May Flours

Sifting through my reading list

Dear Bread,

I think each loaf is a letter you write about place and time and care. Sometimes we are part of the writing, sometimes only the reading. Always I’m in love with your message, passing love from each unimaginable past to any other moment. Bread is connections, and connections are about all we have. Thank you bread, for being a bridge between people, things, and ideas.

Your pal, Amy

And to you, dear readers, hello.

I haven’t wanted to write much for a while. The cluster of human storms that are daily breaking — in Ukraine and the Supreme Court, in Buffalo and Uvalde — leave me quiet.

I have, however, been reading. I’ve been looking at my father’s writing, in his papers and online. K.C. Halloran was a steady op-ed writer, and I found a 2008 piece he wrote about gun violence. I was surprised to see that three years after his first debilitating strokes, his writing was smooth. What he said about our inability to protect and care for each other is the same as I might say today.

I don't have a new way to discuss our inhumanities. Instead, I will tell you the books that I am reading — books that are an ingredient to my own writing. Flour to my bread.

THE ALL OF IT by Jeanette Haien is a wonderful novella about an Irish woman speaking to her priest after her brother’s death. The exchange has the urgency of intimate conversation. I adored the language, especially in the final chapters where the priest is describing fishing for a salmon on the last day of the season.

READ UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature by Farah Jasmine Griffin is a devastatingly good read. The title is what the author's father told her prior to his early death; she follows this instruction, carrying us through her readings and life. Part memoir, history book, and guide to Black literature, put it on your list.

PRAIRYERTH: (a Deep Map) by William Least Heat Moon. You may recognize the author, who wrote BLUE HIGHWAYS, a essayistic travelogue about America off the interstates. I love learning about Kansas and read part of this book before, but didn’t finish it. This time I will, and I’m not racing to the finish line. I am in love with exploring this single Kansas county, skipping around time and place to try to understand the tallgrass prairie and our taking of this landscape. Chapters made entirely of quotes from other writings add a hum of voices.

Speaking of the stones quarried within Chase County, he writes:

Once I came to understand these things were only one expression of what undergirded the place – geologically, biologically, and historically – then my quest turned toward the bones of the land, toward the hard seed from which this prairie and its people grow. Wherever we enter the land, sooner or later we pick up the scent of our own histories, and when we begin to travel vertically, we end up following roadmaps in the marrow of our bones and in the thump of our blood. — William Least Heat Moon, PrairyErth, page 273.

How perfect to find this passage as I am entering my own land, tracing my history through the history of bread in America. I need to learn so much, and these sentences confirm I’m on the right path, combing through city directories, websites, and slim books about local history. I’m researching the commercial and industrial pasts of my city of Troy, New York and studying the baking histories in my family.

Two cookbooks that have me: MAMUSHKA by Olia Hercules and Jeffrey Hamelman’s BREAD: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes, out in a third edition. I made the Moldovan flatbreads from the first, and am prepping to bake sourdough rye breads from the latter — all with flour fresh from Farmer Ground Flour.

And a note about reading: please give yourself grace and take books as you can. I used to be very linear about reading, but now, I listen to books, read them after I’ve listened to them, and flip through them like magazines. There’s a lot of competition for our attention these days, and I hear people fret about not reading. I’m giving you permission to NOT think of books as sacred, meant to be digested from cover to cover. Find any way into them you can.

I hope that you are finding peace within the nonstop violence of the world.

Yours, Amy