Curiosities

Collage work and box-assemblages (in the manner of Joseph Cornell), cooking, and gardening are creative activities that draw me into their sphere of influence before, after, and in between writing.

Boxmaking

I discovered the pleasures of collage and the lure of the diorama while playing with my 4 year old niece, Justine Wiklo-Walton. I began working with shoe-box sized three-dimensional spaces, and with objects, but in time, I became delighted mostly with the suggestability of the intimate space of my friend, Stephen Barber’s Nathan Hale cigarette boxes, and with letters and pictures (vs. objects) arranged inside their space.

Cooking

I love to cook, especially Sicilian and Russian Jewish cuisine. I have discovered that I am no baker, but a cook, and I’ve come to philosophical conclusions about why I prefer to cook rather than to bake. Here’s my half-baked theory: in cooking, constituent parts are altered but retain their integrity in the process; in baking, constituent parts are sacrificed to a whole, into which they disappear. Thus, it depends on your psychological disposition which you prefer. Some of my favorite cookbooks include Anna Tasca Lanza’s Heart of Sicily, and Sidney Shupak’s unpublished Diner/Deli Cookbook. The mysterious possibilities of eggplant are endless, fennel is a wily accompanist to any meal, and Italian aperitifs (like Aperol or Campari) and digestifs (like Averna), I find, are essential conduits both to eating and to conversation. Rice balls (practically unavailable in the US but everywhere apparent in Sicily) are among my greatest challenges, and I have fantasized opening a restaurant that only served Rice Balls and late afternoon drinks. Stuffed zucchini flowers are a special delight. I love the pleasures that a meal, lovingly prepared, brings to a group of people. And I love to improvise (rarely possible in baking).

Gardening

The pleasures achieved in gardening are unsurpassed. For me, they include wintering over geraniums, growing coleus from seed, meeting the challenges of the shade garden, throwing Night Blooming Cereus parties, teaching children how to eat honeysuckle and to make snapdragons talk. Nine year old Caeli Carr-Potter inspired the children’s garden story, “Grasshoppers in His Knickerbockers.” (Left photo: Transplanting seedlings with Natasha Markov-Riss; Right photo: Planting bulbs in White Rock, BC, with Justine Wiklo-Walton).