Bread and Bread

This weekend I felt like I got a small toe back in the literary loop. Saturday I met Sandra Hunter at Buttercelli , a lovely little bakery that anyone not from L.A. would make relentless fun of. There are subsections of baked goods for vegans, paleo people and the gluten-free. I ate something from a menu represented by a lioness mascot. I'm not totally sure what that meant. Vegan and low-sugar, maybe? Like buttah. Not like gluten. (After getting good cancer-test results last week [!], but flying a little too fast and loose around the cheese empanadas at Leslie's short film wrap party on Saturday night, I think I should follow the lead of vegan/low-sugar lionesses. I should probably also talk to my therapist about the patina of control and reward/punishment issues that overlays my generally good-but-imperfect eating habits.) Anyway, Sandra's first novel, Losing Touch , just came out, and I'm liking it a lot so far. It's about a an Indian-English man whose f...

I love my org’s interns. They’ve ranged from nineteen to thirty-one-ish, from literary prodigies who can’t stop talking about their favorite professors to waitresses ready for a career change (who are now nonprofit development directors; hi, Lenise). They used to seem more like peers and less like charming teenagers. But they radiate curiosity and give me the feeling that something new and interesting might be just around the corner for me, too. They’re the difference between “ugh, I wish it was lunchtime already” and “maybe I will look up that word I don’t know!” I have never asked an intern to get me coffee with even one of her eight arms. One of them, Sanam, is a grad student at CSUN now, and the president of the school’s Northridge Creative Writing Circle. She invited Jamie and me to read our fiction and talk about our org last night. It was like they’d read the Guide To Presenting Readings And Workshops on our website that no one ever downloads. One of the club members gree...