Jennifer 8. Lee

Make your own pizza party at sundance. Home made sauce and crust!

Jennifer 8. Lee — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:24:16 +0000

Yummy. Nutella and marshmallow one too.

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Sundance Film Festival 2012 in Park City, Utah

Jennifer 8. Lee — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:12:48 +0000

Dumplings, film and awards.

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Chinese new year dumpling making party at Sundance. Homemade skins.

Jennifer 8. Lee — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:56:44 +0000

Impressed by Andrew McCollums rolling.

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Very excellent wild boar, curried sweet potato etc from @barleyswine in Austin.

Jennifer 8. Lee — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:58:28 +0000

Barleyswine.com

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Awesome recyced dresses at Atlant airport. Crime tape, crushed glasd, junkmail.

Jennifer 8. Lee — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:35:38 +0000

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Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee at Asian American Writers Workshop Page Turner Festival

Jennifer 8. Lee — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:11:19 +0000

Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee took to the stage for a conversation at the Asian American Writers Workshop Page Turner Festival, held at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo. We were amazed at how many people showed up despite the apocalyptic weather of sleet, wind and freezingless.

Junot was humble and inspiring as always. A long time friend of the Workshop, Junot hasn’t changed, despite winning the Pulitzer Prize (among many other honors) for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He and Min Jin met in Korea on a State Department cultural trip of sorts, where she was supposed to be the Korean American, and he was supposed to “the American”

Here are some tidbits from the talk, partially from my own notes and partially from the lovely tweeting by Sepia Mutiny. Some of these may be slightly off in our haste to take notes.

Junot quit writing his novel twice for over a year. Sometimes you just enter a “free fall” where “you don’t believe your words are worth anything.” It took him ~13 years to write novel (Min Jin took 12, beat him by a year, she said.)

Junot said, “I live in the universe of doubt. The hard part isn’t writing the book — it’s finishing it.” He added, “To finish a book, you need compassion for yourself.” He added, “I looked into a mirror and said, “It’s okay. You suck.’”

Junot is not a big fan of workshops, describing “the workshopping habit of writing for writing.” He added, “I taught two years of writing workshops without the ‘reader’ being mentioned.” You should give readers more credit, as they are used to not understanding stuff.

“Readers are massively accustomed to unintelligibility. There’s tons of shit in a book they don’t understand,” he said. “If a reader can make sense of 60 percent of what they read, it’s a win to them.”

Junot took out the famous footnotes in Oscar Wao when his first editor didn’t like them. Then the editor left the publishing house and he put them back. Basically, trust yourself on how out there you can be artistically.

Novels are especially hard to write, because “you can write a perfect short story,” but you can’t write a perfect novel. And you can’t keep it all in your head. So there has to be a greater degree of trust.

Playing Poker with Steve Martin and Amy Tan for Adventures of the Mind

Jennifer 8. Lee — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 05:07:23 +0000

Steve came in third. Amy fifth. David Zax has a nice writeup of the evening on the Paris Review site. This was a fundraiser for Adventures of the Mind, like a TED for high school students, at Chinatown Brasserie.

Making fresh pasta with chef Catherine de Zagon

Jennifer 8. Lee — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:19:17 +0000

Food porn. Making fresh pasta with chef Catherine de Zagon through sidetour.com

Egads. Can you tell from inbox when Google+ opened to the public?

Jennifer 8. Lee — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:35:19 +0000

Sent from my iPad. Forgive peckos.

Visit to Pixar in Emeryville

Jennifer 8. Lee — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:41:00 +0000

It’s like living among cartoons.