Storybelly Digest #6: The Art of Sifting

or, Let there be Cake, and Stories, and Honoring the Ancient Ones

To Sift or not to Sift? That is the question this week.

Sifting, as in the dry ingredients for a cake, for a story, for a life. I’ve experienced all three siftings this past week, and that’s where I want to focus this week’s Digest.

Some housekeeping first: In order to use the photos I want to use each week, and to write about Digest topics at slightly more length than “nearing email length” allows, just know that you’ll sometimes be prompted near the bottom of posts you read in email (this seems to be true mostly for Gmail accounts and isn’t a Substack thing) to click through to the web to finish reading, if I go long. I don’t mean to go long. It’s sort of like the Sixties Trilogy books, though. People would hold them up as doorstoppers and say, “Wow, 400 pages!” and I’d say, “Yeah, but a third of those pages are scrapbook pages/photographs!” Something like that.

Scrapbook stills from Countdown and Revolution

One more house keeping note: I’ll be working in DC area schools next week, and I’ll take you with me. I’m hoping the Digest appears in good time on Monday, the Extra on Tuesday, and the Writer’s Lab on Wed., as usual. If I bumble a bit, it’s because I’m multi-tasking, I’ll get there. I’m hoping, when I leave schools and a family event on Thursday, to travel home through Charlottesville, Virginia, for some research. I’ll take you along there, too, and will be talking about my work in progress, writing historical fiction, and research for same, in the Writer’s Lab next week. You can join in here:

But for now, and for everybody, always: SIFTING. :>

In the Writer’s Lab we’re in the middle of a two-week assignment writing about Food, First, and Ancient Ones. The CHAT is phenomenal! And, as it turns out, in something I didn’t plan in advance, all three of those elements sifted their way into my everyday life last week when a friend called and wanted to know if we might host a gathering to commemorate the one-year anniversary (a first) of a mutual friend’s passing (Comfort would say, from her Top Ten Tips for First-Rate Funeral Behavior, don’t say passing, because we’ll wonder what grade he was in; say death, it’s plain-spoken and true).

We hosted a few friends with some Cake, of course (my standard scratch cake), and companionship. We told stories about our friend who left us a year ago (an ancient one). There was an impromptu poetry reading, two good songs sung by them that brought a ukulele and a guitar, good food passed around, J brought her brother’s favorite cornbread, as it was her brother who had passed on, and we basked in one another’s good company, into the warm spring night.

As I made the cake that afternoon before the gathering, I thought about how I’d heard from two different folks recently their theory that when you enter the kitchen to cook, you bring with you all the ancestors who have cooked before you. You bring their knowledge, their memories, their particular strengths and stories, and their hard-earned wisdoms that carry you through. You are never alone.

I thought about that in relation to Story. I often say, when I’m working with writers or speaking from a podium, that I take my life and I turn it into stories. And that is true. How much of my ancestors’ lives do I bring with me?

family photos... I remember every one of them but Helen, whose story I heard so many times from my Aunt Mitt, I felt I knew Helen, too.

How far back can I remember them, and remember my own story? Here is a part of my chocolate cake story, going back to the ‘90s, although I wrote all over this recipe elsewhere before it found its way into a church cookbook:

In the Lab Chat we’ve shared enough recipes to warrant a recipe tag or section for them at the top of the Storybelly home page. Look for that soon.

As to sifting, I’m always thinking about it, because it’s what we DO. Moments, Memories, Meaning… that’s what goes into every story we tell or sing or act-out or write — the Moments of our Lives, the Memories we have of those moments and the Meaning we give them. I have a friend (more than one friend, if I’m honest) who thinks that sifting is so yesterday, that we don’t need to sift anymore, that recipes don’t even call for sifting anymore, and yet she/they are wrong. Wrong, I say! Sifting is Life!

Sifting is how we order everything, how we make our choices, and what those choices look like when they come together. Like my choice on Saturday to make a cake the way my mother did, and to trace and cut out rounds from a paper bag to fit each layer of the cake. The decision to sift the dry ingredients, to use the hand-held mixer, to pull out my grandmother’s glass cake plate and cover.

And then the foraging around in what we happened to have already, the idea to use the green plates for spring, the white candles for ambience and honoring, the eucalyptus and pussy willows for the flowers. We sifted that along with friends who brought the photograph for a makeshift altar alongside the favorite whiskey, the candles, and the moments, memories, and meaning we all supplied (both collectively and individually) from the years we’ve known one another, and the years we were lucky enough to know our friend among us.

He called everyone "Dear Heart."

It’s all about the Sifting. The Food, the Firsts, the Ancient Ones… and, of course, the Irish Blackberry Fool (NYT unlocked):

Because, of course, there is a bit of fool in all of us, and good thing. Some think the “fool” in the recipe comes from the French “fouler” which means to crush, or press, which is what the traditional recipe calls for with the fruit, but I much prefer the idea that we’re all jesters of a kind, and fools for love and community and togetherness and stories. That’s my jam. I’m glad you are along, here at the ‘belly, for the fools’ adventure!

In the Lab, we’ll start Week 2 of our Food, Firsts, and Ancient Ones writing. (Link is to the Writer’s Lab post last week, where all can read the prep before the assignment.) I’ve already excerpted (in the Chat) part of an unsold novel that has those three elements in one passage, and I’ve written a new piece (we’re talking short passages here) of going to visit my Aunt Mitt when I was a kid, the first time I walked there on my own, and she was waiting for me with her many-days (weeks?) old yellow cake and her signature “blackberry acid” to drink (a precursor to today’s soda pop).

I want to expand, in the Storybelly Extra this week, on bringing the Ancient Ones along with us when we write, and in every endeavour. It’s like Patricia MacLachlan wrote, in my favorite picturebook of hers: “What you know first stays with you.” We’ll talk about that.

This week in American History holds the juxtaposition of two events I write about in Revolution:

1. The week that “She Loves You” (YouTube) by the Beatles hit #1 on the American Billboard Hot 100 (preceded by “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and followed by “Can’t Buy Me Love). Sunny and her friends can’t get enough of the Beatles. Yeah yeah yeah! 1964.

2. In this same week, the third attempt to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, was successful. “The third march started on March 21, with protection from 1,000 military policemen and 2,000 Army troops. Thousands of people joined along the way to Montgomery, with roughly 25,000 people entering the capital on the final leg of the march, on March 25.” 1965.

I’m proud of the publishing partners who helped give birth to these books, to the teams that have helped them find readers, and I am grateful for every reader who opens these books and sees a bit of history and home, community and compassion. I hope readers connect to their own place in history and home when they read my books. You can find out more about each book, and you can buy them, too, at my website. You can also check them out at your local library, and on Libby.

This week, I would love for you contribute to the Storybelly Cake Register. lol. I don’t know what we’ll call it yet, but our ops-guru, Zach, is going to make us a section for recipes, since we’re all chatting about them already, both in comments and in the Chat. Maybe we’ll call it the Home-Ec Home. What are your favorites, when it comes to CAKE? Here is one of mine, and you have the recipe, above. Thank you to all who have commented in so many different ways to so many different threads this past week!

And thank you from our Ops-Guru, here shown after sifting pantry ingredients to figure out some brunch on Sunday. He is nothing if not versatile. Thank you for all you do for us, Zach. And you, too, Bobo, who is there for quality control, of course.

That will be a wrap for Storybelly Digest #6! I am packing and preparing to go, on the weekend. The pine pollen started falling yesterday, here in the South. There is a coat of yellow on everything. Welcome, Spring!