I am really over the moon about how this turned out. The content I’ll let you judge for yourself, but I think I can unequivically state that it just looks SO GREAT. Many many thanks to Sheila Sachs and Paul Dolan for being so amazingly talented.

So, yes, the book is on its way to a bookstore shelf near you; please, if you can, buy it from an indie, from the publisher, or direct from me. We get a few more pieces of gold that way, and you’ll be doing your part to support independent media, in both its production and distribution.

To make it easy - at least for Chicagoans - we’re throwing a book release party on Wednesday, November 2, from 7 to 9 PM at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia. We’ll have books for sale, and soup and bread from a wide range of donors, and a DJ and beer and, basically, a furious good time. A portion of the proceeds from all books sold at the party, and all donations raised, go to the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

If you are not familiar with what is euphemistically referred to over on the right as “my other blog,” I’d urge you to check it out, for more than you could ever want to know about Soup & Bread and its evolution over the years.

But here, in a nutshell, are some of the nice things people have been saying:

Time Out Chicago named it “One of the ten essential cookbooks for autumn.”

Chicagoist says the book is “just as stunning to read” as the first one; Grub Street Chicago concurs, but they used the word “adorable.”

And out in Baltimore, Examiner’s Tamar Fleishman called it “one of the most thought-provoking (and appetizing!) books I’ve picked up in a long time.” How nice is that?

As things ramp up on the soup scene, I will try and post updates here. But, well, if I run out of steam just trust that I’ll get back to this forum eventually. In the meantime, if you’re wondering where I am, the Soup & Bread blog as and the Facebook page for the book are both good places to look.

Hope to see you on the 2nd!

Are you wondering where I’ve gone? Most of the action is over on the soup blog.

And when I’m not there I’m running around trying to wrap up work on the next edition of the Soup & Bread Cookbook, to be published in November by Evanston-based  Agate Publishing It’s sort of a hybrid: part cookbook, part social history of soup as community-building tool, pairing recipes from the last three years of Soup & Bread with stories about *other people’s soup schemes.* Like this. And this.

The scope of the book stretches from contemporary soup-based projects like those above to encompass soup kitchens, community meals, chili cook-offs, crazy art projects, and just about anything else I can cram into the, uh, pot.

Now, there’s a sound case to be made against sharing your work in progress, but I’m willing to take the risk. Because if the examples above get your stock simmering, you can lay claim to membership in the exclusive club that is our target market — and you also might be able to help. Do you know of such a project or tradition? Some homespun soup circle; some enterprising soup visionary? Please let me know (um, soon) at soupnbread10 (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks so much!

OK, back to work.

Not exactly breaking news, since it hit the streets October 6, but for the record here’s what I’ve been working on for the last month — a feature on the agonizing bureaucratic odyssey of the shared-use Logan Square Kitchen.

I have to confess here that when I hit send on the last round of revisions, my cell phone still sizzling from a day spent burning up the City Hall phone tree, I was convinced I had just filed the most boring story ever. Who on earth was going to read this? Zoning geeks? Fiends for the minutiae of the municipal code?

A day later, perspective gained, I felt better. But, still — judge for yourself.

In a nutshell, this is the story of a small startup business trying to gain its footing in a lousy economy. And not just any old small business, but one whose explicit reason for being is to help other small businesses find their footing as well — and do it in a space designed to best reuse the existing resources of its neighborhood. What could possibly go wrong? Well, when you’re got three city departments all weighing in, you’d be surprised.

If, after you’re read to the end, you are moved by this tangled tale, you can go to LSK owner Zina Murray’s blog and download a letter of support to send to Mayor Daley. And stay tuned for updates — I’m planning to follow Murray all the way to the zoning board.

Fun! What ever will I wear?

UPDATE: Zina wins!

I do have other things going on other than work to write about. Or, well, maybe that’s not true. But, in any case, here’s a link to another recently published something: a review in Bookforum of James Ellroy’s new memoir, the Hilliker Curse. Subtitled “My Pursuit of Women,” it’s essentially that — a twisty travelogue through his romantic life. It’s not an easy ride, though there’s much to enjoy about it. And, interestingly, for all the torment love and lust have caused the man, they seem to be doing well by him. My friend Seth said it well (OK, he “said” it on Facebook…):

“I think his simultaneous awareness of and total inability (or lack of desire) to overcome his own juggernaut pathology does make an important point. These experiences of gender, power and love loom so huge in people’s lives that they become living myths. Awareness by itself isn’t usually enough to change them. Though it can–almost parasitically– profit from them.”

[No, I'm not dead.]

Looky here! I spent a several weeks this summer hanging around with Sarah Kavage, creator and executor of Industrial Harvest, an elaborate — and supercool — project aimed at sorting out and making manifest the intimate relationship between the commodity futures market, the city of Chicago, and the food we eat. And then I wrote about it, and the Reader put it on the cover of the paper. [Kudos, by the way, to the Reader art department. That flour sack is really pretty.]

Just in time, too, as all of a sudden the wheat market is again front page news.

Sarah will be in town for a few more months, so if you haven’t gotten your bag of flour, you’ll have plenty of additional opportunities. In fact, she’ll be at Veggie Bingo tomorrow (August 11) talking about her project, distributing flour, and maybe playing a few rounds. That’s from 6-8 at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia. Come on out!

I have a piece out this week in the Reader’s annual These Parts edition on Azerbaijani-to-Wisconsin transplant Sofya Hundt and her excellent blog, Rich Food, Lean Times. If you’re in the market for a recipe for venision-blue cheese stroganoff, step-by-step instructions for pickle soup (pictured), or just some tips on tender pelmeni, she’s your girl.

Back in January I was having dinner with a friend when he launched into a description of the performance he’d attended earlier that day. The performer was a mutual friend of ours — a writer and critic who had, in the great tradition of underemployed journalists across the land, gotten himself a job in a bar after leaving his editorial position at a weekly arts and entertainment magazine. And, with said bar at his disposal, he’d decided to start a salon, a weekly showcase for writers, actors, comics, and anyone else looking for a forum at 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. My friend had gone to check it out.

He did this piece, said my friend, that started out all meta, about the death of journalism and whatnot. He talked about how the New York Times had started charging readers for online content and about how this was freaking people out, and about how once upon a time not so very long ago, there was a viable business model for the free dissemination of news and stories. He talked about the Reader, said my friend — about how it could be free because the editorial side was supported by the classifieds, and about how Craigslist turned that model into mulch. And then, said my friend, he talked about you. A lot.

[Insert phonograph needle screech -- universal audio signifier for cognitive dissonance -- here.]

It was hilarious, said my friend. He made you out to be some sort of ass-kicking editorial superhero!

I was, to say the least, intrigued. And flattered. But despite a few attempts over the winter, I never managed to get my hands on this monologue, in text or audio form. And eventually I sort of forgot about it. Until this past week, when Christopher Piatt, the writer in question, put the audio up on the website for his series, the Paper Machete.

It’s here. And here.

And I don’t want to go too much into the gist of what Chris is saying, because you can listen to it yourself. But I did want to point out that, while I am (again) very, very flattered by the portrait he has painted here, it’s sort of awesome how wildly off it is from my memory of the period we worked together — the glory days of journalism, which Piatt locates way back in the mists of time in 2004.

Because in 2004? Man, I was a mess.

That Piatt didn’t see this is, of course, a testament to our ability to compartmentalize and put on a good show. But it also speaks to the power of narrative to construct a character. In the service of character, writers put in the stuff that hones the persona, and leave out that which makes it blurry. Anyone who’s ever been written about — ever expectantly opened a paper, or clicked on a link — knows how disconcerting this can be. Anyone who’s ever written knows how critical it is.

Teasing out the truth of the character in 1,500 words or less is a parlor trick, and  in this sense, I guess I did do a good job schooling Christopher Piatt. Because there’s nothing factually wrong with this story. I did work insanely long hours at the Reader of yore — we all did. And I did work with a lot of green writers to whom I can imagine I was probably a figure of mysterious power. Yet, I couldn’t help laughing through the whole thing, shaking my head at this too-cool-for-school woman who seems so very much a stranger.

And, in terms of narrative, it’s funny that this popped up again right now. Because after two years in the wilderness (when I was not so much “writing books” as Piatt thinks I was, as “writing book proposals that disappear into the void”) I started a new editorial job this month, as an occasional copyeditor at one of the city’s big dailies. It’s a good gig. But it is weird to be back in a newsroom, weirder still as the lowliest of the low on the cubicle ladder. It’s a biographical development that doesn’t quite work with the up-and-out arc of Piatt’s piece. Maybe I can use it myself, though.

That’s the cool thing about constructing stories. You can always create a new one from the puzzle pieces of the old.

I just spent a very long three days at this year’s FamilyFarmed expo, “live blogging” it for the Reader and, g-d help me tweeting it to boot. You can read the results over on the Reader blog, where I weigh in on the sad saga of shared-use kitchens, whole-beast cookery, urban chickens, and bunch of other stuff. I think some iteration of all these posts will run in the paper later this week.

This was an experiment for me, and mostly it went well. For one, I think I finally understand this whole Twitter business. But, man, the blogging part was hard. Trying to process hours of information, synthesize it, and then spit back out through the fingers on a dime left my brain a blob of jelly and did a major number on my wrists. Is this the best way to disseminate information? To tell a story? It was a fun challenge but I remain unconvinced.

I have a piece in this week’s Reader — a special issue devoted to all things Hyde Park-Kenwood — on the ongoing hoo-ha surrounding the U. of C.’s plan to use the lot long-occupied by the 61st Street Community Garden as a staging area for construction of the new Chicago Theological Seminary at 60th and Dorchester.

The hardest thing about writing this story was not just relying on all the previous reporting on it; the saga’s been going on for a year now, and it’s been reported up, down, and sideways. I’d recommend anyone curious to get a more thorough picture of the garden community and (at least one side of) the current controversy check out Jamie Kalven’s Invisible Institute site, which has a pretty impressive collection of documentary information (interviews, photos, essays) on the garden and its gardeners. In fact, I pinched the photo above from there. I hope they don’t mind.

Are you wondering where I’ve gone?

I’m here.

And over here.

Come visit!