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[Editor's note: The following is a reprint of our 2005 interview with John Irving, whose new novel, Last Night in Twisted River, has just come out in hardcover. Click here to get signed editions while they last!]

On one list are the books you like to recommend. You want to turn someone on to your favorite unknown author or introduce them to the season's latest, greatest novel. If you've read widely enough over the years, you'll match reader to occasion. The list comes to include something for just about anyone in any setting:

Funny books and smart ones; easy and hard; books that teach and those that entertain; pages best turned at the beach, on a plane, or sick in bed; a pick for the woman you want to impress or the friend who reads mostly in ten-minute bursts between cab fares; dry, plotless affairs that ease you toward sleep or blazers that set your mind racing, keep you up late into the night...

A much shorter list contains the sure bets — the ones that work for just about any reader, young or old, anywhere, at any time. A Prayer for Owen Meany may be the only book on my second list.

You get OWEN MEANY'S SQUEAKY VOICE into a person's head and the worst they'll ever say is they loved it. Without fail, they will thank you. [See our guarantee.] Three people I've given it to, years and oceans apart, reported back that it had become their favorite novel of all-time.

"Which one do I read next?" they all ask, so swiftly converted. (Often they're not even done with the book and already they're planning ahead. Anxiety has set in, a debilitating abandonment neurosis symptomatic of the last hundred pages.) Tell them, "Take your pick." The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire, A Widow for One Year...

This summer, John Irving will publish Until I Find You, possibly his most personal book to date. "Here it is my eleventh novel," he considers, "but I think this character, Jack Burns, is more fully developed than any character in any novel I've written."

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Dave: The Fourth Hand offered a much more abbreviated vision of its characters' lives than we typically see in your books. We don't meet Patrick and Doris until they're adults.

John Irving: The Fourth Hand was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing. It was a vision of a book, like a movie, that did not have the passage of time as a major or minor character. For that reason, it was more manageable, shorter.

Donald Miller is a Christian writer, but the question that Miller asks with his latest memoir, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is applicable to anyone who has contemplated the meaning of life. The question is: If somebody were to make a movie of your life, how many hours of footage would show you goofing off on the Internet or planted in front of the TV? (Probably more than most of us would cop to, right?)

This is what happened to Miller when he agreed to adapt his bestselling Christian memoir Blue Like Jazz into a feature film. Turns out, even the life of a bestselling author is... pretty boring. This revelation sent Miller on a two-fold journey to learn how to craft a meaningful story for his script and for his life. Working with two seasoned movie producers, Miller learns how to write a character – i.e., someone "who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it" – and how to be a character. The result? Blue Like Jazz the movie (coming out in late 2010) and an inspiring, funny, heartbreaking new memoir that will appeal to anyone looking to craft a more meaningful life story.

Donald Miller graciously took some time during his 65-city book tour to talk about storytelling and the craft of writing.

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Sheila Ashdown: I came across your book in a serendipitous manner. I knew of you as a "Christian writer," and I thought, "Oh, I'm not a Christian, it's not going to be my bag." But as a writer, I was intrigued by the premise of A Million Miles. So I flipped open the book and landed on this passage:

I wrote a memoir several years ago that sold a lot of copies. I got a big head about it for a while and thought I was an amazing writer or something, but I've written books since that haven't sold, so I'm insecure again and things are back to normal.

That totally made me laugh, and I thought, "Yeah, I can spend some time with this dude."

So, I read the book and loved it, of course, but it got me kind of obsessed with wondering about your readership. Have you run into a cross-section of people like me? Readers who consider themselves storytellers, but are not necessarily Christian?

Donald Miller: Well, I think this book will probably find a little bit of that market, but in the past it's mostly been Christians, and then Christians will hand the books to people who aren't Christians, because they feel like the books can explain them. So a Christian will hand it to their non-Christian friend and say, "Here's what I'm like." I've gotten a lot of that. But I don't think I have a huge readership outside of that of Christianity.

Sheila: Interesting that your Christian readers have been kind of ambassadors for you in that regard. Do you have any sort of audience in mind when you write your books? Or while writing this one in particular?

Miller: You know, I really don't. I wrote a book about guys growing up without dads, and that was definitely to a specific demographic. But other than that, I took William Zinsser's advice that you write to yourself and you hope that there are people out there who are like you. I've maintained that throughout my whole career: If I think it's funny, somebody else will think it's funny.

Sheila: That's a cool idea, that you're writing to yourself and hoping readers can find a kinship with you.

Miller: Exactly. I think writers would do better to consider that idea, because you know yourself really well, and you never know your demographic fully. You only get into trouble if you try to please somebody you don't really understand.

Sheila: Yeah, and I guess it's not an organic process if you're trying to write to or for someone instead of writing what comes from you intrinsically.

Miller: Exactly.

Sheila: This particular book is very "meta" — if you'll permit me to use an English-class word. You know, it's a story about how life is a story. Did you have trouble pitching that? Like, did your agent or publisher think it was too new-agey or not as easily categorized as "Christian spirituality" as your previous books?

Miller: Yeah, I think they assumed it would just take on that tone — that Christian spirituality tone — and then, when they finally got the book, they liked it enough that it just didn't bother them. God doesn't come up in the book till pretty far into it, and that wasn't intentional; it just kind of happened that way. So, no, they didn't really have a problem with it. The publisher basically said, "Okay, well, we never really understand your ideas when you come to us with them, but somehow they kind of work when you're done."

Sheila: It's good that they've got some faith in you — and faith in the process.

Miller: Yeah, I'm glad for it, because half the time I don't know what I’m trying to say.

Sheila: Can I ask how you came up with your idea for the title?

Miller: All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book, so I'd written this piece of prose that had the phrase "a million miles in a thousand years," and I thought, "That has a nice ring to it." So I pulled it out for the title and everybody really liked it, so we stuck with it. It doesn't really mean anything.

Sheila: That sounds too easy.

Miller: [Laughter] We've had some fights before on book titles, but this one wasn't hard.

Sam Savage's first novel, Firmin, chronicled the coming-of-age misadventures of a very literate rat living in a bookstore in Boston's Scollay Square. Garnering praise from authors ("[O]ne of the most enjoyably surprising books I've read for a long time....This really is a book like nothing else," raved Philip Pullman) and critics ("Firmin is a hero in the Dickensian mode...with the sardonic shadings of Vonnegut, and the same explicit tenderness," wrote the Los Angeles Times), it was an unexpected success and a bookseller favorite of 2006.

The Cry of the Sloth, Savage's second novel, is the story of Andrew Whittaker, a slumlord, writer, editor of the barely-surviving literary magazine Soap, and ex-husband, told entirely through Whittaker's own writing. Letters, grocery lists, rental ads, and fragments of fiction make up this "scathingly funny epistolary pastiche" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Cry of the Sloth is an arch, hilarious, disturbingly existential novel; Andrew Whittaker is an unforgettable character, and Sam Savage is an extraordinary writer.

We were so impressed that we created a special hardcover edition ...

In her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood describes a future after humanity had been almost entirely wiped out by a plague. Jimmy, aka Snowman, lives in a wasteland populated by genetically engineered animals gone wild and the Crakers, a race created to be biologically superior to humans but childlike in their simplicity and grace. Snowman's previous life was one of privilege, lived inside the compounds run by the genetics companies and security firms, and he ruminates on his memories and the reasons for humanity's demise. The New Yorker marveled, "Towering and intrepid....Atwood does Orwell one better."

The Year of the Flood opens with two more survivors, Toby and Ren — one defending her position at a defunct health spa, the other trapped in a bio-isolation room at a brothel. Both have previously been members of God's Gardeners, an eco-religious sect dedicated to living sustainably in an increasingly degraded and stratified society, and the novel charts their experiences leading up to the catastrophe. The Year of the Flood masterfully depicts a very different side of the dystopia. Darkly funny, incredibly believable, and surprisingly hopeful, Atwood's new novel is one of her very best.

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Jill Owens: How did you decide to go back to the world of Oryx and Crake for The Year of the Flood?

Margaret Atwood: There are a couple of answers to that. Number one, everybody was asking me what happened right after the end of Oryx and Crake. Since I didn't know, I had to write another book in order to find out.

Number two, a lot of people, having asked me for years, "How come you write so much from the point of view of women?" since I wrote it from the point of view of a man, now asked, "Why did you write it from the point of view of a man?" [Laughter] So you can't win that one.

I thought, All right, what would it be like, if it were from the point of view of women? Also, what would it be like if we went into the world that is something Jimmy only sees out a train window? In other words, the unprotected urban space, unlike his protected urban space. What would that be like? And also, what would the God's Gardeners, who appear in the margins of Oryx and Crake, look like up close? What would that religion actually be like?

All of those things were pretty interesting to me, and there were a couple of characters I was interested in as well, notably Amanda, who was in Oryx and Crake.

Jill: I reread the two books back to back last week, and I was struck by the difference in tone between them.

Atwood: Jimmy is narrating one of them, and he's not a happy bunny.

Jill: I was going to ask if the difference in tone was related to their gender...

Atwood: Well, he's not unhappy because he's a man. He's unhappy because he's not valued in the society in which he has grown up, nor by his parents, particularly.

Jill: And he's isolated.

Atwood: Yes, particularly at the beginning when he's living in a tree.

Jill: He's about as isolated as you can get, really.

Atwood: He does have these other humanoids nearby, but they don't understand him. So, in fact, his state is the emotional state of a certain number of young men who think they're living in trees and that nobody understands them. [Laughter]

Jill: I ran across an older poem of yours, "Elegy for the Giant Tortoises," which begins: "Let others pray for the passenger pigeon, the dodo,/ the whooping crane, the eskimo,/ everyone must specialize," and I thought, in the new book, you're doing the opposite. You're praying for all the extinct animals.

Atwood: As many of them as I could cram in. It's quite a list.

Jill: Do you see that poem as a precursor at all to the new book?

Atwood: It's all part of the same group of interests that have been with me for a long time. Tracing it back, I did grow up amongst the biologists. They were what we would now call early environmentalists; they were early Sierra club, for instance. This kind of interest has been around for a very long time except that it was seen as rather minor — although Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, was a big supporter. It has waxed and waned, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I would say environmentalism had some earlier moments where people were preserving parks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It had probably a low moment in the eighties and nineties of the past century. It had an up moment in the seventies, and it's having an up moment now. But the thinking itself has been around for quite awhile. The people doing the counting and the numbers have been around for quite a while too, and it's true that in 1972, the Club of Rome said, "If we don't change our behavior, in 40 years we're going to be in the following mess." We didn't change our behavior, and that is the following mess that we are now in. So it's not as if people weren't warned and were not told. There was no political will to change anything.

Jill: Adapting and creating the theology for the Gardeners must have been fun, I would think.

Atwood: It was fun, but you know, it's also a trend. There is already with us today a Green Bible. It's got tasteful linen covers, ecologically correct paper, an introduction by Archbishop Tutu, and the green parts are in green. I think that certain wings of Christianity are returning to their roots, and those roots were more biophilic than they became in the seventeenth century, when a mechanistic view was taken of animal life.

Strangely enough, it was Charles Darwin who bucked that trend, in his work on animal emotions. The mechanistic view had it that animals were just automatons. They didn't really have emotional lives; they just had knee-jerk reactions and they were like machines. He denied that. He said they have emotions that are very similar to our emotions. By animals, he didn't mean clams. He meant mammals.

David Sibley's name has become synonymous with birdwatching. The Sibley Guide to Birds, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America, and The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, among many others, are some of the most respected and well-loved bird guides available today.

In his new work, which was eight years in the making, David Sibley focuses his authoritative eye on trees. Gorgeously illustrated and full of fascinating information, The Sibley Guide to Trees will dramatically change the way you look at your backyard, your neighborhood, and the larger botanical world.

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Jill Owens: How did you decide to focus on trees for this new book?

David Sibley: About seven or eight years ago, I was out on a book-signing tour promoting my newest bird guide, and I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. I decided that I really wanted to do another big book project. That's what I really like to do. I started searching around for what kind of species to cover in my next book; I didn't want to do another, more in-depth bird guide.

There were a couple of reasons that trees came to the top of the list. First, even while I was out there on the road traveling mostly in cities, I was seeing trees every day. Trees are so much a part of our everyday life, even more than birds. It seemed like knowing about trees would be something virtually anyone can put to use every day.

The other part of the decision was that I have always tried to be an all-around naturalist, and to learn as much as I could about other things besides birds. When I thought about field guides, I've always been a little frustrated with the tree guides, because they really work in a way that bird guides have advanced from many decades ago.

Tree identification makes sense because trees are so easy to approach. [Laughter] If you see a tree that looks interesting, you can walk up to it and pull out your 10-power or 20-power hand lens and study the really microscopic features, like the shape of the bud scale, or whether there are hairs on the underside of the leaf or not. There's no time limit; you can take as long as you need to identify it.

The tree guides have never really advanced beyond the stage where bird guides were 100 years ago, where you held the bird in your hand and you went through a key to figure out what it was. Modern bird guides work a lot more on simple pattern matching, just flipping the pages until you see a picture that matches. Gradually, as you use the book more and get more experienced, you internalize that, and one day you'll just look at a bird and know what it is, and not have to look it up in the book.

I wanted a tree guide that would work more in that way, having lots of illustrations and emphasizing the natural groupings and patterns of variation, so that if you're out on a walk and you saw an interesting leaf shape, or an odd fruit, or unusual bark, you could just pull out the book and flip through the pages until you found a picture that matched. I saw an opportunity to create a book that really would be something new, and would be a real contribution to advancing the hobby of tree identification through bringing in some of the advances in bird field guides that hadn't really trickled down to trees.

Chelsea Cain has a great laugh. It's contagious (Wait, why am I laughing about corpse decomposition?) and she unleashes it more often than I assumed the author of grisly thrillers would. But then again, she's got good reason to be in high spirits.

Heartsick, her debut novel, was a New York Times bestseller, and garnered enthusiastic praise from... basically everyone. In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison called it a "dizzying novel. Lurid and suspenseful with well-drawn characters, plenty of grisly surprises and tart dialogue." Stephen King placed it, along with its follow-up, Sweetheart (now in paperback), on his ten best books of 2008 list.

Set in Portland, the series follows Archie Sheridan, a detective who spends a decade chasing the infamous "Beauty Killer," Gretchen Lowell, only to be captured by the beautiful psychopath. After 10 days of atrocities in a basement, Gretchen inexplicably releases him, and turns herself in. Archie emerges scarred (literally), with an addiction to painkillers and an obsession with the killer that reaches beyond the realms of his job description. Susan Ward, a zealous young reporter with an attitude, is handpicked to document Archie's troubles, and in the meantime, there are new murders to worry about in the Rose City.

Booklist gave a starred review to the recently released third book in the series, Evil at Heart, saying "Popular entertainment... just doesn't get much better than this."

Chelsea Cain took some time during her book release mayhem to talk about the role of Larry King as muse, Heartsick the movie, and why disembowelment is sometimes funny. (Or at least, why it should be.)

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Megan Zabel: This series has been heavily lauded for its originality. How did you come up with the idea of Gretchen and Archie's unorthodox serial killer/police detective relationship?

Chelsea Cain: Twisted love...

Megan: Yes. I want to know about the twisted love.

Cain: It started with the Green River Killer. I grew up in Bellingham, WA and was ten years old when he started killing people — or at least, when they started finding the bodies. And as a kid, that was something I was really aware of. This was a guy who was killing people, and not just any person, but young women, some of them 15, 16 years old. Even though many of them were prostitutes, as a kid I just thought, "He kills kids." So I think that any kid would have monitored that, but I was also a kid with a pet cemetery and a morbid imagination, so I took an acute interest. [Laughter]

I'd read the Bellingham Herald daily, just to catch up on the Green River Killer and the Green River Killer task force. He was at large for 20 years, so by the time they caught him I was 30. I ended up watching this episode of Larry King when he was interviewing those cops that had been on that task force for so long and I was really intrigued by the obsession that would result when you've been working on a case for your entire career. Especially that kind of case where there's so much emotionally riding on it. These cops got to know the families of the victims so well, and the lives of the victims themselves; the cops worked such long hours, for so long, to catch this guy. They finally caught him, and he cuts this deal, which is the deal that I have Gretchen cut in the book: to avoid the death penalty, Gary Ridgeway agreed to tell them where more bodies were. So even after they caught him, it didn't end. If anything, the relationship intensified. There was this footage of one of these cops, in the interview room with Gary Ridgeway after this deal had been cut, and they just seemed like old friends, you know? They had this sort of convivial relationship. On the surface, it just seemed like they were hanging out together at a bar, chatting and laughing, but underneath there were all these different levels of manipulation. I was really intrigued by that, in the middle of the night, watching Larry King.

[Laughter] And I thought, you know, it would be really interesting if the killer were a woman, because you look at that relationship, with all of its complexities, and then add sex. Which immediately complicates everything.

So that's what it started with — an episode of Larry King. I think I started writing within a couple days, and that first chapter I wrote ended up being the first chapter of Heartsick.

Megan: And that kind of explains why Heartsick starts with Gretchen already in jail.

Cain: I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened — the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine, and following their journey to becoming damaged.

Megan: What are the challenges involved when writing about a female serial killer — specifically a beautiful one, whose strength is psychological, not physical? Did you grapple with how realistic this was, at times?

Cain: I did. When I first started out, doing all this research, thinking that I'd be very realistic, I quickly discovered that, in fact, it turns out there aren't very many violent female serial killers. And even just researching psychopaths, textbook psychopaths, if you're going to be really honest about it, aren't that interesting. We think they're interesting, because they're portrayed in the movies in an interesting fashion, but in actuality they're not. It makes for sort of a flat pathology. There's not a lot of arc in an actual psychopath. So fairly immediately I freed myself from being tied too closely to the textbooks, because I wanted her to be this sort of charismatic, beautiful, sexy, brutal, complex killer... and I couldn't really find one like her to base her on. Curiously enough, there haven't been a lot of super hot, smart, devious psychopaths.

Megan: So the story is set here in Portland, and from what I can tell, you stick closely to the real names of establishments and general truths about the city. First: why Portland, and why didn’t you fictionalize more?

Cain: So many thrillers are set in the same three cities, and it becomes tiresome to write an original thriller that takes place in LA or New York. Portland is off the beaten path, from a pop culture perspective — enough to make it interesting, but still big enough that we can earn a couple of serial killers. It's not totally preposterous. We're not Cedar Rapids. And obviously I live here, so it's very convenient for me. I think there's something about Portland, something about the natural beauty here, that so many people come to the city for and take jobs that we're overeducated for, so that we can live in this place. And we go out hiking, and camping and go to the beach, and go up to the mountains, and 10% of those people never come back. I'm interested in that. The fact that we're drawn to this natural beauty, and people get lost on timber roads, and killed by sneaker waves and avalanches and get lost in the woods. And yet people continue to go out there. I thought that sort of theme — beauty and death and danger and the tension between those things — really fit with the book, specifically Gretchen, and Archie's compulsion to be near her.

Editor's Note: Patrick Galbraith's The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider's Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan offers fascinating insight into the subculture of Cool Japan. With over 600 entries, including common expressions, people, places, and moments of otaku history, this is the essential A to Z that every fan of Japanese pop culture needs to know.

Galbraith will read at Powell's City of Books on Burnside on Tuesday, September 1, at 7:30 p.m.

Powell's own Gerry Donaghy recently had a chance to talk with Galbraith.

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Gerry Donaghy: You live in Tokyo. Have you had a chance to visit the giant Gundam robot yet? What's it like?

Patrick Galbraith: I have to admit that I am one of those painful otaku who was sleeping in the park waiting for the Gundam to be unveiled. It is truly an amazing sight, standing proud at 18 meters tall, right on the path Godzilla took to attack Tokyo. I can only dream of what it would be like to see two such giants of pop ...

Over the course of his career, Tracy Kidder has written about the dawn of the computer age, a year in the life of elementary schoolchildren, his experience in Vietnam, a biography of a small town in Massachusetts, and Paul Farmer's medical and humanitarian work in Haiti, to name a few of his subjects. His books have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, amongst many other awards and honors.

Kidder's incredibly moving and vivid new book, Strength in What Remains, follows and accompanies Deo, survivor of the genocide in Burundi who came to America in the '90s to make a new life for himself. Though Deo had little money and no English language when he landed in New York, he eventually found his way to Columbia University and medical school. Through his account of Deo's ...

Winner of a Caldecott Medal, a Newbery Medal, and two Christopher Awards, David Small is one of the most acclaimed graphic artists in his field.

After illustrating more than forty books for children, now he has turned his attention to his own childhood, creating one of the most visceral and arresting (not to mention gorgeous) memoirs of the decade.

In the apt words of Jules Feiffer, Stitches is "a profound and moving gift of graphic literature that has the look of a movie and reads like a poem."

At the age of eleven, Small developed a growth on his neck. His parents, without explanation (and clearly not lacking for money or access), withheld treatment for more than three years. Two surgeries later, at fourteen, the young boy was left with a rash of stitches up his neck and a missing vocal cord that rendered him unable to speak.

"Something remarkable has happened because of [Stitches], already," Small mentioned just before our phone call ran its course. He then proceeded to share one of those incredible anecdotes that, as the person conducting the interview, you can't believe you almost missed capturing. "If nothing else happens with this book," he concluded, "it would be worth doing it just for that."

The author was kind enough to follow up our conversation by sharing further thoughts about several subjects of particular fascination. His email is copied at the bottom of this post.

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David Small: I'm thrilled that Powell's has chosen Stitches for Indiespensable.

Dave: We'll be sending the book, in its custom slipcase, to 850 subscribers. This is the 13th title we've picked for the program, but it's the first that's not a traditional text narrative. We think Stitches will be a good introduction to illustrated narratives for readers who are less familiar with them.

Small: Before I made this, I wasn't a graphic novels fan, by any means. I just hadn't found anything that struck me. I do read a lot of fiction. I keep rereading Flaubert, James, Tolstoy... So I was curious about graphic novels, and I'd looked at some. I was impressed with Maus, both volumes. Chris Ware's artwork has always impressed me.

Then, about four years ago, Sarah and I were in Paris. A very close friend, a Parisian illustrator, had a son who was working on a graphic novel. We went over to his apartment. Pierre showed me work by Nicholas de Crécy, and a book that he did with Sylvain Chomet, who had done The Triplets of Belleville. That made me perk up. They used to work together. They apparently went to art school together and developed very similar styles.

They did a series of books that were compiled into something called Léon La Came: Laid, Pauvre et Malade (Ugly, Broke and Sick). It's a comic treatment of some very serious themes. Very French. Neo-Nazis are always hovering in the background. I think collaborationism comes into question. It's all treated the same as Triplets. Anyway, then he showed me work by a couple other artists, as well. There was a cinematic quality to the ones I was attracted to. The French are great cinephiles.

I was in college in the sixties when movies really got good. I'm a fan of Bergman and Hitchcock and Polanski and Antonioni. Those are my gods. I've studied those films closer than anything, aside from the classical artists I liked back in grad school.

Sarah and I came back to Michigan, and I guess it had been fermenting in my mind for a couple weeks. She tells me that I started coming home from the studio in the evenings, and I'd fix myself a martini, sit down at the kitchen table, and draw like crazy on this memoir. It just started pouring out.

Dave: After working on more than forty books for kids, you've created one about yourself, for adults. Had you been meaning to tell the story for a long time?

Small: I had. About ten years ago, I sent my agent a chapter of a story. I didn't know if it was going to be autobiography or fiction, but it came from a real incident, that scene in the hospital corridor where little David discovers the homunculus in a jar. That really terrifying incident had stayed in my mind all my life, and that's how I had begun a memoir-like work.

Holly got very excited about it. [Editor's note: Holly McGhee is Small's agent.] She also loved a little drawing of myself that I'd sent along with it. She said, "This is going to be your book," but I always knew, in the back of my mind, that it was never going to be a book if I had to do it in prose. I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational. And I knew that I'm not that kind of writer.

So I knew that I was never going to write a novel, but the idea had been there for a long, long time. And, besides, I couldn't remember anything except that one incident, specifically. Then when I started drawing it out, that's what was so exciting: Once I started drawing and bringing all those ghosts back, I was amazed at the files that were in my head and accessible. Unbelievable. This wasn't stuff I wanted to revisit, but it became just as exciting as anything else I was doing to see how much more I could remember.

Here I am getting older — I'm supposed to be forgetting — and I could remember more than I'd ever thought possible. It's funny what will come to you. I don't know where I found it, but there's a quote by Sylvain Chomet that goes, "The memory improves the more you lay burdens on it." So contradictory to what everybody thinks.

We've been swooning over Karen Solomon's Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects since it arrived on our shelves a couple months ago. The book is plump with dozens of creative kitchen projects, which range from jams and pickles to crackers and candy to smoked trout and home-cured bacon. It also doesn't hurt that the recipes are accompanied with luscious photos that make the book a feast for the eyes as well as the belly.

With more and more people trying to produce their own food, it only makes sense that a book like this, executed with this much care, is going to do well. Not just limited to vittles that live in jars, Solomon focuses on other foods that people often forget they can make themselves, like crackers and dressings, marshmallows, and infused spirits. "Things that live in the middle of the grocery store," she said.

Whether you're struggling to put up your garden's bounty or just looking for a place to sink some creative energy, Jam It is a precious find. I talked with Solomon about her research methods, her

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