Reading High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver, her favorite author. It's a book of essays and she picked it up because, in Kingsolver's book, Small Wonder, she talks about poetry. The essay Stealing Apples is about how poetry isn't something you write, it's something that happens to you, and not when you're sitting at a desk.
10/20/2006
Posted by Sonya Worthy at Friday, October 20, 2006
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Last night, even before I mentioned my blog entry, on my way to a Watchword Press event, my friend, Adam, said he wanted to steal apples...a coincidence? I don't know. Maybe he read my blog on the sly.
Later that night, en route from the event to a birthday party, the plan evolved--the stolen apples would be made into a pie for the birthday girl. We began considering the possibilities. It was already after midnight and we didn't have time to search for apples that were "stealable" so we got them at Cala Foods--the only 24-hour supermarket in the area--and we bought them. My friend, Kenneth, needed to get cash back from his debit card so he'd have money for a taxi later that night.
The plan was this: we hand the apples out to the people at the party and then steal them back. What we didn't count on was that the guests would, as soon as they had an apple in hand, begin eating it. "I was so excited to get it," someone said later, "I'd been eating nothing but chocolate and junk and cheese and it was something healthy!" I panicked and tried to explain that the apples were not for eating. I may have overreacted. No one quite understood.
I went to the kitchen and started making pastry dough. The weekend before, when my friends and I rented a cabin in Harbin for a writing retreat, I had successfully made dough for a pumpkin pie sans recipe--you mix up a stick of butter with a few cups of flour and then add a little bit of water so it clumps together in balls. By chance, the birthday girl had just received a rolling pin for her birthday. The pie was meant to be.
My friend, Jenny, went out and stole the apples from the unsuspecting guests. Kenneth cut the bite marks out and we piled a pie tin high with apples--when my cousin, Tyler, used to make apple pies I remembered they were always very tall before they went in the oven--apples reduce.
An hour later we had pie, or, maybe it was poetry. I was too tired to notice.
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