Archive for November 2010


Ravenous Video

November 28th, 2010 — 10:09am

I’ve been working on my video for Ravenous. I’ve never written a script before but hell, I’ve never written a book before either.

My dear friend Jaime Kyle, a wonderful musician and music producer based in Nashville, wrote the music for piano and cello. Here’s a picture of me in the sound studio where I recorded the voice over, living out some not so deeply embedded rocker girl fantasies.

Video coming soon.

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Giving Thanks

November 25th, 2010 — 12:16pm

In a few hours, our extended family will come celebrate Thanksgiving. I am grateful for so many things:

my husband
our beautiful children
our parents
our friends
our health
having good food to eat
clean water
my job
my book and the team that supports it: Patty, my editor; Stephanie, my agent; Lindsay, my publicist.
my Guild guitar which sounds better with age
living in Berkeley
and the miracle of farms coming back to Rockland County, where I was born.

This picture was taken at Cropsey Farm. Under a licensing agreement with Rockland County and the Town of Clarkstown, the Rockland Farm Alliance has created Rockland’s first community farm. There were just a few farms left when I was growing up in the 60s, and that land occupied a a huge space in my heart and consciousness.

I am thrilled for all the kids growing up in Rockland that they will once again have the opportunity to know what a farm is.

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Eat, Eat, Eat

November 23rd, 2010 — 9:32pm

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love” will be speaking at the upcoming Yoga Journal SF conference. I work at Yoga Journal and a coworker asked me if I ever thought of naming Ravenous, my upcoming book, “Eat, Eat, Eat”.

No — but pretty funny.

“Eat, Eat, Eat” though, is not entirely accurate (well, it used to be accurate). I could have called it “Eat, Binge, Purge” — but that wouldn’t have been entirely true either — I was never a purger, just a binger.

Maybe Eat, Pray, Eat Less.

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Promise Kept

November 17th, 2010 — 8:39pm

I’m sometimes asked how long it’s taken me to write Ravenous. The answer is, it depends.

You could say it’s taken six years. I first got the idea in 2005 when I studied with Sri B.K.S. Iyengar at the Yoga Journal Colorado Conference. Guruji is the teacher of my teachers. I thought that something in the nexus of yoga and food could, perhaps, unwind my ferocious appetite.

I thought then I would mostly do reporting. That I’d speak with lots of wise teachers, learn from them, and then, somehow, my life would transform. But as I began to do my reporting, I slowly realized that what I really wanted to write was a memoir.

In 2007, I began writing a proposal. The next year I wrote a sample chapter. Then I sat on it. Then I was downsized from four days of work a week to two. And I thought, surely the universe was telling me, “It’s time to write that book.”

In 2009 I wrote another sample chapter. My agent sold it in three weeks. Then I got upsized again to four days of work a week, so I had to write really fast.

But you could also say it took me 38 years to write this book. Because when I was 12, I had an idea for a book I wanted to write but didn’t believe I actually could. I told myself, I’ll write a book someday. And now, at 50, I have.

Some promises are just too important to break. And this was one of them.

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Poem

November 9th, 2010 — 8:15pm

Cleaning up my office today and found this poem by Mary Oliver. I love her work — she reminds me that we must love what we love well, because one day it will be gone.

Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

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