postcard from a Yalynakivtsi summer kitchen

At 2 a.m., I was awake, thinking about the novel I am working on. When I began it a few years ago (it has been put aside several times while I got caught up in other writing), I wanted to write about a small fishing community and its legacy of stories, marine engines, and remnant old growth forests. I wanted to see this as a painter might and so the main character is a painter. Many of the scenes are based on her attempts to put down on canvas what she sees and imagines. She doesn’t have a method to explore the layers she sees in the community so she works out various strategies–seams in the canvas, with one thing layered behind another, revealed by opening tiny zippers and other closures. I didn’t know when I began that part of the narrative would shift to Ukraine but it has and I’ve just finished that section. At 2 a.m., I was awake, excited about some idea I had for making a material connection between the two places: Easthope, the fishing village; and Yalynakivtsi, the Ukrainian village. I kept turning over, twitching, and finally I got up and came downstairs to try to piece together my ideas.

This is what I love best: writing that fills my imagination, overflows into my daily life, so that I am walking around with the world of the novel or essay swirling in my heart and mind. This morning I came downstairs, made coffee and a warm fire (it’s raining!), fed the cat, and then came in to see if what I’d written in the dark made sense. And I think it does. It’s led me to a couple more things I want to write today in and around packing for a few weeks in France. We leave tomorrow. Luckily I will have a notebook and a handful of pens and I hope I will come home with the makings of another section.

And because it’s Thanksgiving weekend, I’m also thinking about food. Last week I was bringing my main character to a small Ukrainian village where members of her family are waiting with a meal. It’s late September and they are still using their summer kitchen with its ancient pich. Here’s a postcard from the village.

postcard from a Yalynakivtsi summer kitchen

borshch with pampushky, drizzled with garlic oil, smetana spooned over top; holubtsi, bright with tomato sauce; tangy sourdough rye loaves; varenyky, cheese-filled, potato-filled, mushroom-filled, thick smetana to dip them in; a round of banush flavoured with pork fat and sheep’s milk cheese; ducks roasted in the pich, stuffed with garlic; kutia for dessert, snippings of dried apricots and peaches; and cherry-filled varenyky, this time with sweetened cream. Poppyseed cake, topped with plums in a sweet glaze. Glasses of uzvar, dark and smoky.