I don’t have much by way of a preamble this week. It’s been chilly and rainy, so I’m back to drinking hot tea regularly at home and rotating through my assortment of mugs. I’m also excited about fall cooking — sweet potatoes, oats, and pears are now in my kitchen rotation and I picked up all the ingredients for making my first soup of the season (more about that in a future newsletter, if it goes well!).

This week I can’t stop talking about:

Minda

bell hooks’ mentions an essay by William Goyen in her self-help book, “Sisters of the Yam.” This was my first introduction to Goyen but what he had to say about writing and spirituality made me seek out the full essay, “It is clear that writing — recovering life — for me is a spiritual task.”

You can read the essay in full in the TriQuarterly magazine archives (fun fact — it appears in the same Fall 1964 issue as Amy Hempel’s famous short story, “In the Same Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.”) The essay is on page 615 of the literary magazine (why yes, it is wild to think about how a literary mag could be nearly 700 pages in the 60s), which is 620-621 on the slider across the bottom of the page.

Anyone who’s ever written anything with any kind of personal stakes to it, will tell you writing wrings you out, but it also shows you who you are. You’re like a boxer at the end of a match, bloodied but accomplished. I have never known myself better than when I became serious about my writing. Page 4 is the heart of the essay. He proclaims the writing life “transformative and redemptive.”

I think what Goyen has tapped into is why so many writers tell you that even if the publishing industry collapsed completely, they would continue to write anyways. Because it is a spiritual act, because we don’t know how to live without performing the alchemy of turning experience into art.

This was my first fall seeing Fingerling sweet potatoes at the grocery store (Fingerlings are smaller, finger-shaped potatoes). I have this unfounded fear that sweet potatoes take too long to cook. I think I probably had an undercooked sweet potato one time and began to shy away from making them at home (even though I’ve probably undercooked every other vegetable in existence at least once). So I was very eager to give these small-size sweet potatoes a chance.

I also — somewhat founded — believe smaller fruits and veggies (once they’ve reached full size, of course) are more flavorful and sweeter. And these wee sweet potatoes certainly tasted sweeter to me. I just slit them in half, seasoned them and tossed them with some olive oil and fresh sage, then slid them in the oven. Because they’re small, they cooked up quick.

I got them from a local grocer, but I saw some at Whole Foods last week, so you might be able to track them down in your neck of the woods too.

Toss out those teas you let languish all last season. You’re not going to drink them this year now that they’re old and stale. I used to tell myself that I was saving them for when company came by, but I had to be real about the fact I didn’t have a ton of people dropping by for tea and certainly anyone who was that much of a tea drinker to want a hot mug at my place, did not want the mystery tea that’d been in my cabinet going on three years — gotta be kinder to your company!

If it makes you feel better, compost them.