedy blade of grass in our pastures with over an inch of the clearest, prettiest ice. It turned our homely farm into a fairyland, a set of the Nutcracker Suite, everywhere glitter and trees bowed into sparkling arches.

At first my daughters and I just wanted to be out in it. Sliding on the sidewalk around our house. Bigstepping through fields of daggers. Breaking especially nice ones off to admire—the thin, yellow blade of grass or black briar magnified into magnificence—and then add to their collection, alongside all my frozen waters, in the freezer. (The girls have stored our Oklahoma weather there since babyhood: hailstones, mucusy-looking icicles from the eaves of our porch, snow they plan to make into snowcream after the snow is gone.)

We planned a longer tromp through the magical woods, under the glass trees. All at once, though, the woods became a warzone. The ice had gotten so heavy that, one after the other, the trees exploded downward, broken off at the crown, Kristallnacht everywhere.

. . . READ MORE. PURCHASE ISSUE 20.

Contributor’s Notes

Jenn Blair is from Yakima, Washington. She has degrees from King College, Hollins, and St. Andrews University. She has published in New South, Copper Nickel, Kestrel, and the Tulane Review, among others. Her chapbook All Things are Ordered is out from Finishing Line Press. She teaches at the University of Georgia, and lives in Winterville, Georgia, with her husband Dave, daughter Katie, and two goldfish who still remain nameless.

Laura Breukelman is currently completing a Master of Christian Studies degree at Regent College. Her area of research and interest lies in the intersection of theology, theory, and visual art
practice. She is also passionate about art education, especially as a part of social justice initiatives, having taught art classes to a diverse spectrum of students from a Belize elementary school to
street youth drop-in centers in Calgary and Halifax. She currently teaches sessionally at Trinity Western University. She writes: “The two pieces featured here are from ‘Accumulations and Erasures,’ a project that examines various rites and rituals that form the contours of memory. It attempts to draw out the relationship between truth and subjectivity in memory, its slippages and distortions, holes and erasures, anchors and reference points.”

Barbara Crooker’s books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, published in 2008 by Word Press and winner of the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C&R Press, 2010). New work is out or forthcoming in Spirituality & Practice, Windhover, and others. She lives with her husband and son, who has autism, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, and she loves Leonard Cohen and pistachios in equal measure.

Rylie Dodd buys cowboy shirts for her husband Jeffrey G. Dodd. The couple lives in Spokane, Washington, but he’s from Southeast Texas and sometimes needs his homesickness eased. Plus, the little pearlescent snaps are so crisp and tactile. Someday, she thinks, he’ll write a poem about them—the snaps, not the shirts. She’ll be featured prominently. Like his other poems, it’ll be published in journals such as Rock & Sling, Harpur Palate, Meridian, and Santa Clara Review. She doesn’t tell him this; he doesn’t need the ego boost.

Nicora Gangi was born in Indiana in 1952 and was a professor of art at Syracuse University for 29 years. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 2006. Her work has appeared in journals and magazines such as CMYK and American Artist. Nicora has lectured regionally and nationally as a visiting artist at universities and artist’s guilds on such varied topics as, “Spiritual Symbolism in Art” and “Personal Expression Through The Pastel Medium.”
Recently, she taught for Gordon College in Orvieto, Italy, and she now resides in New York City. Nicora writes: “My aim as an artist as is to render the aesthetic experience of being overwhelmed, filled with awe at something so majestic it evokes a sense of the One who created everything seen and unseen.”

Joseph Heithaus is a professor at DePauw University. His book Poison Sonnets was recently accepted for publication by David Roberts Books and will come out in February of 2012. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry. He also has the luck of having a poem etched in stained glass at the Indianapolis International Airport and a poem painted onto the side of a barn in Greencastle, Indiana, where he lives with his wife and four children.

Libby Falk Jones grew up in south Louisiana with parents who loved words, music, and food. A professor of English at Berea College in Kentucky, she teaches courses in creative writing (poetry, prose, and drama), literature, and vocation. Her contemplative writing course invites writers to probe silence, solitude, and nature as wellsprings of creative work; her chapbook of poems celebrating abundance, Above the Eastern Treetops, Blue, was published by Finishing Line in 2010. Her poems have won awards from Women Who Write, Heartland Review, and the Labyrinth Society and have appeared in 13th Moon: a Feminist Literary Magazine and New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writing, among others.

Rita Jones graduated from Westmont College in 2010 with a degree in history. She was raised on a small farm in the Puget Sound, Washington, with four siblings and a menagerie of animals from cows to peacocks. To that end, she harbors a deep appreciation for orchards, chicken runs, and front porches. Her writing has appeared in Westmont’s poetry annuals, while her illustrative work can be found in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jesus (Baker Publishing, 2011).

A.J. Kandathil lives and writes in the New York City metro area. Some of her favorite NYC spots are Bryant Park, Alice’s Teacup, and the MoMA. She’s currently writing a memoir about hide-and-seek at nightfall, low-budget high school plays, and church camp pyromania. Her work can be seen in Burner Magazine, Precipitate Journal, and The Quotable.

Candace Keller is a professor of art and curator of art for the Museum of the Llano Estacado and Abraham Art Gallery at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas. Her work has been awarded the Citation of Distinguished Service by the Texas Historical Commission, and she served on the Texas Commission on the Arts. She was selected for fellowship studies in painting with artist Audrey Flack in 1986 and artist Ed Paschke in 1995. She is also the recipient of the Virginia Steele Scott Fellowship Award for art history research to the Huntington Library and Collections. Candace has an extensive exhibition record and is represented in private and corporate collections. Her work is concerned with the human condition, the natural world, and the spiritual aspects that underlie visual apprehension.

Patty Kirk is associate professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. She is the author of a food memoir entitled Starting from Scratch: Memoirs of a Wandering Cook (Thomas Nelson, 2008) and two spiritual memoirs, Confessions of an Amateur Believer (Thomas Nelson, 2007) and A Field Guide to God: A Seeker’s ManualThe Gospel of Christmas: Reflections for Advent is forthcoming in October 2011. She and her husband live on a farm just across the stateline in Oklahoma, where she spends her time watching birds, cooking, worrying about her two college-aged daughters, running on the back roads, writing, grading papers, and ruminating about life—all of which eventually end up in her writing.

Laurie Lamon‘s poems have appeared in journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins. She was selected by Donald Hall, Poet Laureate 2007, as a Witter Bynner Fellow for 2007. Her collections of poems are The Fork Without Hunger, 2005, and Without Wings, 2009 (CavanKerry Press). She is a professor of English at Whitworth University and poetry editor for the literary journal Rock & Sling.

Josh MacIvor-Andersen lives in an old house in Wilmington, North Carolina with his wife, a cat named Baby Kitty, and a brand new baby human. He is an award winning writer, teacher and tree climber.

Natalie Minor graduated from Cornell University in 2010 with a BA in classics. In the summer of 2011, she plans to move to Greece. She has won several awards for poetry, and her work is forthcoming in Talkin’ Blues Journal and St. Katherine’s Review.

Sharon Fish Mooney lives in Coshocton, Ohio. Every third Thursday you’ll find Sharon and her husband Scott at their local Tim Hortons where they host a poetry and music night. Sharon’s poetry on Alzheimers has been featured on the Ohio Poetry Association website and in an anthology (Silver Boomer Books). She has lectured in the US and the Netherlands on poetry and dementia and teaches research and gerontology online. She is the author of Alzheimer’s: Caring for Your Loved One, Caring for Yourself and was a 2011 semi-finalist for the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award for a book of sonnets and 2011 winner of the Frost Farm Prize.

C.R. Resetarits’ most recent poetry appears in Women’s Quarterly Review, Able Muse, Front Range, and the Dogs Singing anthology from Salmon Poetry. She lives, writes, and roams the High Plains of West Texas.

Stefani Rossi studied painting and printmaking at the University of Puget Sound. In 2010 she received her MFA in painting from Colorado State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions, and her upcoming exhibit “Bitter/Sweet” may be viewed at the Clearstory Gallery in Spokane, Washington, from June 3rd to September 15th, 2011. Stefani will be joining the art department faculty at Wabash College in Indiana beginning July of this year. She has worked with Ruminate Magazine as visual art editor since 2008. More of Stefani’s work can be viewed at www.stefanirossi.com.

Lauren Schmidt’s work may be found or is forthcoming in The Progressive, Alaska Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Rattle, Nimrod and others. Her first full-length collection, Psalms of The Dining Room (Wipf & Stock) is forthcoming. “The Magic Trick of the Table” is part of a chapbook based on her experiences in The Dining Room in Eugene, Oregon, where she was a volunteer server. In November 2009, Lauren was forced to resign from her high school teaching position for the publication of her poetry. She returned to her native New Jersey where she teaches at Brookdale Community College.

Don Thompson writes: “I’ve been publishing poetry here and there for almost fifty years. My recent chapbooks include Turning Sixty (March Street Press), Sittin’ on Grace Slick’s Stoop (Pudding House Press), Where We Live (Parallel Press at University of Wisconsin), and Back Roads, which won the 2009 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. My wife Chris and I live on her family’s cotton farm in the southern San Joaquin Valley not far from the prison where I teach.”

Last Note

Ruminate Contributors on Feasting…

After being with people at work all day, I feast on the evening bird calls in my neighborhood. I love to time the evening walk with Maude, our Scottish Terrier, for those distinct calls and returning calls across the pines and birches. There is something so poignant and simply ordinary about that close to the day that has paralleled the human day. Waking, working, eating, resting . . . I love being reminded that our seasons of the day overlap.
                                                                        Laurie Lamon POETRY

To sustain others with food is an everyday act of love; an expectation, a necessity, but an effort worth the doing. A feast however, is a special celebration of love and occasion, a coming together with a recognition and focus on the love behind the gift.
                                                                        Candace Keller VISUAL ART

So much of any feast is about anticipation. Food is in the head, well before it is in the mouth. Recently, I got my family lost while taking them all on their first experience cross-country skiing. I had our lunch in my backpack, but we were trying to find a picnic table up among the trails on the mountain. Soon hunger and fatique set in. My nine-year-old daughter started crying. My twelve-year-old daughter was hungry. My wife was angry. My teenage son was ready to give up. But I kept thinking we were getting near. Finally, a woman passed and told us we were only a few hundred yards from the tiny lodge where we had started. We’d somehow circled back to the sunny spot where we’d put on our skis that morning. Peanut butter and jelly never tasted so good.
                                                                        Joseph Heithus POETRY

My favorite Scripture passage has taken on an additional shade of meaning since I’ve been writing poetry. Jeremiah 15:16 is all about feasting on God’s words that bring joy and rejoicing to the heart . . . like all good poetry . . . like Mary Oliver’s The Swan, that calls me to feast on beauty—calls me to change my life.
                                                                        Sharon Fish Mooney POETRY

As a small girl, my favorite morning meal was Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. I adored it, and fancied dairy even more, so much so that I would take an early morning trek to the large refrigerator we kept in the barn, where we stored fresh milk from the days before. I would sojourn (barefooted) over fifty yards of gravel and stand on cold concrete to take a ladle to the glass milk jars, delicately scooping a full portion of straight cream on my Raisin Bran. I seem to have escaped diabetes and high cholesterol (thus far), but not my voracity for breakfast.
                                                                        Rita Jones BOOK REVIEW

And sometimes you find yourself out on the Fiery Gizzard trail in Tennessee, wandering with a backpack and some beef jerky and a friend who agreed it would be a good idea to disappear for a while in the wilderness. You are days deep in the adventure before it feels like your body starts to devour its own fat supplies in order to survive. Instant oatmeal won’t cut it. You are starving. But then there’s this: that sumptuous return, the first sight of a Waffle House, the hard plastic booths and the laminated menus. Scattered covered diced chunked capped and topped hashbrowns and make it a double, please. Make it quick, please. Triple it and pump the coffee directly into the vein. God bless this feast. God bless this emptiness filled.
                                                                        Josh MacIvor-Andersen NONFICTION

You know the saying “feast or famine”? Well, it seems to be more famine than feast around my house, as I’m “Our Lady of the Perpetual Diet.” As I get older, keeping things in check seems to get harder. So I write about food rather than consuming it, a calorie-free pursuit .
                                                                        Barbara Crooker POETRY

After a period of excess, what a relief it is to diet! To measure out and record my daily portions, to feel myself deflate as the days pass, to rediscover hunger—a rare gift in our overfed culture. Without hunger, bounty and provision just words. When I diet, the least luxury—an apple cold from the refrigerator and a one inch nugget of good cheese—becomes a feast.
                                                                        Patty Kirk NONFICTION