Making Ghelye Mahi in Amsterdam

A bit off topic, but I still wanted to share my first article about cooking featuring an actual, if inexact recipe. I look forward to comments.

The piece is up now at Tehran Bureau. It's for one of my favorite dishes, Ghelye Mahi. Please go read it, and if you make the dish let me know how it turns out.

Every time we had people over for dinner, my husband would say to me, "Tori, we didn't make enough food."
"How can that be?" I'd ask. "There are leftovers." It wasn't until we moved to Iran in 2003 for a four-year stay that I understood what he meant. A chicken leg or two is not leftovers. It's ta'rof -- good manners. It's what the guests leave behind so you won't think you served them insufficiently. "Enough food" means that another party can be fed with what is left over at the end of the evening.

The first time we were invited out in Iran, we were served omelets, fish, whole roasted chicken, yogurt and cucumbers, yogurt and spinach, tomato, cucumber, and onion salad, salad with iceberg lettuce and Thousand Island dressing, spring chicken kebabs, and chopped lamb kebabs. All of this was brought to the table just before midnight. Kamran whispered, "Do they think we're cows?"

I tell you this so you won't balk at the amount of food my friend Zohreh Sanaseri (pictured) prepared for our dinner of ghelye (ghalieh) mahi -- a stew of fish, herbs, and tamarind paste. She invited three others to share the stew with us, but made enough for at least ten people.

In four years of living in Iran, I never once encountered ghelye mahi. In fact, it wasn't until a night out at a Persian restaurant in Amsterdam that I ate it for the first time. The flavor was surprising: sharp, sour, sweet, and fishy all at once. It was made with many of the ingredients found in other stews I'd eaten in Iran, but tasted nothing like them. I searched for recipes and tried making it a few times before giving up. None was as good as my first time...

And then I ate ghelye mahi at the home of my friend Zohreh, who hails from the city of Abadan in southwestern Iran. "It was the Paris of Iran," the eldest of her two daughters, who were born in the Netherlands, tells me. "Was," Zohreh emphasizes. "Before the war."

It was the war with Iraq that drove Zohreh and her family out of Iran. She settled in the Netherlands with her husband when she was just 25. "I had never cooked before in my life," she says. "I learned everything here."

"My father tells us she used to burn food all the time and that her cooking was awful," her daughter adds. This seems impossible now because Zohreh's "cooking hand" (dast pocht) is renowned among friends and family. Like many migrants, she learned cooking by calling her mother long-distance and working at her side during extended visits. "For me, ghelye mahi is the most important dish. This is our dish. It is the dish of Abadan and the one food that makes me feel connected to my family and my city."

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2012/04/cuisine-too-much-is-never-enough-making-ghelye-mahi.html#ixzz1tA6yDWC8

A Return to Story-Telling

I've long been a lover of story-telling.  I think I really got into it when I was in the 7th grade -- about 13 years old -- in Mrs. Ream's English class.  Back then, it was stupid stories about action heroes who battled and belittled a popular boy-band of the era (the New Kids on the Block).  But it was a start.

In college, I majoried in Communications and minored in Creative Writing.  And even when I wasn't studying, I really enjoyed videography as an avenue for story-telling (the Roving Paramedics being the prime example of this phenomenon).  Story-telling just seemed to be in my genetic make-up.

But then I went into full-time Christian ministry.

A Wasted Education in Story-Telling?

In the late 1990s, when this career transition happened for me, I felt like all Christians (and especially Christian workers) were categorically disinclined towards reading (or writing) fiction.  It was seen to be a waste of time.  The books that most Christians seemed to like reading were case studies in apologetics, like Lee Strobel's "Case for Christ" or "Case for Faith"... Or they were books about self-discovery, like Rick Warren's "Purpose-Driven Life" or John Eldridge's "Wild at Heart."  To a smaller degree, some Christians were into sociological- or anthropological studies, like Leonard Sweet's "Soul Tsunami" or Robert E. Webber's "Younger Evangelicals"... Or of course, there were (and have always been) books about the best theories for starting or growing churches (I could probably name off a couple dozen books in this category).  I read all these different kinds of books -- and I genuinely benefitted from what they had to share -- but I always felt kind of guilty because I didn't seem to naturally soak up that kind of reading as much as my colleagues and contemporaries did.  I read those types of books as a type of "continuing education," but I enjoyed them about as much as I enjoyed my academic textbooks from my university years.

If it was up to me, I much preferred the latest novel by Douglas Coupland or a nice collection of short stories by various authors.  These felt more entertaining to me -- but also more inspiring, and I might even say more instructive.  But as someone working in full-time Christian ministry, I always felt kind of sheepish about these preferences.  And over time, I even came to feel embarrassed that I had "only" studied Communications and Creative Writing.  Like these had nothing to do with Christian ministry, and I could have just as easily trained to become a zoo-keeper.


Reclaiming the Power of Story

For whatever reason, I've been noticing a cultural trend within Christendom over the last couple of years:  a sort of return to story-telling.  Actually, I think it's happening in the culture at large, too.  Have you noticed it?  Have you picked up on any kind of a return to story-telling?

For whatever reason, a number of different external sources have stimulated my awareness of this phenomenon. One of these was Douglas Coupland's book: Generation A, which "champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world." I might add that the book does this in a really interesting and provocative way.  Around the same time that I was finishing with Coupland's novel, I read something that Amber van Schooneveld posted about story-telling, literary critique, and "children's books." She makes a brilliant case for story-telling that jives very much with what I've been noticing and what was brought up in Coupland's book. And then, just an hour after reading the piece from Amber van Schooneveld, I stumbled across a beautiful description of the story-telling powers of the Bible, written by Gerard Kelly.  And through all of these stories about stories, my enthusiasm has continued to build and build.

I still don't know exactly what to do with these observations or these enthusiastic feelings.  Of course, I can keep delighting in the story of the Bible.  I can use my church's pulpit as a forum for biblical story-telling (while not neglecting other important parts of preaching, of course).  And I can keep tinkering around with my own stories here on the internet (and hopefully soon in more widely-published places).

For now, though, more than anything I'm just thinking, wondering, and feeling... almost like I'm back in Mrs. Ream's 7th grade English class.

Did It Really?

A journalist friend swore she couldn’t write fiction: she couldn’t write a story that wasn’t true. A novelist confessed he was a liar: he couldn’t write anything true.

Most writing falls someplace in between. In the nebulous zone between actual events, people, locations, emotional experience--and imagination.

I just finished reading “The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy” by Barbara Vine, which deals with the parallels between the life of a writer and his writing. In this novel, Gerald Candless, a bestselling author, dies unexpectedly. His publisher asks the daughter to write her father’s memoir. She makes an enthusiastic start, but soon discovers Gerald Candless doesn’t exist prior to the age of twenty-five when he changed both his name and identity. Through research and interviews the daughter finds out part of the truth. She discovers the facts but not the motives. The why and the emotional anguish can only be revealed in the novels he wrote.

Upon reading a published novel written by a friend, I was surprised to find some of the things I had said to the author repeated verbatim in the dialogue. While the character who spoke them resembled me in some small ways, she was definitely not me as a whole. She was a creation sprung from the nebulous zone.

We all draw on our own lives and those that touch ours when we create stories. Who in the critique group reading someone’s piece hasn’t wondered… Did that really happen? Is that him? His girl friend? Me?

Pierre Menard Covers The Quixote as Nick Cave Gets it On with Leonard Cohen

Writers steal. We steal ideas, dreams, and thoughts. We record the misremembered and misheard and misunderstood. That’s how we cover. Yet, plagiarism is the greatest sin a writer can commit. It will damn you to whatever ring of hell is reserved for betrayers, traitors, and liars. Despicable.

But isn’t there anything to learn from “covering” great writers? Can’t we be a bit like musicians every once in awhile and cover another’s work rather than steal it? I can’t write this without thinking of the Jorge Luis Borges piece:
Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote. I’ll let an excerpt speak for itself:


It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
 
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic. 

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

In the spirit of covers, I offer you this post, which is a cover of one I wrote for the Mezrab Blog earlier in the week. It offers a number of covers by artists who have so re-imagined the originals that they are transformed and surprising. For starters, I offer you Hit ‘Em Up Style from the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Their version of the song made popular by Blu Cantrell is picked clean, sharper than the original, and infused with righteous anger:



When Leonard Cohen sings I’m Your Man, I think, “Someone to cuddle up with and depend on when I need him… What could be nicer?” When Nick Cave sings it though -- well, that’s something else. It’s erotic and explicit, sweaty and visceral. It makes my heart palpitate and my mouth water. I love you, Leonard Cohen, but it’s Nick Cave I want.




Like many people who were young in the 80s, I am a huge Clash fan. I saw them live in the Aragon ballroom in Chicago sometime or another before they stopped touring. There were no seats, and we danced with a kind of rage and energy that can only be experienced in a hall full of people keyed into the vibe, angry at the world, and filled with a drive to change reality. When I listen to them now, their songs sound surprisingly mild and melodic. They’re like lullabies. Nouvelle Vague has done some breathtaking covers of the Clash (Guns of Brixton comes to mind ) and Lily Allen’s version of Straight to Hell deserves a good listen, but in the spirit of the times, I want to highlight Rachid Taha’s version of Rock the Casbah. It just seems like great timing for a rebirth of this song, and Rachid Taha really brings it home.



My final recommendation for today is Ramblin’ Man from the Residents. It wasn’t until I listened to the Residents perform the Hank Williams classic that I understood just how dark the original really was. It can be found here: . Listen to both… isn’t it clear the ramblin man just killed some woman who may or may not have been his girlfriend and buried her in the woods? Tell me you don’t hear it too.



I leave all you readers with one final question: is it possible for writers to cover the works of other writers the way musicians do? I sure hope so.

Guidelines for the Zolder Writing Group

For the past few years, I've had the privilege of helping to facilitate a fabulous “fiction critique group” with a literary organization here in Amsterdam called WordsInHere. We've learned a lot from each other along the way, and we continue to grow and develop both as persons and as writers. At one point in the early stages of our group's development, we had to deal with some ethical issues within the group -- and as we worked through things, we realized that we didn't have anything in the way of official guidelines to help us work through the process.  We even tried doing some research on-line, to see how other similar writing groups might handle sticky situations like what we were experiencing...

In the end, though, we decided to write our own guidelines.  And since there seems to be such a relative paucity of information on the internet about guidelines for a writing group, it seems like it might be useful to increase the "public knowledge" by posting what we came up with, for whatever it's worth (special credit goes to Chris, by the way, for his work in putting our group conversations down in written form, way back in the day). So anyway, here are the guidelines that we've developed:

*     *     *     *     *

The Zolder Writers Group - Who we are

We are a group of serious writers - some of us published, some of us not published yet. The Zolder Writers' Group provides us with:

1. A valuable forum for literary critique,
2. Encouragement to reach new heights with our work, and
3. A real "writer's community".

The Writer's Group serves many purposes, but the primary purpose is to be a critique circle: reading each other's literary work as writers and providing feedback about story, character and craft (as requested by the submitting writer). We are of diverse backgrounds - both culturally and literately - and receive inspiration for our work from outside the group, but we can inspire and motivate each other by providing helpful critique to our fellow writers.

How we treat each other's work

The primary requirement of a well-functioning writer's group is trust. In order for writers to feel safe circulating their intellectual property in the group, readers commit to returning all hard copies to the submitter and deleting any soft copies following critique. Plagiarism (the use or close imitation of the language and ideas of another author and representation of them as one's own original work) will not be tolerated. Anyone who is "inspired" by another writer's work in the Group should confer with that writer before undertaking an endeavor that could possibly be construed as plagiaristic. When in doubt: ask.

How we treat each other

We are not only writers, but human beings. All communication (oral and written) amongst group members should be respectful. During critique sessions, criticism will be focused on the work, and not the individual. All writers in the critique circle must be given the opportunity to share their thoughts and criticism on the submitted work; as a diverse group of writers, critique might be focused on divergent aspects of the work, so it's important that the submitting writer has the opportunity to ingest and respond to all critique of their work.

Of Haggadahs, Passover, and the Sexist Roots of Judaism

For decades the home of my parents has been Passover central, with a staggering number of holiday meals served (at least 1500 - nothing for McDonalds, but a lot for one Jewish family with an averaged sized living room in a suburban home), traditional songs sung loudly and off key, and haggadahs read. The Haggadah is the book of Passover. In our home, it's wine-stained, torn, and stuffed with copied pages of new readings to share with family, friends, and strangers. As part of our seder, a word that means "order," we have shared, created, and edited a story of liberation, slavery, longing, and justice. It is an active tradition.

Not My Father's Seder

The seder I grew up with was boisterous. It was my father's gift to us, his five children, one unlike those he grew up with, which went on for hours in a language he neither spoke nor understood. "That was a seder for men," my father always tells us. My mother grew up in a retail family, which meant most Passovers were spent working selling Easter finery to farmers.

My father was determined that our seder welcome and include children. As the years passed, our celebration also welcomed and included women. We altered the texts and sometimes even referred to God as she. New texts and traditions were added regularly. My brother introduced a fifth cup of wine to the four tradition demanded to remind us of those killed during the Holocaust. My cousin added a cup filled with water to remind us of the well discovered by Miriam during the forty-year wandering in the desert. My friend added the orange to the seder plate as a rebuke to a man who had said, "A woman belongs on the bima as much as an orange belongs on a seder plate." (A bit or research informs me that the orange was originally added in support of gays and lesbians. This new bit of information, no doubt, will be incorporated into our seder next year.) We replaced the "sons" with children. We added our mothers to our fathers. We heard the voices of women in the never ending story of freedom from slavery.



The New American Haggadah

When I heard Nathan Englander speak about the work of writing a new Haggadah in an interview with Terry Gross, I was thrilled. A great writer, a secularist, with deep roots in Jewish tradition, and a knowledge of Hebrew had reimagined the Haggadah! I knew it would be something I wanted, something that would enhance my celebration of Passover.

I ordered it, and it arrived in time for the first seder.

I opened it randomly and read this first:

"Here I am, prepared and ardent, allied and present, ready to perform the mitzvah of the first cup, the enactment of salvation's promise."

Prepared and ardent, allied and present. What thrilling language! Give me more. The writing throughout is immediate, clear, and gripping. The Haggadah is filled with intriguing bits of commentary and little details that are interesting. In the end it is a failure. Women and girls are relegated to the margins where we get a mention or two on the timeline, but the traditions we have added to the seder over the years are nowhere to be found.

The New American Haggadah reflects very little of the tradition of my family or of others who have used the ubiquitous and imperfect Maxwell House Haggadah as the inspiration for self-made traditions and new readings. As reformed Jews, we have as much of a right to our heritage and ritual as the orthodox and the lapsed orthodox. And our heritage is one that has struggled (as Jacob struggled with God) to include the voices of women and the marginilized. This is
especially true on Passover, when families become the centers for religious interpretation rather than rabbis and congregations, and when the story is one of overcoming oppression and injustice.

A Boy's Guide to Passover

The New American Haggadah is written by two men who obviously did not share the tradtion of change and inclusion I gew up with. It has erased decades of American Jewish learning by reverting to the old order of a story passed on from fathers to sons. Given the opportunity to include the voices of women, the retelling gives us more male voices and more male voices: it's awash in testosterone.

Reading the Haggadah reminded me of the sexist core of Judaism, not the beauty of tradition and ritual. Like all Haggadahs that have come before it, the best parts will be copied and inserted into the worn out Maxwell House Haggadah we've been using since before I was born. It will not replace the self-made books in my home or the homes of many I know who celebrate Passover as a living tradition that over the years has come to include the stories of women and girls, mothers and daughters, as much as those of fathers and sons and rabbis and disciples.

The New American Haggadah squandered an amazing opportunity to reflect the new traditions of many American Jews by diminishing our contributions and ritual and reverting to the sexist core of the religion. It would be better titled A Boy's Guide to Passover.

Apocalypse Then & Now

Our fascination with the End of the World certainly predates modern publishing (and even predates the Great Flood and Revelations), but the volume of "Apocalypse literature" seems to have literally exploded in the past few years (thanks, Kindle!). This speaks to the increasing popularity - and continued commercial opportunity, but when publication volumes were low, did writers reflect the general anxiety of their times, or were they simply inspired by an earthquake or volcanic eruption to spin a tale? Was Armageddon their focus, a setting, or simply a plot device?

This isn’t a philosophical thread, but for hundreds of years now, “Apocalypse fiction” has therapeutically spun tales about every type of disaster imaginable – nuclear war, viral outbreaks, sun flares, asteroid impacts, giant radiated flora and fauna, alien invasions, the Rapture, ecological or social collapse, and now increasingly – the rise of the undead. 

The first example of Apocalypse fiction was actually the first science fiction novel ever: Theologus Autodidacticus, by Ibn al-Nafis, written in the 13^th century. For this physician-philosopher, the Apocalypse was simply a means to his end: a philosophical rebuttal. The next surviving example of Apocalypse fiction wasn't for another 700-odd years. ln Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) we get our first intimate – and grim – examination of life in humanity’s last days (after a plague). Our first alien invasion was of War of the Worlds, but H.G. Wells also portended the inevitable decline of man’s era in The Time Machine. Why did human civilization fail? Perhaps for no reason at all except that all things must come to an end.

Things picked up in the 1900s: a volcanic eruption sent a cloud of cyanide gas into the atmosphere (The Purple Cloud, by M.P. Shiel), the sun exploded (The Night Land, W.H. Hodgson), the machines rose (R.U.R., the play by Karel Capek that gave us the word “robot”), and of course - there was war, lots and lots of war.

A brave soul on Wikipedia actually attempted to collect and classify all Apocalypse-themed media out there: novels, short stories, poems, songs, films, television programs, and even video games. I wondered if grouping the literature on that list and portraying it visually might tell us something about literary trends: did they reflect the real anxieties of the time, greater cultural trends (e.g., movies), or simply market forces?

To be clear, the Wikipedia list is imperfect and incomplete. This is no criticism of the list's editor, as there’s no easy way to capture the recent explosion in zombie fiction (literally thousands of titles are on Amazon with publishing dates from 2010) or track down the countless short stories appearing in decades’ worth of pulps (or the more respectable pages of Omni). Despite these limitations, I went ahead and extracted the Apocalypse prose, poetry, comics, and plays, grouped them into broader categories (e.g., giant asteroids, exploding suns, sun flares, etc. are together under "Celestial Bodies" and the Rapture-related fiction is under "Supernatural" together with ghosts, demons, etc.) and graphed the past 70-odd years below:

Graph showing publication trends (number of titles) in Apocalypse fiction: 1940-present (source: Wikipedia)
(NB. pre-1940 volumes are too low and post-2009 volumes are too high)

Because of its inherent incompleteness, I would take the booming interest in Apocalypse fiction that this graph suggests with a grain of salt. If there’s a tale to tell, it’s that the spikes in some sub-genres do coincide with the anxieties of our collective conscience (something I touched on in my previous post). I’ve illustrating this by mapping a few seminal events alongside their sub-genres to show the apparent spike in publication volume.

Looking at the “War” line in pink, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the publication of World War III-related fiction spiked following multiple Soviet “victories” and Ronald Reagan’s subsequent tough talk. Similarly, the anxieties spurred on by the AIDS epidemic created a lot of plague-related tales (and unfortunately manifested itself as irrational prejudice against innocents like Ryan White, who was barred from his school so he wouldn't "infect" anybody).  You can be sure bird flu and hoof & mouth also did their part. Finally, the multiple environmental events that led to the establishment of Earth Day gave us all sorts of juicy possibilities for writers to portray the coming, inevitable collapse of our climate.

The success of the ground-breaking leaders in each sub-genre (subjectively, I would say War of the Worlds, On the Beach, Day of the Triffids, A Canticle for Liebowitz, Childhood’s End and now World War Z) spurred on loads of copy cats: just take a look in Amazon.com how many “Zombie Survival Manuals” are out there following Max Brooks' efforts. This site has a good, definitive list of modern Apocalypse fiction. In each instance, the writers on that list deliver "the well told tale" through character-driven stories of the survivors, reflections on the end of the human era, and gripping descriptions of the how the End arrived.

My only anxiety? Who’s going to continue updating that Wikipedia entry if we’re all gone?


- Chris