The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes by Rick Bass

I met Rick Bass once, at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. I was in town for a writers' conference, and he was in town to promote his most recent book, The Wild Marsh (2009), which aroused my interest because I frequently walk around in marshes. He actually lives IN a marsh, and this book told the story of making the decision to move into the remote Yaak Valley in Montana, and what it is like to live there. I remember having a lovely conversation with this man who I hadn't read yet, and vowed to look into his other books and essays. He encouraged me to write my book about the seashore marsh I know well. It turns out he has a long bibliography, and since that meeting his name pops up frequently as a model of nonfiction writing. He writes fiction, too.

As my recent summers have been somewhat on the hectic side, I vowed that this year would be the summer of calm, relaxing reading. I was not so misguided as to think I'd work through my to-be-read piles, but at least I could read some books I've been meaning to get to. As of today, August 1, I have read or listened to twelve books, some from the to-be-read pile and some that I recently became aware of.

Rick Bass's The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes is brand new and got my attention because there's a chapter on Rick Bass having dinner with Joyce Carol Oates. I read three of her books this summer, so far.

Each chapter of Bass's book chronicles a meeting between him and an author he admires in which Bass prepares a meal for the writer in their own kitchen. Bass is accompanied by one of two students that he mentors on each of these journeys, or his daughter, Lowry. "I just want my mentees to see what greatness looks like," he writes on pages 119-120. He got in just under the wire with Peter Matthiessen, the double National Book Award Winner (for fiction AND nonfiction) who died soon after. Barry Lopez, David Sedaris (in England), and John Berger (in Switzerland) are three of the nonfiction authors I've enjoyed reading, and I found the descriptions of their meals with Bass hilarious. Something always goes wrong, and it is fun to see how these gifted authors cope with culinary adversity. Bass doesn't profess to be a gifted chef, but he knows what he is doing in the kitchen and even serves many of his "guests" elk meat that he killed and butchered himself. This is what one does in the Yaak Valley wilderness. One of his students, Erin,

often brings dried morel mushrooms from her home in Oregon.

There are sixteen such chapters which include Amy Hempel, Russell Chatham, Lorrie Moore, and Terry Tempest Williams among others. Some of the authors were new to me, but after reading about their meals with Bass I feel like I know them and I've noticed their names in my general reading about writing and books. these are all writers' writers, if you know what I mean.

The chapter on Joyce Carol Oates was a fun one. Bass and his entourage did not cook for her. Instead they met at a local restaurant and had their mishaps there. I'm not going to tell the story here, but I will warn you that if ever you find yourself at dinner with JCO, do not take her picture while she is eating.