New Year, What Are You Practicing?

Also, a new book contract, A live Vancouver event with Deb from Smitten Kitchen (!!!), and Broccoli Ricotta Pizza

Hi Friends,

I love to start the new year with reflections and intentional new schedules and a fresh start feeling. As I told a friend recently, my toxic New Year’s trait is wanting to launch fifteen different daily practices.¹ But between sick kids and a class I’m designing and teaching for the first time, I feel more like I’ve stumbled backward into 2024. “Oh hi! Here we are!”

Still, as I sat with my frustration over a raggedy start to a new year, feeling less clear and intentional than I’d like, I found myself thinking about what I am practicing.

What am I practicing? A lot of new things, actually.

A Creative Writing Teacher’s Companion

Contract!

Recently, my colleague John Vigna and I signed a contract with Bloomsbury Press to co-write a creative writing teaching book.

This is very exciting! We’re both huge pedagogy nerds, and between us, we’ve taught across a wide variety of contexts and genres. We desperately want this book to be USEFUL, a book a new teacher can turn to and find a sample assignment sheet or classroom approach that gets them excited, a book an experienced teacher can open to find a candid thoughtful discussion of contract grading, Generative AI, or the role of research in writing speculative fiction.

And wow, does this book have me practicing some new things!

1. Co-writing with a collaborator. I’ve participated in many writing groups and given and received feedback on all kinds of writing, but I’ve never done this kind of sustained co-writing. John and I are in the Google Docs all up in each other’s sentences! Often, this is delightful: I get a thought as far as I can take it, and when I reopen the doc, John has magically taken it farther! Our styles are pretty compatible: we both value clear communication, willingness to draft messy, not being precious about being edited, and openness to be pushed to reconsider our initial thoughts. But there’s also a learning curve here.

2. A new genre/tone. I’ve written poems and peer-reviewed essays and letters and syllabi, but I haven’t written this kind of how-to resource book before. So much writing on teaching gets bogged down in the alienating language of the corporate university. We don’t want our readers to have to sift through our tone to find what’s useful. But even this whole sustained writing in “we” (with occasional interludes of third-person!) is new. Fortunately, I’ve taught UBC’s Creative Writing Teaching course for MFA students a handful of times now, and I’m able to imagine exactly who I’m trying to talk to: curious, thoughtful teachers and aspiring teachers who bring heaps of their own expertise and so much hunger to do right by their students.

3. Project management with lots of moving parts. Inspired by Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook,

   Courtney Maum
   ’s Before and After the Book Deal, and others who have enriched their projects with voices beyond their own, we decided to feature mini-interviews with our teaching friends and heroes in each chapter. SO many amazing folks have agreed to contribute! I’m so glad we’re doing this. And also, whew boy, this is a lot of work! We’re offering folks the option between written and recorded interviews, preparing individual questions for each interview, and keeping track of scheduling, permissions, and so on. More new skills. We’re so grateful to have support from a fantastic paid student intern.

   

   A tiny corner of our tracking spreadsheet

4. The art of the interview. Interviews are really fun! I am also practicing: asking questions that are specific but also open, moving from a smoosh of doubts and vague impressions to an actual coherent question, imagining questions that would be useful not only to me but to someone just starting out as a teacher or teaching in an entirely different context, nodding with tremendous enthusiasm on Zoom while also shutting the heck up so I keep getting more great answers. . .

What about you, what are you practicing these days? Leave a comment below or hit reply and let me know.

Speaking of interviewing, I will have the chance to put these growing skills to work in a really special way this Wednesday.

OMG! I’m Doing a Live Vancouver Event with Deb from Smitten Kitchen!

I’ll be hosting and interviewing

deb perelman

from

the smitten kitchen digest

this Wednesday for a free event at the Vancouver Public Library as part of the Vancouver Writers’ Fest Incite Series this Wednesday, January 24th at 7 pm. In-person tickets were snapped up right away² (it’s Deb!), but you can tune in via livestream from anywhere. Anything I should be sure to ask? I’m planning to bring my sticky post-it filled copy of Keepers.³

Broccoli Ricotta Pizza

In honor of hosting Deb, I’d like to share my recipe for Broccoli Ricotta Pizza. It’s a recipe I’ve been perfecting over the years, and I’ve been making it using a riff on Deb’s “Angry Grandma” crust recipe ever since Smitten Kitchen Keepers came out. My children LOVE this pizza and request it over plain cheese, pepperoni, etc.

Makes 2 pizzas. Start the dough at least 2 hours before you want to eat.

Ingredients

The Slightly Precise Part (Dough)
2 cups (475 grams) warm water (warm to the touch but not hot)
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
4 cups (250 grams) flour
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 tablespoon olive oil

The Entirely Flexible Part (Toppings)
a few handfuls of low-moisture mozzarella, grated or cut into cubes
one or two crowns of broccoli, cut into small florets
around 3 cloves garlic, peeled and cut into thin slices
2 tablespoons butter
around 3 tablespoons olive oil (plus more for the baking sheet)
between 1/2 a cup and 1 cup of ricotta (the nicer the better! Strain briefly if it’s super drippy)
kosher salt
generous grindings of black pepper (if you like it)

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, whisk the yeast into the warm water. Let it sit for about 5 minutes to bloom and get that nice yeasty smell. Then add the flour, salt, and olive oil and mix it all together. It should be fairly incorporated, but you don’t have to knead it or work it. Cover the bowl with a dish towel, and let it rise for 1.5 to 2 hours until it has doubled and jiggles when you shake the bowl.

2. Heat oven to 450 F. Coat a full-size sheet pan (18” x 26”) (or equivalent two cookie sheets, or cast iron skillets or whatever you have around) with a generous amount of olive oil and spread it thoroughly around. Divide the dough in half (or keep it together for one giant pizza) and scrape/plop each piece onto the sheet pan (I’ve been doing two big ovals side by side as you see below). Gently stretch the dough toward the edges of the pan. This dough is more like a bubbly dimpled focaccia dough than a thin-stretchy pizza dough. Let it relax for about 20 minutes and then stretch it again.

3. While the dough is relaxing, prepare your toppings. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Blanche the broccoli florets (and bits of sliced stem, also fine!) for 30-60 seconds before straining and draining thoroughly. (If you’re using a small colander, you might run it briefly under cold water to keep it from continuing to cook in a heap.) In a small saucepan or frying pan, heat butter and 2-3 tablespoons olive oil at medium-high until butter melts, then turn down to medium-low. Add sliced garlic and cook gently, as if you were preparing garlic bread. You want the garlic soft but not browned and your whole place smelling like delicious garlic butter. When the garlic is tender, add the broccoli to the garlic pan and mix it all around, along with a sprinkle of salt, especially if didn’t use salted butter. Toss to get the broccoli nice and soaked.

4. Top the pizza(s). Sprinkle a handful of grated/cubed mozzarella, then arrange broccoli (and its little friend garlic) all over the pizza but not overlapping much. Use a small spoon (with possibly another small spoon to scrape if you don’t want to use your finger) to dollop blobs of ricotta until generously nestled around the broccoli. Drizzle any remaining butter/oil mix over the broccoli, then grind lots of black pepper over the whole situation.

5. Bake 20 to 30 minutes, or until the bottom crust is a nice crispy golden brown and the broccoli is lightly singed in places.

Tips

• This crust is pretty robust and can take a lot of toppings, but be sure not to waterlog it with super drippy ricotta and inadequately drained blanched broccoli. That would be sad.

• Don’t skimp on the pan olive oil or you may have some sticking.

• Be prepared for friends and family to cut thin strips off the end of the pizza to nibble on even when they say they’re done eating.

Yours in garlic butter,

Bronwen

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1. This is only barely a joke. How to decide between all of the things: lift weights, swim, do yoga with Adriene, write poems on my typewriter, write a daily letter to a friend, do a Creativebug daily painting lesson, practice guitar, write a Commonplace Book entry, pull a daily tarot card, maintain a Linda Barry Daily diary, etc. etc.?

2. If you’re in Vancouver and you want to come but didn’t get a ticket, I’ve heard that free events often “sell out” quickly, but that there’s almost always some attrition and a good chance of getting in if you show up.

3. Relatedly, would it be fun if I did a little series of cookbook and craft book recommendations?