Pig Candy

From Amazon.com

Pig Candy is the poignant and often comical story of a grown daughter getting to know her dying father in his last months. During a series of visits with her father to the South he'd escaped as a young black man, Lise Funderburg, the mixed-race author of the acclaimed Black, White, Other, comes to understand his rich and difficult background and the conflicting choices he has had to make throughout his life.

Lise Funderburg is a child of the '60s, a white-looking mixed-race girl raised in an integrated Philadelphia neighborhood. As a child, she couldn't imagine what had made her father so strict, demanding, and elusive; about his past she knew only that he had grown up in the Jim Crow South and fled its brutal oppression as a young man. Then, just as she hits her forties, her father is diagnosed with advanced and terminal cancer -- an event that leads father and daughter together on a stream of pilgrimages to his hometown in rural Jasper County, Georgia. As her father's escort, proxy, and, finally, nurse, Funderburg encounters for the first time the fragrant landscape and fraught society -- and the extraordinary food -- of his childhood.

In succulent, evocative, and sometimes tart prose, the author brings to life a fading rural South of pecan groves, family-run farms, and pork-laden country cuisine. She chronicles small-town relationships that span generations, the dismantling of her own assumptions about when race does and doesn't matter, and the quiet segregation that persists to this day. As Funderburg discovers the place and people her father comes from, she also, finally, gets to know her magnetic, idiosyncratic father himself. Her account of their thorny but increasingly close relationship is full of warmth, humor, and disarming candor. In one of his last grand actsFunderburg's father recruits his children, neighbors, and friends to throw a pig roast -- an unforgettable meal that caps an unforgettable portrait of a man enjoying his life and loved ones right up through his final days.

Pig Candy takes readers on a stunning journey that becomes a universal investigation of identity and a celebration of the human will, familial love, and, ultimately, life itself.

http://www.amazon.com/Pig-Candy-Taking-Father-Memoir/dp/1416547673

Huffingpost and AARP Memoir Contest

From GalleyCat;

The AARP and The Huffington Post have teamed up for a writing contest. The two organizations are calling for memoirs as part of their new Memoir Contest.
The winner will get a $5,000 prize will be excerpted in AARP The Magazine and featured on The Huffington Post’s website. In addition, Simon & Schuster will consider publishing the work.  The first 5,000 words of the memoir is due February 15, 2014. Finalists from this round are invited to submit their complete memoir by June 15th. The books should run between 20,000 to 50,000 words.
To enter the contest, you have to have been born before Dec. 31, 1964. Here is more about eligibility from the rules:

The AARP & Huff/Post50 Memoir Contest (the “Contest”) is open only to legal residents of the fifty (50) United States (including the District of Columbia) who were born before Dec. 31, 1964. Employees, contractors, and their immediate families (spouse, parents, children, siblings, and their respective spouses), including those living in the employees’ households of AOL Inc., AARP, Simon & Schuster, Inc. (“S&S”), and their respective parent companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, divisions, advertising and promotion agencies (collectively, the “Contest Entities”), are not eligible to enter or win a Prize.

Eddie Huang's Memoir to Be a TV Show

ABC is shooting a pilot of Eddie Huang's memoir Fresh off the Boat. Huang himself is the producer and Nahnatchka Khan will be both scriptwriter and executive producer. The tv show will be about a Chinese family that settles in Orlando, Florida in the 1990s.

These are a few of my favorite things, Korean food, travel, and Anthony Bourdain

Roy Choi to publish memoir with themes of Korean cooking and the back allies of the Los Angeles of his childhood.

From Galley Cat;

Choi takes us through the neighborhoods and streets most tourists never see, from the casinos where gamblers slurp fragrant bowls of pho to Downtown’s Jewelry District, where a 10-year-old Choi wolfed down Jewish deli classics between diamond deliveries; from the kitchen of his parents’ Korean restaurant and his mother’s pungent kimchi to the boulevards of East L.A. and the best taquerias in the country, to at last, the curbside view from one of his emblematic Kogi taco trucks, where people from all walks of life line-up for a revolutionary meal.

Anthony Bourdain, a favorite traveling food critic, chef, and writer will be publishing a series of books "composed of chefs, enthusiasts, fighters, musicians and dead essayists. And we’re looking to publish them in a way that’s both accessible and respectful of the power of the written word – and appropriately fetishistic about the tactile joys of the printed page.”
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/anthony-bourdain-gets-his-own-line-at-harpercollins_b37985

So looking forward to a Bourdain special on Choi's LA food cart.

Health Insurance for Self Employed Writers

This great news from Galley Cat;

Despite the federal government shutdown, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Marketplace is now open, a way for people to compare health insurance options under the new policy also known as “Obamacare.”
Self-employed writers will have more choices under this act. Explore options for self-employed writers at the official site:

You can use the Marketplace to find health coverage that fits your budget and meets your needs. You can compare important features of several plans side-by-side, all of them offering a full package of essential health benefits. You can see what your premium, deductibles, andout-of-pocket costs will be before you decide to enroll. You can’t be denied coverage or charged more because you have a pre-existing health condition. If you currently have individual insurance–a plan you bought yourself, not the kind you get through an employer–you may be able to change to a Marketplace plan. Learn more about changing individual insurance plans.

The Year Without Pants- thoughts on writing from home

Reposted from GalleyCat;

In his new book, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work, author Scott Berkun outlined what he learned while working as a manager at the major blog company.
On today’s Morning Media Menu, Berkun shared insights that can help editors, publishers and writers cope with the rapidly changing digital workplace. Press play below to listen, but here’s an excerpt:

Working remotely at all is considered taboo at some companies, but I think that is foolish. It should all be focused on the results instead of these superficial characteristics. If someone can work well remotely, then where they are in the world shouldn’t really matter that much. It should be focused on their output and their results.

Berkun continued:

Everyone at WordPress.com works remotely or works from home, which means there are no office hours, no set place to go to work. One of the big discoveries in the book is about co-working and finding places where other independent workers are working. There are social benefits that come from being in a room with other people who are working. Even if you are not working on the same thing. Wise managers or employers should be open-minded about allowing their employees to experiment and try co-working spaces.

Weinstein is sick of the negative attitudes about Generation Y

An excerpt from Adam Weinstein's essay in Gawker this month. Over 700,000 views;


I once listened to a professor, who is in his sixties, read us the first published piece he’d been paid for, in the late 1970s. A thousand words or so. The rate, he says, was something like two bucks a word. That’s four times what the Village Voice pays today, even for an award-winning investigative cover story. It’s geometrically greater than what most writers can earn today writing daily brilliance for nationally renowned publications online. And writing daily brilliance, which many of them do, is hard goddamned work. If I had a dollar for every older writer or editor who confided to me that “I don’t know how young writers do it today; I certainly couldn’t,” I could buy every property that publishes them. So no, we shan’t be doing as well as our parents, and no, we shan’t be shutting up about it.