The Ohioana Awards

Rare, never-to-be repeated photo of an artist/naturalist speaking at the Ohio State House.

On October 18, 2008, I gratefully accepted a citation from the Ohioana Library Association for
"Distinguished Service to Ohio in the Fields of Art, Writing and Commentary." The OLA honors Ohio writers and creative artists for their contributions, and maintains a huge library of works executed by Ohioans. We are busy people out here in Ohio. The awards ceremony was in the State House, and our former governor, Bob Taft, and his wife were there, and there were lots of gifted artists and writers and poets there. Bit of advice: Try not to get up at a podium after a poet has said his artfully humble and mercifully brief thank-you. It makes you, Ms. Overkill, feel like popping a verbal Immodium. However. I wanted you, my faithful readers, to know that you, and this strange little forum we enjoy, were at the forefront of my thoughts as I wrote and re-wrote and then re-wrote and still fretted over my acceptance homily. They told me to keep it to 30 seconds, one or two minutes at the most, but I couldn't. It came in at 2:50. Here it is:



I don’t know about you, but I get most of my celebrity news in the grocery line, while waiting for the cashier to look up “Bok Choi” on the produce list. While doing this, I’ve found out that three celebrities share my birth year: Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince. As I stand here, I feel certain that, this generous Ohioana citation aside, Madonna and Michael Jackson** need have no concern that I will eclipse their celebrity. Prince is an interesting one, though. He looked at the deals the record companies were offering and walked away from the crossroads. He produces, publishes and distributes his music from his own recording studio in Minneapolis, and by all accounts he’s doing just fine.

These are exciting times to be a writer. Rumors of writing’s demise, I think, were premature. Writing is very much alive; I’d submit that it’s healthier than ever. Let’s face it: Most of us spend many waking hours reading off a computer screen. It’s easy now both to find and circulate good contemporary writing. The Internet has created brand new forums for it; instant exchange of pieces that touch something in us. It’s as though the blood of creativity has found new vessels, and a writer, or for that matter, a musician, painter, photographer—any creative artist-- can find a targeted audience with vastly greater speed and efficiency than has ever been possible before.

Although the word “blog” sounds like something you’d find stuck to the bottom of your shoe, after stumbling into blogging, I’m a true believer. I’ve kept one for three years, and more than 21,000 unique readers visit each month. The number grows by about 1,000 a month. Serving up good content five days a week is a big commitment—but it’s like having your own small magazine. You control the content, graphics, the creative direction. And it really gets interesting when you hear from 40 or 50 readers, exchange ideas, and allow them to expand your horizons.

Writers need to write, I think, and write every day, whether it’s an essay or a footnoted treatise; a haiku or a blog post. The writing muscles need to move, even if the back gets stiff and the tailbone gets sore. The odd thing about writing every day is that you don’t run out of ideas; you beget more, just by writing.

William Thackeray said, "There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write."

Thank you, Ohioana, for this honor. I thank my husband, Bill Thompson III, and his parents, Bill and Elsa Thompson, for first publishing my work in Bird Watcher’s Digest, begun in their Marietta living room and now celebrating its 30th year. I thank my agent, Russ Galen, and my editor, Lisa White, for making a book of Letters from Eden. I thank my editor Ellen Silva, Melissa Block and National Public Radio for believing that there’s something going on in Whipple, Ohio, that a national audience would like to hear. And I thank the online readers who are with me each day, who sometimes spit coffee on their computer screens when they open the blog. If they have to wipe their screens, I’ve done my job. Thank you.

End of remarks.

And thanks to Kerf for the pictures, for hanging out and making it all such fun.

**Madonna and Michael Jackson share my exact birthday and year. Shazaam. Could serial marriage, reclusive exhibitionism, a private amusement park, sexy personal trainers, a gaggle of nannies, surrogate parenthood, fabulous thighs, a creepy skin condition, repatriation to England, the cloud of pederasty, Kaballah, or a chimp named Bubbles be in my future, too?

I'll take the thighs.

Paw Paw Processing

A naturalist's table: freshly picked paw paws, a blooming Cattleytonia orchid, a couple of monarch chrysalides waiting to hatch. Yes, I will get to the chrysalis posts. But there are overripe paw paws in my blog pantry right now.
Consumed by paw paw fever, Phoebe and I went looking in our own woods where we had seen some paw paw saplings coming up a couple of years ago. Imagine how wonderful it would be to find them old enough to fruit, on our own land! We had a big bowl of fruit from Athens; now we'd look for some on our place. Our excitement built as we got ready for the paw paw safari. We wanted to wait for Daddy, but he wouldn't be home until after dark, so we set off by ourselves.

There were the trees--a veritable paw paw grove! And there, hanging above us, was the fruit.
Can you hear the heavenly chorus? Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh! Perfectly, splendidly, softly, fragrantly ripe. Here is the haul from our little grove:
We thought them much superior in looks and flavor to the Athens ones. Perhaps it's because they weren't hauled for miles in a backpack.

We tried to teach Chet Baker to find them once they'd fallen from the trees as we shook them, but he was no help. He found lots of sticks and pillbugs, but never got the point of our giving him a paw paw to smell, then saying, "Go find it, boy!"It was not for lack of interest. Chet Baker likes paw paws, as you will see. We just couldn't get the concept through his little melon head that he might look for them and find them for us.

All right. Now I had a whole mess o' paw paws. Time to process them. I'd learned from my previous big haul that they are a bit time-consuming to prepare. In short, the pulp can be separated from the huge and abundant seeds in only one way: by squishing the fruit through a colander.

I separated out the ripest fruit to work on first. You definitely want the fruit to be soft to the touch before you process it. It tastes best when fully ripe, and it separates best from the seeds and skin when ripe.You lay the fruit in the colander and squish it flat with your palm and your knuckles. It separates readily from the skin. Then you grind it around, seeds, pulp, skin and all, until just the pulp squeezes through the colander holes into a bowl below. After awhile, you have something that looks like this in your colanderand this in the bowl below:That's the money shot, right there. Pure gold.

Chet Baker got to lick the colander when I was all done.I will say this about processing paw paws. It is messy. You want to do it outdoors, because the vigor required to squash the paw paws around means that a certain amount of pulp winds up elsewhere than in the catch bowl. The pulp is extremely sticky, and I found I had to whack the colander on the catch bowl to dislodge the pulp and make it go into the bowl. Little bits of pulp fly about when I do this. When these bits dry, they set up like cement on clothing and kitchen surfaces. By my third big batch of fruit, I was processing paw paws in my underwear, out on the deck. By this, I mean to say that I was wearing only underwear whilst smashing paw paws. Not that I was processing paw paws in my underwear.

There are blogs that titillate. This is not intended to be one of them, unless you are talking about the titillation of delicious food and the occasional bizarre play of words or a seductively misplaced modifier.The entree that night? Chicken korma, with fresh tomatoes from the garden, cilantro garnish, and a sweet paw paw yogurt sauce over jasmine rice. Swoon.

Here ends the paw paw series. I have loved coming to know the paw paw, abundant native fruit of the Ohio Valley. The pounds that we harvested are now reduced to two large zip-loc bags of pulp in the freezer. I'll saw off chunks for smoothies and sauces all winter long, into spring.For all you could want to know (and some things I'd rather not know) about the paw paw, check this page. Thanks to JW for the link!

I leave Friday morning for a jaunt to Columbus, where I will be accepting an Ohioana Library Association Citation for "outstanding contributions and accomplishments in a specific field or area of the arts and humanities." I think you can tell that I find it great fun to live in Ohio. I celebrate it every day, right here with you all. Well, now it's even more fun. Thank you, Ohioana Library Association, for digging my stuff.