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Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

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Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

  • About
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Narrative Cookbooks

August 31, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

The worst kind of cookbook is one whose recipes just don’t work, of course. A close second is a database of recipes with no context, explanation, or personal story—recipe as equation that will give as clockwork and uninspired a result as a multiplication table. The kinds of cookbooks I love are personal, passionate, and preface each and every recipe with enough detail to know why it mattered to the cookbook author to include it, and how to judge the results as the reader and cook.

But even that kind of cookbook is primarily a tool—for expanding one’s repetoire of flavors or skills or simply grasp of how the other half eats. I’ve concluded, though, that my most favorite cookbooks are something beyond tools. They are what I hereby officially dub Narrative Cookbooks.

A Narrative Cookbook is not a Memoir with Recipes—a fine genre, and have I mentioned lately that I myself have written a Memoir with Recipes?—but its distinct own thing. In a Memoir with Recipes, the primary purpose is to tell the personal story, and in this particular case the personal story is very much bound up with food, so the author would like you the reader to taste or at least imagine the taste of the food that informed the life.

By contrast, a Narrative Cookbook is still more about the food than the life, but it recognizes that you can’t extract the one from the other, and the food won’t come to life without the life itself being reported alongside the recipe.

In my entirely unscientific survey, I find that Narrative Cookbooks span a spectrum from most essay-ish to most memoir-ish and the whole range in between…

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Tags cookbooks, memoir
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Transgenre Theology

May 11, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
Early Lutheran transgenre theology: depicting the distinction between law and gospel visually.

Early Lutheran transgenre theology: depicting the distinction between law and gospel visually.

You may have misread the title of this post. Take a second look just to be sure.

I’m fascinated by and obsessed with genre, which is not necessarily the most flattering moniker in the literary world.

“Genre fiction” is dismissed as formulaic, literarily subpar, and morally questionable to boot. Passive tools of the powers-that-be drug themselves with one escapist fantasy after another, whether it’s romance, Western, or sci-fi—or so the accusation goes.

Ursula K. LeGuin taught me to reverse my suspicion toward such suspicion of genre fiction, and enough disappointed dabblings in literary fiction have taught me that there’s more than one way to drug a populace. It’s the sniffy writers of beautiful sentences devoid of meaning or plot who are most likely to claim that their work can’t be classified; it’s beyond genre, so they say.

While I do like to read all kinds of things, I’m not especially devoted to any one genre. If it’s a good story, well told and well written, I’m game. The real reason I’ve become a genre devotee is because of the epistemology it unlocked for me…

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Tags Thornbush Press, transgenre theology, theology, books, memoir, fiction
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I Am a Brave Bridge: The Complete Prologue!

April 13, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
Click on the cover to order your copy from Amazon!

Click on the cover to order your copy from Amazon!

I missed Czechoslovakia by six days.

It had been an odd sort of companion throughout my childhood, like an invisible mirror or rumored cousin, never quite real enough to manifest, never quite imaginary enough to vanish.

There was reason for its reticence, of course. It was communist, though poor little Czechoslovakia couldn’t really be blamed for that. Whenever I visited the red and gray farmhouse in upstate New York cobbled together by my grandparents’ meager construction skills, I would spin their globe, swiping the Atlantic Ocean out of sight, to locate the inverted circumflex amidst a crazy-quilt of countries small enough to be states. Surely Czechoslovakia had the most wonderful name of them all. Fourteen letters, beginning with that peerless Cz cluster, hinged in the middle by a modest but muscular o flicking upward the long fishtail of the remainder. The little orange strip, topologically ridged to represent the Carpathians, could barely accommodate its unwieldy moniker, in marked and modest contrast to the vast swath only a thumbprint’s width away, which fittingly named itself with a four-letter word: U.S.S.R.

I knew things about Czechoslovakia that other people didn’t, and not only how to spell it. Czechoslovakia, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. I assumed they were ordered according to the principle of save-the-best-for-last. My people were not Bohemians or Moravians. We were Slovaks.

I also knew that the pseudo-word “Slovakian”—usurper, pretender, and offense against eye and ear—was our private shibboleth, the unerring indicator of an outsider. It was anathema to us Slovaks; no one on the inside ever, ever said it, The New York Times notwithstanding. Ditto the equally opprobrious “Czechoslovakian” as a term for a nonexistent language.

I knew, moreover, that it made no nevermind that three generations of us had never actually been there. American citizenship was a mere epiphenomenon, a fact that my classmates, most of whom hadn’t the faintest idea of their own ethnic heritage, seemed unable to grasp. Whereas I knew that if sentimentality for the lost motherland gripped the church ladies in my grandfather’s Slovak congregation, the sure result was to be cabbage rolls, boiled with an inch of their lives. Plus ziti. Contradictions were allowed.

There was something else I knew, of which Czechoslovakia was but one of several echoes reverberating back to me from afar: I knew how always to be homesick for somewhere else…

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Tags Slovakia, memoir
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I Am a Brave Bridge: Cover Reveal!

March 30, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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I’ve been working on this book for five years, gone through drafts and beta readers and research and “killing my darlings,” and you’d think that would be enough. But I think any author will tell you that nothing makes it real like seeing the cover!

The basic concept was mine. I wanted an image of St. George in honor of the starring town of Svätý Jur (St. George in Slovak), but I wanted him spearing not a dragon but a heart—namely, mine. And in the background I wanted the SNP Bridge, which I like to think of as the Eiffel Tower of Bratislava, at least of its iconic status if not quite the same level of architectural distinction. Strictly speaking, the title doesn’t refer to this bridge, but I must say it’s pretty handy that Bratislava boasts such a distinctive bridge to make for a great visual tie-in!

However, my skill set definitely does not extend to the execution of visual design, so I found two great artists to make the dream a reality…

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Tags Slovakia, memoir
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Cooking at the Crossroads

March 16, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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Just about a month away now from the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge, my memoir with recipes of a year in Slovakia 1993–1994, I thought it was time to give a little love to an unjustly neglected cuisine at the four corners of a defunct empire.

The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire is how the Time-Life “Foods of the World” characterizes it and accordingly entitles that entry in the renowned series. I imagine the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be rather irritated by their absence from this name, but as usual, Slovaks have more cause to complain: author Joseph Wechsberg fails to include a single recipe attributed to Slovakia (even “Liptauer Cheese,” the German name for a spread from the Liptov region of Slovakia), presumably assuming—as Czechs are wont to do—that Slovak is a subset of Czech.

For all that, it’s a marvelous cookbook and a good place to start if, as is generally the case in the English-speaking world, central Europe is kind of a blank on your mental map…

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Tags Slovakia, cooking, cookbooks, recipes, memoir
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Memoirs with Recipes

February 16, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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Now that I am—finally!—counting down the days and not the years until the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge: An American Girl’s Hilarious and Heartbreaking Year in the Fledgling Republic of Slovakia, I have found myself more and more curious about the other contenders in my subgenre: the memoir with recipes.

It came as no surprise that memoirs with recipes lean heavily toward the crosscultural and international. Nothing evokes the reality of having a foot in more than one reality than the different, even conflicting tastes you develop along the way. Being an international person means always being hungry for something you can’t get…

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Tags cooking, Slovakia, memoir, recipes
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What Is Grace? Two Memoirs from Thornbush Press

February 2, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
Click on the cover to order your copy from Amazon!

Click on the cover to order your copy from Amazon!

A year ago, in early February 2020, I hadn’t yet heard of the coronavirus, and therefore could not under any circumstances have dreamed of how the year would unfold unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Nor would I have imagined that my response to lockdowns, border closures, and economic disaster would be to… start a publishing house.

And then came a further surprise on top of that one: that my publishing house would actually be the ideal home for any author but myself! Not long after Thornbush Press launched, the wonderful, brilliant Katie Langston put the manuscript of her book Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace into my digital hands for a beta read, and I’m not quite sure anymore which of the two of us asked first if Thornbush could be its publisher. I think I tried to talk her into at least trying for a deal with more prestige. She insisted that she preferred the authorial freedom, drastically better profit-sharing, and (I daresay) good fun of working with me instead. I couldn’t bring myself to argue. When you find a pearl of great price lying in a field… run out and buy the field!

The upshot is that Thornbush Press is now officially a two-author outfit! Look out, Random House, here we come.

There is a deeper connection here, though, than convenience and covid. As it turns out, Katie and I have both produced, at roughly mid-life (me a little more mid- than she), memoirs that try to sort out how we ended up where we are right now; both of these memoirs will be published in the next couple of months; and both of them—without knowing anything about the other at the time of writing—are a narrative attempt to answer the question: What is grace? …

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Tags memoir, Slovakia, Thornbush Press
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Serendipity and Synchronicity in a Pop-Up Book

March 17, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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This is simply too weird and wonderful not to share.

Somewhere around 1998 I discovered what seemed to me to be the true cosmic reason for the internet: namely, online used book stores that would allow me to summon home all the long-lost treasures of childhood. It is the closest I’ve ever come in my life to a runaway spending spree.

Memory, however, is slow, and so are used book sellers. It was some years till I remembered a beloved pop-up book of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”—but when I’d look online for it, either it wasn’t there at all, or there were multiple options and none with a photo of the cover to help me disambiguate. And then I’d forget again for a few years, before I’d look and run into the same conundrum.

But last month, as I was selecting my book purchases to bring home from a trip to see my parents in the U.S., this one came to mind again, and, sing praise to the heavens, there was a cover photo—which I recognized immediately. Yes, this was my long-lost book, and the seller assured that the pop-ups were intact (which is no minor consideration). So I ordered it and had a very happy reunion when I arrived Stateside…

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Tags Artia, memoir, Slovakia, children's books
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The Bitter Price of Making the World a Better Place

February 4, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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Rosemary Kavan, Love and Freedom: My Unexpected Life in Prague (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 278 pp. Originally published as Freedom at a Price: An Englishwoman’s Life in Czechoslovakia (London: Verso, 1985).

In reading Janko Jesenský’s The Democrats, I found myself as intrigued as anything by the book’s translator, Jean Rosemary Edwards, also known as Rosemary Kavan (or, in Czech, Rosemary Kavanová). I’d found out a little about her—she married Czech Communist Pavel Kavan, lived in Czechoslovakia during the communist rise to power, enjoyed a short stay with him working at the embassy in London, and then returned to Prague only for Pavel to be arrested—like countless other true-believer communists—by his own party and country on trumped-up charges of treason. Pavel was released sooner than his sentenced twenty-five years, but his health was destroyed and he died in the late 1950s. Rosemary stuck it out in Prague until her older son Jan Kavan’s liberal activism in the Prague Spring, and her support of it, threatened her own liberty and life. She escaped Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s and stayed away until her death of cancer in 1981.

This memoir of her life, finished shortly before her death and published by her aforementioned son, fills in much of those details, not least of all the extremely difficult marriage she had with Pavel. Confusing their chemistry with love (hardly an original mistake) and his ideological passion for the whole human race with the ability to love well and attentively a single person, she stuck by her man, his short temper, inconsiderateness, neglect, and occasional violence notwithstanding. The communist commitment to ending the exploitation of man by man rarely noticed the problem of the exploitation of woman by man…

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Tags Slovakia, communism, memoir, Artia
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Singing the Praises of a Story Grid Edit(or)

September 5, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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I’ve enthused before about Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know. Once I’d read the book a few times, in addition to bingeing my way through every single episode of The Story Grid and The Story Grid Editor Roundtable podcasts, I was emboldened to take the tools and apply them to my memoir. I knew I more or less had the story arc in place, but I also knew from reader comments that there were some gaps that fuddled or distracted. It’s always amazing what you don’t realize has to be said because it’s so obvious to yourself!

Armed with Story Grid tools and reader comments, I did a close analysis of the entire book—and saw what was missing.

In short, while all the pieces of the external genre were in place (in Story Grid lingo, Love/courtship), a few key scenes were missing from the internal genre (Worldview/maturation). And this was a serious problem, because while the love story is the hilarious-and-heartbreaking narrative that should drive readers on chapter by chapter, the real meat of the story, and its final payoff, is in the maturation of worldview. Less obviously dramatic, but ultimately more meaningful.

Once I saw that, I also saw exactly what to do—where I’d missed an opportunity or failed to realize the stakes of an event. Corrected and embellished, I now had a plot with two strong and interrelated plot tracks to take the reader all the way to the end. I even charted the revised version one more time to make sure every last scene was carrying its weight.

And then I was done, right?

Not quite…

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Tags memoir, Slovakia, writing
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