Happy Passover/Easter/Spring from the Deep South, where we’re already knee-deep into strawberry season.

It’s been a busy first quarter. Last week, I published a quick recap of my Seder shopping adventures in Religion Dispatches Magazine.

Last month, I had an interview with Restaurant Opportunity Centers-United co-founder Saru Jayaraman about her new book, Behind the Kitchen Door (get it, if you haven’t yet) in Clarion.

And in February, I was very pleased to join Dr. Jon Deutsch and other culinary publishing experts for a discussion of culinary textbooks at the Roger Smith Cookbook conference.

I’m so pleased that the good and fun folks at Streetlight Magazine included my essay “Blue Coat” for their relaunch edition. Spring is such a great time for renewing literary ventures. In honor of Spring and Passover, here’s a quick taste — but I hope you’ll savor the whole magazine. There’s lots of good stuff in there.

Before I went to college I was indifferent about my Jewishness. But explaining lox to my first Minnesotan boyfriend (“I thought it was some kind of bread product,” he said), realizing that I argue for fun and sport, knowing that I would never cross a picket line—hell, that I knew what a picket line was—it all made me realize I wasn’t only a New Yorker, I was a Jew. And not just a generic Jew, but a red-diaper-grandbaby Jew. I began—what else?—to study. (And to go to therapy.) I was already interested in this heritage, but when my grandmother died I felt my tether to my Judaism snap, and ricochet back at me.

It is a fact of literary life that journal publication is sometimes delayed. So it is with the soon-to-be-revived journal scheduled to publish one of my essays. Both essay and journal are “forthcoming.”

But look over here — cake! There are certainly ways that baking a cake is like writing an essay: both depend on confidence, practice, chemistry and a little bit of magic. Good cakes and good writing both boast fine flavor, enough lift to avoid being dense but enough substance to avoid being too light. Like a writing an excellent essay, cake baking balances tradition and innovation, experiment with combinations and proportions and ideas, but stay within some general bounds dictated by common sense and physical limits. Both are best layered, and feature some contrast. Also, if it flops or collapses or just plain sucks, it’s relatively painless to trash the failed experiment. But here are three ways baking a cake is not like writing an essay:  cake baking is linear, low-stakes, and makes your house smell good.

Cake is a good consolation prize for receiving rejections, a real reward for sitting and writing, and productive procrastination for whiling away the time this writer spends waiting for her work to see print. What can’t cake do?

I had such a good time on Sunday reading — and spending time — with Oil and Water…And Other Things That Don’t Mix Editor Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson-Brown and contributors Laura B. Gschwandtner, Ginger McKnight-Chavers, and Maureen Doallas, who graciously coordinated us. (The book is available from Amazon and benefits Mobile, AL charities. Read well and do good at the same time.)

It could have been supremely awkward — meetings of writers often are. And these are not just any writers. These are writers I’m already intimate with, people whose work snuggled up next to mine between the covers of our anthology. I’ve already spent lots of time with their words, so of course I wondered, what would they be like in real life? Would I like them, really like them? Could the be as fab as their poems/stories/essays?

Not to worry — they were.

We did have a friendly lovefest, listening to these ladies’ poems/stories/essays in their own strong voices. I get so much from hearing writers speak their words aloud, from hearing the inflection, the additions and the contractions, the humor — an increased intimacy.

Oil and Water may not mix, but Oil and Water contributors definitely do, and I hope we will again soon!

Thanks to Judith HeartSong for the photo (from her blog) and for hosting us at her lovely gallery.