Dear friends of the unreal — In my latest Medium piece, I wax eloquent about my history with a famous foodstuff and how it works in my new novel.
Food is love, my husband once told me and food is crucial in my forthcoming novel, Pretend Plumber.
I love food. No, seriously, I LOVE food. I’m always hungry, and I always want to eat.
In particular I love food that is easy to prepare because I come from a long line of women who cannot cook, and men who cannot help them — I never saw any man in my family don an apron or fix anything to drink that wasn’t on the rocks with a twist of lime. Now, the Norwegian side of my family — the 3 Gaustad sisters — they could cook, but I didn’t live near them. I lived near the useless but decorative 2 Manhattanites — my mother, Barbé and her mother, Stephanya. They were book reading, lipstick wearing, dog-walking, designer dress strutting non-housewives, who could not cook worth a damn.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer is a magical realist prose fiction writer, novelist, occasional essayist, and a committed, intermittent poet, as well as a passionate instructor of writing. A 7-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize she has published work in Hayden's Ferry, Pearl, CRATE, Rhapsoidia, NYCBigCityLit, the East Jasmine Review, Apeiron, Inlandia, Literary Alchemy and the Bellevue Literary Review among other places. She is the author the fabulist novel THE PUPPET TURNERS OF NARROW INTERIOR (Urban Farmhouse Press), a novelette, RESCUE PLAN (Bamboo Dart Press), a prose poem chapbook collection, SEX WITH BUILDINGS (dancing girl press), and a poetry collection, HOW FORMAL (Spout Hill Press).
Stephanie's new novel PRETEND PLUMBER is available for order from your favorite bookstore, and her poetry chapbook CITY SLICKER appeared in July 2022. Stay tuned for her novella, JOURNEY TO MERVEILLEUX CITY, coming out in 2023!
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