{"id":3560,"date":"2014-08-09T22:27:41","date_gmt":"2014-08-10T02:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=3560"},"modified":"2014-08-11T08:23:38","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T12:23:38","slug":"life-stories-80-ava-chin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2014\/08\/09\/life-stories-80-ava-chin\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Stories #80: Ava Chin"},"content":{"rendered":"
Subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a><\/h5>\n

\"Life<\/a>
\nphoto via AvaChin.com<\/font><\/p>\n

In this episode of Life Stories<\/i>, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Ava Chin<\/a> discusses some of the things she’s learned foraging for edible plants within New York City limits—but that’s only half the story of Eating Wildly<\/i><\/a>. She also writes about growing up as the only daughter of an emotionally distant single mother and grandparents who encouraged her to enjoy many different types of foods, and how that&#8212and what happened when she finally connected with her father—shaped her adult relationships. As our conversation turned to some of Chin’s favorite memoirists, we talked about how her method of combining personal reflections with recipes echoes Molly Wizenberg<\/a>, and then she cited Patti Smith’s Just Kids<\/i>:<\/p>\n

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“It’s not just that it’s written by Patti Smith and she’s an amazing writer; it’s not just that she’s Patti Smith and she’s writing about her relationship with Mapplethorpe, or that it’s New York in the ’70s… It’s all those things plus—what she did was she wrote following the heat of the story, the emotional heart of her story. And I think that’s necessary to have readers turn the page and to be thoroughly engaged in the narrative.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Chin could<\/i> have simply written about foraging and the ways that it’s affected how she thinks about food and her place in the food economy; after all, she’d been writing on the subject online at the New York Times<\/i> for several years. But “I didn’t want this book to be a guidebook,” she explained. “I felt like I needed to tell this story in a way that a 700-word blog post, even a series of them, couldn’t.” In doing so, she was able to confront the identity that others had imposed on her from before she was even born and take the steps towards redefining herself in a more fulfilling way.<\/p>\n

Listen to Life Stories<\/i> #80: Ava Chin<\/a> (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a>, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a New York Times columnist, Ava Chin spent several years writing about her experiences foraging for edible plant life within the city limits. But Eating Wildly isn’t just a handbook on how to find mulberries, (safe) mushrooms or other potential foodstuffs in an urban environment. It’s also a memoir about how growing up feeling as if her own identity was defined by the father who left before she was born, and about her relationships with her mother and grandparents… and about taking the steps, in adulthood, to create a healthier emotional self-identity for herself… a process in which the mushrooms (among other flora) actually do play a meaningful role, as you’ll learn during our conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272],"tags":[839,840,842,132,305,841],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3560"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3560"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3573,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3560\/revisions\/3573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}