Right about now, you’re bracing for the onslaught—of food, of booze, of family. There’s no getting around it. But there are a few things you can do to preserve (most of) your sanity.
By Laurie Palau
In theory, the holidays are a good idea. Unplug for a week or so, surround yourself with family and friends, give and get a few gifts, overeat, overdrink. In practice, they get a little murkier. The constant entertaining, the constant indigestion and hangovers, the constant presence of out-of-town family. The first week of January should really be declared a national holiday so that we can recuperate in our own ways from the supposed vacation we just endured.
Until Bose develops barely noticeable, noise-cancelling ear buds, you’re going to have to suffer through your mom’s scrutiny. And you should probably accept by now that those gifts are really just returns-in-waiting. On the bright side, your disappointment’s been so obvious that everyone’s at least including gift receipts now.
In other words, the holidays are what they are. You need to lay claim to those fleeting moments of happiness and let the rest of it go. Easier said than done, I know. But these are a few practices I’ve managed to find great solace in. Feel free to copy and paste into your life as needed.
Know your audience
Forget Martha Stewart. And screw the Barefoot Contessa. One year, I spent months poring over gourmet recipes and settled on a set that required me to hunt down tens of obscure ingredients and prep for hours. No one was especially impressed. They gorged, they drank, they got up from the table and they moved on with their lives. With so many people to feed, it’s OK to aim for the lowest common denominator. That’s your most finicky eater, anyway, not the locavore.
Stick with tradition
In that vein, lean on the dishes you can make in your sleep. For me, it’s bacon-wrapped scallops and crab cakes. I get bored easily, but having two dishes that I barely have to think about goes a long way toward lessening my burden. Plus, you make them year in and year out for a reason.
Give them a drawer
The less your overnight guests feel like an imposition, the less they’ll actually be one. It’s a funny thing; when guests feel like they’re in the way, the more they seem to hover, always wanting to ask for something, but never quite getting there. So head them off. Ask beforehand what they like to eat and drink and stock up. And carve out some space in the closet, along with a drawer or two, in their room. Everyone feels a little more at home when they’re not living out of a suitcase.
Take photos—often
Even when your kids are feuding. Even when you’re otherwise tuning out most of the room. Before you know it, the moment will be gone, for better and for worse, and, either way, you’ll regret not preserving it. Gone are the days when Hallmark moments were the only photogenic ones. In fact, you’ll appreciate the honest depictions a whole lot more—after the fact. Well after the fact.
Breathe deep—often
I’m the furthest thing from a Namaste chick, but when I feel my blood pressure spiking, the surest way to calm myself down is to pause right where I am and take a few deep breaths. You’ll know the moment.
Laurie Palau is the owner of the New Hope-based simply B organized, a home and life organization service.
THE LIFE STYLIST
If you’re exhausted by the thought of digging out the formalwear and trudging to some nondescript, overly expensive party, take a cue for the Life Stylist and ditch convention.
Text + photography by David J. Witchell
Being the eternal optimist that I am, I’ve always held that how you usher in the new year will go a long way toward dictating how you’ll live with it. Which is why my New Year’s Eve is an Event—but far from the conventional sense. I shed the tuxedo and the artificial glamour a while back in favor of a simpler night, one where I’m decked out in pajamas and surrounded by my closest friends and family, all of us savoring each other’s company and a home-cooked meal.
The hosting duties rotate among us. They’re falling to me this year, and, naturally, I started planning months ago. My father was born on New Year’s Eve, and every New Year’s Day, we staged a birthday feast, so the occasion was already a big deal for me. I keep the décor simple. I’ll pare down the Christmas decorations—so last year—and trim the remaining stuff in white, silver and a touch of gold. The dinner table follows the same aesthetic. If I can find them, a few bunches of white tulips are my go-to for the centerpiece; white roses, if not. And pajamas are the extent of the required attire. (It’s proven to be a good excuse to buy a new pair for myself and few more for the guests who “forget” to don theirs.) For the cynical among us, it’s only odd to be sitting around a candlelit dinner table in pajamas if you’re the only one wearing them.
Where Christmas is meant to exude a deep-seated sense of tradition, New Year’s Eve/Day should be pure and fresh and free of such a heavy burden. I’d like to enter the new year the way I’m sure most of us would: with a blank canvas. Easier said than done, but framing it as such can’t hurt. It’s certainly better than waking up to a mess of glitter, half-filled champagne flutes and cigarette butts. Come midnight, I’ll be toasting Janus, the Roman god after whom our first month is named.
Janus presided over both the beginning and the conclusion of conflict, which is why he’s often described as a two-faced god. To Janus. May you reflect upon our year that was and gather insight to help us find our way in the year ahead.
What was your best New Year’s Eve like? Only remember bits and pieces of it?
Sounds about right. That’s the thing: Even if your New Year’s Eve plans meet your every outlandish expectation, you’re still waking up the next morning with a debilitating hangover and a spotty memory of what just transpired. All you do know for sure is that you’re a few hundred bucks lighter in the pocket for it.
This pressure, internal and/or external, to do something on New Year’s Eve is totally unfounded. It’s a holiday celebrated by twentysomethings and eccentrics who need to be penned into Times Square for hours on end. The rest of us are just trying to reenact, what, some overly glorified memory from our youth, a rom-com that led us to believe there’s magic in the air, and we just need to open ourselves up to it?
Instead of fixating on these few precious hours, let’s envision another scenario: You go to bed at a decent hour, the clock ticks past midnight like it always does. You sleep in late and wake up bright-eyed and increasingly energized as you realize you haven’t dry-heaved the day away. In the afternoon, a small group of handpicked friends and family collects in your living room and kitchen and talk and laugh, talk and laugh, over a few simple snacks and a round or two of drinks. No formalwear required. No insatiable urge to over-drink in an effort to justify your outlandish reservation. No expecting the earth to shift on its axis at midnight.
When the sun goes down, they go home and you drift off on the couch, warmed by a bit of bourbon and the satisfaction of a once-lost day well spent.
Bethlehem-based fashion designer Lauren Midlam is nurturing a devout following through her subtle-but-empowering collections.
By Sean Downey
Butter Knit Ruched Dress in sapphire, $218, and Butter Knit Wrap in blue topaz, $198
Caught between Philadelphia and New York, as we are, it’s easy to fall into the trap that stipulates that all forms of modern culture—music, cooking, fashion, for starters—worth serious consideration must be tethered to one or the other. Sure, that once held. But this is a different day. And Lauren Midlam is walking proof.
Classic Window Pane Dress in navy and carbon, $328
Her focus, when she launched in 2012, was online sales, namely because it didn’t require much infrastructure. But the Internet has never served subtlety particularly well. “I found out it was hard to gain traction that way because consumers couldn’t touch and feel the fabric and fit, which are two of the biggest differentiating factors in my clothes,” Midlam says.
LM StyleBar’s collections are built around tailored, minimalist, foundational pieces—dresses, pencil skirts, jackets—that can be seamlessly incorporated into a wardrobe and just as easily become its staples. “I use a lot of standard colors and clean lines that stand the test of time,” Midlam says, “so when you buy something in one season, you can match it with something from the next.”
Like life in general, the fashion houses with the brashest patterns and most aggressive silhouettes tend to receive most of our attention. But to truly appreciate Midlam’s designs, we need to run our fingers down a blazer’s silk charmeuse lining and eye up the princess seams, or notice the total lack of a side seam in a pencil skirt. All of it is a study in subtly. The results, though, are anything but: fabric that caresses you skin and forms that look downright bespoke.
Ponte Knit Classic Dress with three-quarter sleeves in carbon, $325.
Which is to say Midlam’s fortunes changed dramatically once her label started getting picked up by local boutiques.
“Fabric plays a huge role in an item’s look and a wearer’s attitude,” says Midlam, who likes to mix silk with synthetic fibers, like viscose and spandex. Together, they mold to a figure and then move, fluidly, with it. Which seems to be emboldening said figures in ways once reserved for those sporting oversized, gold Gucci clasps and screaming Dolce & Gabbana prints. “My customers,” she says, “have been requesting larger and larger sizes, which tells me that they appreciate clothes that show off their curves.”
Imagine that: Fashion that enhances self-image, instead of masking it.
There comes a time in our adult lives when we realize that it’s time to let go of the secondhand stuff, the piecemeal collections and the flat-out old and begin forming our own identities. Mine arrived this summer as my seven-year-old nephew gulped milk from an Oktoberfest pint glass. We promptly nicknamed him Sluggo, but the site unsettled me, nonetheless.
We held on to souvenirs from college, like that glass (and many others of its kind), because they’re still totally functional, and we don’t like waste. Clearly, though, more appropriate drinkware was in order. So I made a pact with myself: My purchases would be purposeful, sustainable and as local (sourced and made) as possible.
I found Owen Moon, a budding artisan, and his 10-ounce Ceramic Dart Cup Set ($60) at the Wrightstown Farmers Market. Yep, those Dart cups, the kind we used to drink from, maybe gnaw around the lip a little and then toss into the garbage. Owen casts the Styrofoam cups in his studio at Alfred University (he’s still in school) and glazes them in faint, glossy shades of indigo, cranberry and cream. The Dart logo on the bottom of the cup’s still very much intact. It was the nostalgia that pulled me, but the ingenuity sealed the deal.
The pint glasses are stowed away, safely out of reach of lil’ Sluggo, awaiting my husband’s future cave. We’re serious adults now; we drink from Dart cups. —Kendra Lee Thatcher
The way that those handsome Billykirk bags only seem to get better with age, that’s not by accident. That’s the sweet spot that Chris Bray, one of the two brothers behind the brand, has been chasing after his entire life. Here, he invites us into his New Hope home for a glimpse of his countless points of inspiration.
By Scott Edwards Photography by Josh DeHonney
Bray, pictured with his family at their New Hope home. Above and below, some of his collections.
The large rooms and modest décor give the 18th-century New Hope home a lived-in, English manor feel. Chris and Tracy Bray moved their young family here from Jersey City, New Jersey, a few years back for the schools and, as Chris describes it, a “little bit of land.”
In the tiny plot behind their brownstone, he managed to nurture a rather robust garden. “I had plants that had, like, 250 different habaneros,” he says. And, “I was probably one of the only people that had chickens in my backyard.” Also safe to say: His rooster was not popular around his block.
Chris has spent almost all of his adult life in major northern and western cities, but he exudes an easy charm that stems from his Tennessee roots. He’s animated at turns, but he’s never rushing. A formal interview with him almost immediately becomes an organic conversation.
He and his brother, Kirk, founded the leather and canvas goods company Billykirk 17 years ago in Los Angeles. A little over a decade ago, they moved it east. And today, they maintain a studio in Jersey City, a flagship store in Lower Manhattan and a presence in fashionable boutiques around the world. This month, they’re launching a new line with J.Crew, a longtime partner. Billykirk is a brand that’s become synonymous with boundless utility, old-school craftsmanship and aging handsomely. And in those same ways, it’s also become a pure extension of Chris.
Losing ground
“This, right here, was found in our backyard in Jersey City,” Chris says, as he deposits the object in question in my cupped hands.
Is this a cannonball?
“Yeah. That’s Revolutionary War right there,” he says.
It weighs 12 pounds, but it feels heavier. Chris consulted a historian who told him that Communipaw Cove, which no longer exists, teemed with British gunboats during the war, and their yard was well within the range of their canons.
“He said there’s a good chance that it hit our backyard and it stayed there until now, because it was deep,” Chris says. “He also said, when they were leveling out the land, there’s a chance that it was dug up and planted there. I like the first story.”
He restores the cannonball to the mantel over a large fireplace in the more formal of two living rooms. Chris is a guy consumed with stuff, but not in the manner of a collector, nor in the way of a hoarder. He’s more of a historian, because it’s the stories that he connects with. The objects, whose value he cares little about, not that there’s much of it in most cases, are merely remnants and physical cues.
He used to be much worse. Tracy’s reined him in. A personal trainer with an online supplement program called Leany Greeny in development, she shares little of his fascination with artifacts. Moving cross-country has a way of doing that. And as a Briton, she’s done that and then some.
“When she first met me, she thought I lived with my grandfather because I had pipes and smoking stands,” Chris says.
There’s still some evidence of his collections scattered around the house—the cannonball, a candid portrait of Marilyn Monroe that was taken and given to him by the revered photographer William Woodfield, whom Chris befriended toward the end of his life in LA—but most of what remains has been relegated to his third-floor office and his workshop in the basement, where he crafts small sculptures with various found objects. So we head upstairs first.
On a wall outside of his small office that faces the third-floor landing, Chris has arranged a stylish vignette that could hold down the display window at the Billykirk flagship. It’s comprised of some of his oldest Billykirk possessions—a well-worn, black watchstrap that dates back to the company’s inception, a hand-stitched leather satchel inspired by a World War II-era Belgian map bag—and some of his most prized personal ones—swatches of olive drab canvas from his uncle’s Vietnam boot bag, a Swiss medic case.
Inside the office, beside a spare desk and an old lamp and chair, there’s an enclosed, built-in closest and a slim dresser that sits between them. The closet and the dresser are crammed with loose ends.
“These are my dad’s boots … Just an old switchblade, came out of my neighbor’s place. He passed away. Again, they were throwing everything out in that house,” Chris says, taking partial inventory of the dresser’s contents.
I spot a pair of Dorothy-looking, red-sequined girls shoes in a corner. “My daughter went through a couple pairs of these,” he says. “I just kept them because she beat the hell out of them, and I just liked that.”
Earlier, in the course of a conversation that intertwined references of this stuff with his and Kirk’s ambition to turn Billykirk’s bags, belts and cardholders into the kinds of possessions that get passed down, I asked, finally, where this obsession with heirlooms comes from.
“My family’s an old, old American family,” he says. The Daniel Bray Highway, that stretch of Route 29 that runs between Stockton, NJ, and Frenchtown, NJ, it was named after a relative. “When that happens, you’ve got just this huge family that, by and large, most of them kept stuff. We keep stuff. We pass stuff down. The connection we have with stuff, it’s just important. For me, it’s just important.”
And yet, even standing among these crowded shelves and drawers, the stuff’s not as important as it once was. Since Tracy’s intervention, Chris describes himself as “sort of a minimalist.”
“I’m not gonna kill myself trying to save any of it. I just won’t. At the end of the day, I’ve sort of realized it’s just stuff,” he says. “I mean, my wife really kind of helps me remember that.”
Do your daughters (Matilda, 11, and Willa, 6) have any interest in it?
“Yeah. You know, there’s something,” Chris says. “They want to go through my junk drawers. They’re not ready, because they’ll lose stuff.”
So there’s still some value to him, more than he’s likely admitting here, considering the ease with which the stories come and the degrees to which he lights up telling them. Matilda and Willa are curious kids, even though they hardly act their ages. Matilda’s working with a former Bucks County Poet Laureate to publish her first book of poetry. And Willa, “She’s a piece of work,” Chris says. “Fiercely independent.” It’s inevitable that some of his sentimentality is likely to rub off on them, but Matilda and Willa appear to be firmly entrenched on Team Tracy.
A beautiful mind
The sculpture, Chris has been doing for a while now, “getting my mind off stuff.” From the third floor, we’ve descended many steps to reach a cave-like room in a corner of the short but sprawling basement. Chris’s collections have migrated, literally, to the extreme reaches of the home.
Relatively organized clusters of found objects are scattered across a workbench just inside the doorway. Within arm’s reach, there’s a small table, atop which sit several assembled pieces, all about the size of a fist.
“I’m just making shapes here,” he says. “Here’s a piece I just did. That’s a frog gig. This is part of a wooden loom.”
Chris retreats to the other side of the room—in order to do so, he shimmies around a massive, old nautilus machine that occupies at least two-thirds of the floor space in this room—to retrieve a weathered lobster buoy so that he can assemble a loose mock-up of a lamp he plans to create. I’m cynical until it comes together. There’s an unlikely cohesiveness in his creations, even the lobster buoy lamp.
He also powdercoats everything and anything that looks like it would be improved by being powdercoated. He picks up a little iron weight plate. “I like olive. So I powdercoated this little weight olive,” he says. “It takes sort of a weird brain to go for it. That’s sort of what makes me tick.”
You can find Billykirk (@billykirkinc) locally at The Selvedge Yard in New Hope, Modern Love in Frenchtown and Art in the Age in Old City.
For a couple precious weeks each year, we can enter the homes of complete (and, sometimes, not) strangers and gawk at their stuff. To ensure that you satisfy your curiosity, we offer a brief guide to the prime snooping—err, tours.
By Scott Edwards
‘Tis the season to scope out some of the most inspiring halls around us, public and private. And, of course, soak up some holiday vibes. But, let’s be honest, we drag the dog out for a walk out most nights as a convenient excuse to peer through our neighbors’ floor-to-ceiling windows. These are the couple of weeks of the year when we can drop the act and walk right in. What follows is a guide to the season’s most promising house tours. Rest assured that every property will be decked out. You’re probably more interested in what lies beneath the garland, though. As are we.
Newtown Historic Assoc. Holiday Open House Tour | December 3
Six homes and seven public buildings, all in Rockwell-ian Newtown Borough, comprise this year’s self-guided walking tour, which dates back to 1963 (when admission was a buck-fifty; it’s $30 now). You’ll find some of the most impressive examples of colonial-era architecture in Bucks County among this collection. Chadds Ford Historical Society Candlelight Christmas Tour | Dec. 3
Several historic Chadds Ford and Pennsbury township properties will be decorated and awash in candlelight—or, rather, sunlight; the tour starts at 1 p.m.; but candles will be burning, or plugged in, at least—for the self-guided tour. This one’s most appropriate for the history savant. Most of the featured stops played a role in the 1777 Battle of Brandywine.
Fonthill Holiday Lights Meander | Dec. 10
There’s only one stop on this tour, but it’s a doozy. In broad daylight on an average Tuesday, Henry Mercer’s personal castle in Doylestown, Fonthill Museum, is akin to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, if Wonka was a freak craftsman instead of a sugar fiend. Adorned with garland, candles and designer Christmas trees, it’s sensory overload. Haverford Holiday House Tour | Dec. 11
Five homes, the oldest dating back to the 19th century. Expect lots of wide-plank floors, short doorframes and built-in shelving and cabinetry. In other words, the kind of authentic nuances that, despite our boundless innovation since their inception, have become impossible to replicate.
Pottsgrove Manor by Candlelight | Dec. 11
On the 12th day of Christmas, the English colonists got down with their God-fearing selves—indulgent dinners, lavish parties. So, here, actors will be recreating some of those scenes throughout the 264-year-old mansion of Pottstown’s founder. There will be something on all three floors—dancing in the parlor, cooking in the kitchen and, we’re expecting, a secret rendezvous in the servants’ quarters.
You like a good scare, but you’d prefer not to wet your pants. Follow us.
By Christine Olley
Halloween, like salsa, is an occasion that’s served at various intensities. Some of us may kick back with The Wizard of Oz and then call it a night. Black-and-white if we’re feeling brave (or buzzed), Technicolor if we’re alone and especially paranoid, with all those trick-or-treaters roaming around. Others may opt for a haunted hayride. Just enough of a fright to cause a spike or two of adrenaline, but never too threatening. And then there are those whose every action over the coming weeks suggests that Halloween is, in fact, the dawning of the end of times.
Our compilation of some of the coolest Halloween attractions now playing favors the mild-to-moderate side of the palate. We figured if you were seeking something hot, you weren’t going to refer to a magazine called Home + Table. Still, there are ample reasons to feel afraid. Just think more along the lines of goosebumps than night terrors.
If you tend to weather your hauntings better on a full stomach, the Nassau Inn, which sits across from Princeton University, in charming Palmer Square, is offering private dinners for groups of 20 or more chased by a tour of the campus’s most notoriously haunted nooks. ($75 per person.) You’ll be armed with EMF meters, dousing rods and night-vision flashlights and fed lots of graphic stories for dessert.
If not for Halloween, we’d likely never realize that we’re surrounded by so many turn-of-the-century asylums and orphanages. And thanks to whichever reality TV-ghost hunter you favor, we’re all now well aware of the horrific treatment that played out within their walls. So what we have here at Malfate Manor, a.k.a. The House in the Hollow, is the perfect storm: Our own ridiculous preconceptions colliding, head-on, with lots of dark corners and costumed teenagers jumping out from them.
Imagine a haunted house where you and your friends are the attraction. That’s the idea behind Waldorf’s newest scene, the Zombie Escape Room. You’ll be offered refuge from the encroaching apocalypse and then given a half-hour to figure out the clues that’ll lead to the exit. Think “The Walking Dead,” but without the armfuls of guns. If there are enough of you—10 are admitted per turn—make a game of it. Slowest to exit buys dinner. Then align with your Type A friends.
The legend has it that Damon DeMonio returned home after fighting in the Civil War only to discover that his new wife was, um, nurturing an army of her own. He lost his head. The result was not pretty. Skip ahead 150 years: An actual freemasons lodge sits atop the plot where DeMonio’s home once stood. Strange things, reportedly, happen there, like freemasonry. Also: a three-story haunted house. But, really, freemasonry is plenty creepy enough.
When you’re moaning your way up a small hill, barely maintaining a walking pace, do you ever think, What could make this jog even better? A bulky, awkward-fitting costume? Yes! Then the Costume Dash is just the opportunity you’ve been looking for to further sabotage your fitness. And if that wasn’t already a weird enough site, there’s a pub crawl afterward. Nothing says, “You’re a man now,” to a 10-year-old like forcing him to witness Iron Man and his super friends stumble out of a bar in the middle of the afternoon.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is hosting a “Stranger Things”-themed party (Will!) October 19, from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., (free with museum admission; registration required) complete with pumpkin decorating (resistance is futile) and tarot card readings (find out when you’re going to die through a party game!). There’s also going to be ghost tours of the galleries, including one of Fernando Orellana’s ghost machines. It’s a site-specific installation where Orellana’s configured four robotic machines through which he’s attempting to interact with the ghost of Thomas Eakins.
Photos courtesy (from the top) Waldorf Estate of Fear; Nassau Inn; Waldorf Estate of Fear; Costume Dash
Brandi Granett’s mastered the fickle art of nurturing grassroots support for her novels. With her latest, she’s taking a different tack: turning away from her computer and trying it in her backyard.
By Scott Edwards
It’s early 2000, and everything in Brandi Granett’s world is right. She’s fresh out of graduate school and her first book just dropped. The world is opening up before her. Until it abruptly flips upside down. Her publisher, William Morrow and Company, is bought by a larger publisher, HarperCollins, and overnight, everyone she works with is dismissed. Just that quickly, she’s alone and adrift.
“So, I didn’t want to do it again for a very long time. I walked away from it. I was saying, ‘I’ll just be a teacher,’ ” Granett says. “But then I started competitive archery on a lark.”
Her daughter was aiming to star in either the Olympics or a renaissance fair, so they scoped out a school in Lambertville, New Jersey, near their home, and the director confided in Granett, with a wink, “You know, women are better at this than men.” She was hooked from that moment. With writing and then publishing, everything Granett thought she knew deteriorated to nothing. But archery revealed itself to be surprisingly profound. The more she practiced, the further it grounded and focused her in the rest of her life, including the writing.
“There’s a coach that I admire, Jim White, out of Georgia,” she says. “And he teaches his people, relationships determine results.”
It became a kind of mantra for her as she gradually worked her way back to the thought of taking a run at writing another book. The rules are different now; the book’s only part of the pitch. “You’re expected now to have a platform,” Granett says. “If you go to a publisher and you have two Twitter followers and one of them is your dog, they don’t want to hear from you.”
So she joined a peer group called the Tall Poppy Writers, comprised of 45 women fiction writers from across the country. And she launched an author profile series for The Huffington Post, for which she’s a frequent contributor. The aim of both is one and the same: To establish a self-sustaining community. The authors, these days, who draw a marketing budget that’ll reach mainstream America could be listed in a single breath, and there’d be some air leftover. The rest are left, largely, to find their own ways. And as with all grassroots efforts today, that means social media networking. A well-placed Retweet is as valuable to these workingman writers as a New York Times endorsement.
When it came time to promote her latest novel, Triple Love Score, published last month by Wyatt-Mackenzie, Granett was inclined to make it a group affair, naturally. Over the last few months, she’s organized what’s become quite a massive book fair, for lack of a better term. In all, 45 mostly-Delaware Valley-based authors spanning a range of genres, including children and young adult, will present themselves and their books October 23, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Prallsville Mills, in Stockton, NJ, as part of the event Granett’s dubbed River Reads.
[divider]River Reads[/divider]
WHAT A book fair featuring 45 mostly-local authors. Plus, crepes and a Unionville Vineyard tasting
WHEN Sunday, Oct. 23, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
WHERE Prallsville Mills, Stockton, NJ
“I didn’t want it to be about my book,” she says. “That sounds so—I don’t have this mysticism about, like, oh, I wrote a book, so I’m somebody special, because thousands of people, every day, hit publish on Amazon Createspace. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. But what means something is connecting people to readers and sharing books with other people.”
Some of the authors, Granett knows—a few Tall Poppies will be there—but the majority simply answered her public call. The total number of participants doesn’t even represent the true extent of the interest. It’s only where she was forced to cap them for lack of space to accommodate any more.
Spread across both floors of the mill’s main building, each writer will have his or her own display. And there will be brief readings performed every 15 minutes or so downstairs and up-, “like a little commercial blast of what they have to offer,” Granett says. Also, nearby Unionville Vineyards will be hosting a tasting and the Bonjour Creperie truck will be stationed outside.
A community, virtual and actual, is currency in modern writing. The larger the population, the more likely you are to publish another book. But it’s also become a support system for a profession that’s notoriously isolating and disorienting. For many aspiring and established writers alike, Granett included, the former is the icing, the latter, the cake. Granett expects River Reads, if nothing else, to reinforce the following: “I know that I’m not the only person that had an agent break up with her. I’m not the only person who’s struggling to find time with writing and being a mom.” And that, she says, “kind of keeps me invested in the process.”
Burning through fat really is this simple. But don’t infer that simple means easy.
By Todd Soura
We live in an interesting time. A lot of the long-held conventional thinking about exercise and nutrition has been debunked in rapid succession over the last several years in favor of methods that are, for the most part, more conducive to our nonstop lifestyles. Never really able to make time for those 10K training runs? Good news. Turns out that 10 minutes of sprinting are more effective anyway.
A lot of what seemed radical at first glance, like the above, now feels closer to common sense. Yet, the onslaught of so-called revolutionary workouts and diets just keeps coming. Understand that it’s a business, first and foremost, and you’ll begin to see it for what it is: an attempt to profit off of misguided information.
To show you just how simple it can be, I’m going to outline a 10-minute workout that’s designed to boost your metabolic rate long after you finish, as well as a recovery plan for the hours immediately afterward. No gym’s required. Nor is a nutritionist. If you’re cramped for time, you can do the workout and leave it at that. But if you supplement your current regimen with it, save it for last. You’re not going to have anything left in the tank. For that reason, my clients have come to refer it as the “10 Minutes of Hell.”
Perform the circuit twice and without rest between the exercises or the rounds, unless you absolutely have to. Aim to do the maximum amount of repetitions you can within each timeframe. If you’re not thoroughly exhausted when you finish, try the advanced version next time:
Once you pull yourself together, try not to head straight for the kitchen, unless you need to grab some more water. I know. The popular thinking is to eat within 20 to 30 minutes of finishing your workout. Your metabolism’s still raging, and anything you consume is more likely to be used as fuel rather than stored at fat. That’s all true. But it neglects the other half of that equation: You stop burning fat as soon as you eat.
In other words, you just ruined yourself for 10 minutes, and now you’re going to negate those gains in a single bite. What you should do instead is abstain for the next hour. Let your body eat into its fat stores while you go shower and prep your meal. Then, reward yourself with a palm-size portion of lean protein and all the veggies you can stomach. (Note: If you’re building muscle or trying to enhance your athletic performance, a different set of guidelines apply.)
