When I was around six, my mom’s good friend was a writer of cookbooks.  Health-food cookbooks.  Seventies-era health food.  Fructose.  Carob.  Maple leaves and bark.  There was a photo on the back cover of one of these books with the cook, Mary Ann, and her two children, a little younger than me, licking their fingers over a mixing bowl, all smiles.  I envied these children, these rosy-cheeked cherubs who loved food that was good for you while I was folding my little hands on my green gingham bedspread in my room, praying for a box of chocolates so big I could sit inside of it when I was done.

But I wanted to be good like Mary Ann’s good children who’d somehow been enchanted to love seventies good-for-you food, because every time Mary Ann invited us to dinner to try her new recipes I’d scrunch down in the floorboards of mom’s car in Mary Ann’s driveway, dig my heels into the seat back, and sob while my mom tried to pry me out.

“Stop it!  Stop it right now!” mom would be saying through her teeth in a stage whisper, her eyes on Mary Ann’s front windows. “You’re going to pretend you like it, and you’re not going to embarrass me!”

As some sort of enticement to like Mary Ann’s food, mom once bought me the would-be gateway drug to seventies health food that was the carob bar.  Have you ever had a carob bar?  It is aggressively not a chocolate bar.  It is an abomination of chocolate.  It only masquerades as a chocolate bar.  No child prays to eat her weight in carob any more than she prays for the boogie man to pluck her teeth out while singing Alice Cooper songs in falsetto.  I don’t know.  Maybe carob has come a long way since the seventies, but back then it was like eating star-shaped dollops of Gulf Wax painted all the shades of monkey excrement.

So nothing was working for me.  And I’m not even going to tell you how many knives we bent in the jars of natural peanut butter mom kept in the fridge so the oil would separate.  I’m just saying the seventies were hard.  And nothing could make me be healthy on purpose.

In 2013, though, I have a new motivator.  Breast cancer.  Who knew that’s all it would take?  And lately I’ve been making great strides in vegetarianism, as per my doctor’s suggestion, except for when, three days ago, I broke down and ordered P. F. Chang’s Mongolian beef because I’d had the surgery to implant the mediport and therefore felt I deserved Mongolian beef.  And if you don’t believe in karma, believe in this: after you’ve had a port inserted into a vein in your neck, every chew of Mongolian beef is going to smart.  But not to worry.  In four more days, I start my first round of chemo, and I’m quite sure I won’t be thinking of Mongolian beef, whatever the price of eating it may be.  I’m sure I won’t be thinking of food at all, but nonetheless, I’ll have to eat.  So this week in preparation I’m thinking of small, healthy protein-packed things I won’t mind choking down.

One recipe in Mary Ann’s cookbook that I actually loved because I could make it myself, unsupervised, was a recipe for no-bake peanut butter balls.  If she’d invited us for dinner and served us heaping plates of peanut butter balls I would have been a-okay.  She included in them dried milk, wheat germ, coconut, and honey, but I’ve modified them here for maximum impact.  You could even throw some chia seeds and dried cherries in there.  Post-chemo, I’ll report back with a thumbs up or thumbs down.  But without poison coursing through your veins these taste like candy masquerading as candy.  I’m calling them Tofu Peanut Butter Balls because Schweddy Balls was already taken (and they don’t look a thing like monkey excrement).

Ingredients:

1/4 c peanut butter

1/4 c silken tofu

1/4 c coconut flakes

1/3 c honey or agave nectar

1 tsp vanilla

2 tbsp dry milk

1 c oats

1/4 c ground flaxseed

a pinch of cinnamon

dark chocolate chunks

Directions:

1. Blend tofu and peanut butter with a hand mixer and, voila, what tofu?

2. Combine all other ingredients, especially the dark chocolate chunks because, antioxidants.

3. Shape into balls and roll in a bowl of oatmeal to keep them from being sticky to touch.

4. Refrigerate.

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

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I put on my prettiest dress to go have a PET scan done at the radiologist’s office.  Partly because I have to teach a class afterwards, but mostly because last time I went to a radiologist’s office I was wearing a sweater over a pajama top and jeans.  And nothing says “I’m a sad sack with cancer” like wearing pajama layers in public.  So I’m wearing the dress.

And the first building I drive to is the wrong one.  I’m talking to Joe on the phone, telling him how I can’t find any parking.  “What do you mean?  There are all kinds of empty parking spots,” he says.  “I’m standing at the front entrance right now staring at all the empty parking spots.”  Then I realize I’ve driven to the surgeon’s office instead of the radiologist’s.  So I drive to where Joe is waiting, and then we realize I told him to go to the wrong radiologist’s office.

“Don’t you have the address?” he asks me.

“I wrote it down.”

“On your phone?”

“No.  At home.  On the yellow paper.”

That would be the yellow paper on which I’d drawn a light bulb for Joe to show him how it could also be a woman leaning over to pull up her girdle.

The rest of my notes from the doctor’s office are scrawled on a Whole Foods holiday grocery bag.

Lesson learned: I’m going to need a dedicated notepad and an organizer.

The wrong radiologist directs me a mile west to the right radiologist, and, once inside, my technician Brian looks down at my high heels and says, “I can see this is your first rodeo.”  He keeps repeating this phrase, most depressingly when he says, “This won’t be your last rodeo, of course.”  I’ve been to one actual rodeo in my life, when I was ten.  I had a hay fever attack and my family had to take me home.  That’s my relationship to rodeos.  Circuses. Circuses on the other hand.  I saw the Jim Rose Circus perform once – a man who swallowed razor blades on a string, another guy who contorted to fit through the head of a tennis racket, a woman with duct-taped nipples assisting someone lifting kettle weights on a chain attached to his nether regions.  That’s the more apt analogy.  But I don’t break it to Brian who is now asking me what exactly I think is going to happen here today.

“I think you’re going to inject my veins with something and then shove me in the claustrophobia tube,” I say.

He squints at me for a second and says, “You’ve been Googling.”

What’s going to happen, more precisely, is I’ll be injected with radioactive isotopes with “a glucose chaser,” as Brian says. “And the cancer cells will light up on the scan.”  But between the injection and the scan, I have to sit for seventy minutes in a small, dark room under warm blankets.  Brian tells me this is when patients take a nap.  But I can hear through the walls as Brian ushers another woman through the process and they start to argue.

“Why won’t you be able to tell me my results today?”

“I’m just the technician, ma’am.  I explained this to you yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“When I called you and talked to you for twenty minutes.”

“You didn’t talk to me.”

“I did.  I talked to you for twenty minutes.”

“You most certainly did not talk to me yesterday.”

“I did.  I called you.  You said it was you.  And I talked to you for twenty minutes.”

“I talked to a woman yesterday.”

There’s a long pause here before Brian says, “That was me, ma’am.”

So instead of taking a nap, I spend seventy minutes in a small, dark room trying to imagine what a woman with Brian’s voice might look like.  Just before the doorknob jangles, I figure it out.

A woman with Brian’s voice would look like Bea Arthur.  Now every time he says something – as he leads me down the hall, situates me on the scanner table, instructs me over the intercom while I’m in the tube – I see Bea Arthur.  Bea Arthur is telling me to raise my arms over my head.  Bea Arthur is telling me to keep my head straight.  When I’m done, I sit there for a second in the gown and the paper shorts billowing three-times my width, thinking Brian and I have a rapport.  I made him laugh.  We have the whole rodeo thing.  So I ask Brian if he can tell me the results of the scan.  Just blink twice if I lit up like an electrocuted cartoon cat.





Come on, Bri.  Just blink twice for bad news, once for good. His face crumples in a Bea Arthur grimace of deep disappointment.

I want to know, but I don’t want to know.  Especially the closer it gets to my four o’clock class.  And I really don’t want to know right before I walk in to play James Earl Jones reading “The Raven” in Darth Vader’s voice.  So I don’t even call my doctor to find out.  When I get home, carrying a hot pizza box on the inverted teepee of my fingers, my twelve-year-old is singing Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” because they’ve been warned to keep a five-foot perimeter from me until morning and the Firecracker is chasing after the dog in matching princess dress and Joe rushes out to get the pizza box from me.  Or at least that’s what I think he’s doing.  But really he’s coming to tell me the surgeon called and said it would seem the cancer hasn’t spread.

Day One.

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Ah, here’s something brand new for you I’ve been meaning to share, now up at New World Writing. The beginning:

Built on the cat­a­combs of old zinc mines, the tor­nado licked the ribs of this town clean. Look at this, my grand­mother says, her lawn pocked, pit­ted. It was level before. The low heel of her san­dal twists in a divot. She twines her arm with mine. Overhead, ends of rib­boned VHS tape trail from a knot in the gum tree stripped down to cru­ci­fix limbs, its rus­tle whis­per thin. The birds are gone. The hum of elec­tri­cal wires, silenced. Pulp of pul­ver­ized homes dries on the truck-bed, blue and white Ford, ’71, pushed out of its ruts just so. This town is a turned-out coat.

The rest: here.

A few new(ish) interviews to tell you about.  I recently chatted with screenwriter Sarah Koskoff and director Todd Louiso.  You might remember Louiso as Dick from High Fidelity or Chad the nanny in Jerry Maguire, but he’s also making his mark as an indie director with features such as Hello I Must Be Going.  I also interviewed one of the stars of the documentary Last Days Here, Sean “Pellet” Pelletier, the fan and manager who helped Pentagram’s Bobby Liebling make a comeback after decades of drug abuse.  And, as part of TNB’s “21 Questions” series, I geek out with Erik Sharkey, documentary filmmaker of Drew: The Man Behind the Poster, a film that focuses on the iconic movie-poster artwork of the great Drew Struzan.

Very excited to present the book trailer for Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema ahead of our December 1, 2011 release date. Morris Hill Pictures and Vernon Lott created this brilliant little video for us, and I’ll probably be sending them notes of thanks every day for an eternity. Help us spread the word by sharing this trailer with everyone you know.

Here’s a little something new at The Nervous Breakdown about the inspiration behind the direction Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema has taken and my trip to Joplin, Missouri seven weeks after the tornado:

Curbside at the ruined high school, my fingers hesitate at the door handle.

“It’s okay,” my grandmother, sitting beside me, says, “everyone else has been taking pictures.”

With a big inhale, camera in my hands, I’m out on the street, then in the grass, in my wedge-heeled sandals, stepping over gnarled strips of metal.  I’m still holding my breath as I find the school in the camera’s lens, twisting to focus on its row of classrooms opened up like a smashed dollhouse.  My shirt hem flaps in the wake of the traffic, and I want to announce, “Really, I’m here to help.  It just doesn’t look like helping because I’m a writer and this is all I can do.”  With my finger fumbling over the camera buttons, I snap five blind shots, hurry back to the driver’s side, and exhale behind the wheel.

Maybe I’m the worst person to do what I’m doing because I’m having trouble taking a simple picture to show you what I’m doing it for.  I’m having trouble even telling you what I’m doing.  I’ve started this story at least eight different times so far, and none of them began here.

Read more.

A big thank you to Melanie Dolloff and Danny Craven of Joplin Schools for taking the time to tell me about the needs of the faculty, staff, and students in the aftermath of the tornado.  Full story forthcoming.

Here’s another bit of news from my trip as reported on the Writers on the Influence of Cinema site:

“The Joplin Eagles Television program at Joplin High School, which instructs students in the fundamentals of film production, lost their studio and field equipment and other supplies in the May 22 tornado. Pictured above is some of the damage sustained by the high school, deemed a total loss. After a visit to Joplin School offices last Friday, we learned that we can allocate the Writers on the Influence of Cinema donation to the Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund specifically for the JET 14 program.  More details coming soon, but in the meantime we couldn’t be more excited at the prospects of helping JET 14 Station Manager Danny Craven and Joplin Schools in their efforts to ensure that JET 14 students have what they need to develop their skills in film and broadcasting.”

The anthology will be available in ebook format this fall, and if you’d like an opportunity to have your essay on film and writing included submit it here before the contest closes on July 22.

I’ve been hesitant to update my page since the last thing I posted was in regards to the Joplin tornado of May 22.  Other things seem silly and small by comparison.  But then again maybe some levity is a good thing.

Here are some silly and small recent items of mine at The Nervous Breakdown you can read/watch if you want to.  The first is a playlist inspired by all of that stylized slow-motion walking in movies and the second is a video guide to the 2011 summer blockbusters (in movie geek attire, of course).

Not so silly nor small is the new edition of Prick of the Spindle on which I first officially served as managing fiction editor.   Some excellent works in here.  Don’t miss it.

Mostly I’ve been busy on the Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema project, coming soon this fall as an ebook from Calavera Books with proceeds benefitting the Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund, and the related essay contest.  Tell everyone you know about it.  And then tell them again a little later in case they forget.

I’ll be in Joplin this week for the first time since before the tornado hit, checking on family and dropping by the Joplin Schools offices for a visit.  After the media packs up it’s easy to forget that the devastation is still there and people are still in need.  Check the previous post for ways you can still help.

So I think we’re all caught up now.  Enjoy the holiday weekend!

Oh, and there’s also that novel I’m revising like a madwoman ….

My family is from Joplin, Missouri, and while my relatives are all well and accounted for my heart goes out to all of those who’ve lost loved ones and to all of those who are beginning the hard work of rebuilding and recovering in the aftermath.  Please take a moment to donate to an organization dedicated to assisting in this process:

Greater Ozarks Regional Chapter of the American Red Cross

The United Way of Southwest Missouri

United Methodist Committee on Relief

Ozarks Food Harvest

A larger list of organizations collecting donations can also be found at rebuildjoplin.org and at the Joplin Tornado Relief Fundraising Efforts Facebook page here.

(*Photo taken by my cousin in my grandparents’ Joplin neighborhood.)

I recently interviewed writer/filmmaker Vernon Lott regarding his documentary film Bad Writing, out now on DVD.  Find the interview here at The Nervous Breakdown and watch the trailer here: