Lisa Alber on Turning Points and Pie

LUCY BURDETTE: We all loved Lori Roy's post earlier this week--so many good stories about keepsakes. When I read Lisa Alber's response about memorabilia from her father's restaurants, and about his coffee toffee pie, I asked if she would join us to talk more and share that fabulous-sounding recipe. And then I discovered her first book comes out next year! What fun! Welcome Lisa!

LISA ALBER: Thanks for inviting me here today, Lucy! Lori’s post struck a nostalgic cord with me, that’s for sure.

Sadly, a crucial turning point in my relationship with my dad occurred after his death. My sisters and I had discovered a stash of menus, articles, and fliers from Dad’s restaurateur days. He’d saved three copies of everything, one set for each daughter. Frankly, I was astonished. Dad saved this for us?

Dad was a distant man, and I barely saw him growing up. We weren’t close. Fingering a menu that listed Dad’s famous coffee toffee pie for 60¢, I realized that not only had Dad been sentimental, he’d been thinking about us all along. Talk about a revelation. I caught a glimmer of him, perhaps for the first time, and I was heartbroken. What do you do with a turning point when it’s too late to go back?

Eventually, I wrote my upcoming  novel, Kilmoon, which centers around a woman who doesn’t know her father. I also kept the one keepsake—excluding papers—that my dad had saved from the restaurants: a battered springform baking pan. My mom never understood why he’d kept it, but I’d experienced the glimmer. I understood. Menu items came and went, but Dad always served coffee toffee pie. That dented pan symbolized an era and also Dad’s love in the only way he could easily express it. I still miss coffee toffee pie.

Have you experienced an epiphany about someone when it was too late to go back?

And, for you, dear Jungle Reddians, a recipe. Yum!

Joe Alber’s Coffee Toffee Pie

Makes two pies

Crust:

1 lb. box of pie crust mix
1/2 cup Ghiradelli powdered unsweetened chocolate (or cocoa)
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 1/4 cups crushed walnuts (not graham crackers as I’d mentioned in Lori’s post)
4 Tbsp. crushed Heath toffee bar bits
1 Tbsp. water as needed
 
Combine pie crust mix, powdered chocolate, brown sugar, walnuts, and toffee in a mixing bowl. Beat until crumbly, being sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Press dough firmly into two well-greased springform pans, keeping thickness of bottom to ¼ inch and heights of sides to about one inch. Add water to mixture and blend as needed if mixture is too crumbly. Also, moisten fingers with cold water as pressing dough into place to ease handling.

Bake at 325 degrees for 20 minutes. Cool for 20 minutes, and then place in the freezer.

Filling:

3/4 lb. butter, room temperature
2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp. instant coffee
3 one-ounce squares of semi-sweet chocolate, melted and cooled
6 eggs, room temperature

Cream butter. Add sugar gradually, beating until light and fluffy. Stir in chocolate and instant coffee. Add eggs one at a time beating thoroughly after adding each egg. Pour into cooled shells.

Whipped cream topping:

1 cup heavy cream
1 tsp. instant coffee
1 Tbsp. powdered sugar

Whip cream with coffee and sugar. Spread over whole pie. Chill at least two hours before serving.


Lisa Alber’s debut novel, KILMOON, a mystery set in Ireland, arrives March 2014. Based on Kilmoon, Lisa received an Elizabeth George Foundation writing grant. You can find Lisa online at www.lisaalber.com and lisaalber.wordpress.com.

A Favorite Keepsake by Lori Roy

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm a sucker for hearing about where writers get inspiration. I know lots of people hate the question: Where do you get your ideas? But I love it! And so I'm happy to introduce Edgar winner Lori Roy, to talk about her brand new book.


LORI ROY: One of my favorite keepsakes is a set of vintage white gloves. When I first began working on UNTIL SHE COMES HOME, I held these gloves and imagined a woman living in 1958 Detroit who had boarded a bus to do her daily shopping. Sitting among the other ladies, all bound for the shops on Willingham Avenue, she realized she had forgotten her white gloves. Ashamed and embarrassed, she hid her bare hands in her lap. Why was she so distracted, I wondered.  What had happened to make her forget her white gloves? 

Before I could answer these questions, I had to get to know this character and so I turned to one of my favorite research tools—a 1958 Sears catalog I bought from Ebay.  In the first few pages of the catalog, I came across the clothing for the young women, girls really, still in their teens. They wore skirts with wide sweeps and slender belts cinched around their slender waists. Their long smooth hair was pulled back and up into ponytails that sat high on their heads. These girls didn’t wear white gloves. Even when bundled up and cheering from the sidelines of a football game, they challenged convention and refused to wear gloves. Only one young girl in all these pages had dared to pull on a pair. She stood with three other teenage girls on a dance floor. Balloons were scattered at their feet, streamers hung overhead, and all the girls wore party dresses, but only one of them, the one who had clearly won the attention and affection of the one man in the photo, wore short white gloves with simulated pearls stitched at each cuff.

As I continued to turn the pages of my catalog, the girls grew to young women. While standing in line at a movie theater, several men hovering nearby, the young ladies wore belted jackets and cropped sweaters and all wore gloves.   Most had abandoned the high ponytails for thick bands that held their hair, still long and smooth, from their faces. In this section, I also found pictures of brides and bridesmaids. They, of course, all wore gloves.

More pages and the ladies continued to age. They must have all found husbands because there were few men in these photos. The ladies appeared settled in their lives. They had husbands at home, children to care for, lunches to prepare, bake sale committees on which to serve. The ladies of this certain age matched their gloves to their shoes and handbags, or for a more casual afternoon outing, they chose gloves that matched the color of their dresses.  But no matter the color, the fabric, the length or the style, if there was a hat on her head, or a jacket slung over her shoulders, or a handbag hanging from her forearm, a lady of this age wore gloves on her hands. 
This is how I came to know Grace and Julia and Malina—all important characters in UNTIL SHE COMES HOME. They are the women who give voice to my story. They are the women who always wear gloves and when Grace forgets her gloves that day on the bus, she can no longer ignore what has happened to her and her neighborhood or what may yet come.

For all the readers out there…I’m always looking for new inspiration.  Do you have a favorite keepsake and what is the history behind it?





LORI IS OFFERING A COPY OF HER NEW NOVEL, UNTIL SHE COMES HOME, ALONG WITH A COPY OF BENT ROAD TO ONE LUCKY COMMENTER!

Lori Roy’s debut novel, BENT ROAD, was awarded the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, named a 2011 New York Times Notable Crime Book, named a 2012 notable book by the state of Kansas, and was nominated for the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award. BENT ROAD has been optioned for film by Cross Creek, with Mark Mallouk to adapt and Benderspink to produce. Her second novel, UNTIL SHE COMES HOME, was published June 13, 2013. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook.

SNOW DAY

      **On Bent Road, a battered red truck cruises ominously along the prairie; a lonely little girl dresses in her dead aunt’s clothes; a boy hefts his father’s rifle in search of a target; a mother realizes she no longer knows how to protect her children. It is a place where people learn: Sometimes killing is the kindest way.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I have no idea, though I’ve really tried to remember, when the moment was that I decided I was a writer. I had an English teacher in high school, Mr. Thornburg, who taught me about Shakespeare and the wonders of analytical thought, and once gave me an A for a paper comparing The Faerie Queen with Out of the Silent Planet. I do remember that.

I  remember, as a semi-grown-up, maybe age 22, writing a story for Rolling Stone about Susan Ford’s prom at the White House. I remember seeing that in print, and staring at the page in wonder.

I remember when I finished Prime Time. I typed ‘The End” and burst into tears.

Lori Roy, though, does have an idea when she began. She’s come a long way since then—and now her first novel, the lyrical and moving BENT ROAD, is an Edgar nominee. Something must have gone right.

Grab a cup of tea or coffee, and maybe curl up in a chair. And listen, for a moment or two, as Lori remembers—it all began on a

        SNOW DAY

           by Lori Roy

 

Brother flips on the radio and rolls the dial until a familiar voice speaks to us. I stand in mismatched socks and faded flannel pajamas, a patchwork quilt wrapped around my shoulders. When the heater clicks on, I shuffle a few steps until I stand over the floor vent. My quilt traps the warm air that begins to flow. Brother gives me a shove because no fair hogging all the hot air.

In the kitchen, Mother pulls a skillet from the shelf over the oven and fishes a spatula from the utensil drawer. The announcer begins to read from his list. We shout for Mother to please be quiet because we can’t hear the radio. USD 320…that’s Wamego. USD 475…that’s Junction City. Brother pounds both hands on the table, one on either side of the radio. Come on USD 383. Come on USD 383.  I slide one foot after the other until I again stand over the vent, trap all the hot air and close my eyes. Silently, only mouthing the words, I say the same as Brother.  Come on USD 383.

The announcer says, “USD 383.” It’s official.  Our school district is closed for the day.

Brother gives the table one last smack, runs for his room and his mattress springs creak as he dives back into bed. I join Mother in the kitchen and sit at the table while she scrambles half dozen eggs. She’ll add ham and cheese before she’s done.  Outside, the drifts have piled up against our front door and the plows haven’t yet reached our street. A lone set of tire tracks cuts through the fresh snow. At the end of May, when we should be getting out of school for summer break, we’ll have to make up this day, but for today, it’s a snow-day. No school.

Unlike Brother, I don’t want to go back to bed. I am awake, wide awake. Too windy to play outside. Maybe later if the snow stops, but it’s too cold for good snowballs. The snow won’t stick. So, instead, I’ll write a book. I have the whole day. How long could it take? How hard could it be?

This time, I sit alongside the vent in the floor, again trap the warm air with my quilt and tap a number two pencil on the tablet Mother found for me. I keep tapping, and while I can’t think of anything to write, I do see a picture in my mind.  A boy. He’s thirteen or fourteen—about my brother’s age. He’s sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree. He’s lonely, I think. I don’t know who he is, what has happened to him or what will happen to him, but my novel is definitely about this boy.

I ask Mother if she has any cardboard. She tells me no, but she does have a small shirt box—a leftover from Christmas morning. Perfect. It’s thick like a novel would be. I fetch a box of Crayolas from my room, return to my spot over the vent, and design and color my novel’s cover art. It’s a picture of the lonely boy leaning against a tree with no leaves. I’m no good at drawing the leaves.

In the year since my first novel—BENT ROAD—came out, I am often asked when I started writing. This is the story I tell in answer to that question. I wasn’t disciplined in those days and never made it past designing the novel’s cover. In truth, I wasn’t disciplined enough until I hit my thirties. 

So perhaps I should say that’s when I started writing.

  For about ten years, I wrote every day. I gathered rejection slips for unwanted short stories, attended a few writers’ conferences, met some great writer-friends, won a small award here and there, gathered more rejections slips and finally wrote and sold BENT ROAD.  And while the novel I started on that snow-day back in the mid 70s never made it beyond a hastily colored shirt box, I’d like to believe the young boy I envisioned did find his way into print. He is Daniel Scott, one of my point-of-view characters in BENT ROAD.

Given this, I will continue to say I first became a writer on that snow-day when I was eight-years-old.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Ah. I'm reading Bent Road right now, and it's absolutely original--you can tell, from this essay alone, how special it is.  So, Reds—if you write, when did that happen? If you read, when did you realize how important it was to you? A copy of BENT ROAD to one lucky commenter!

*************************************************

Lori Roy was born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas where she graduated from Kansas State University. Before beginning her writing career, Lori worked as a tax accountant in the public sector and later for Hallmark Cards. Bent Road, Lori's first novel, was named a 2011 New York Times Notable Crime Book and has been nominated for the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award and the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. Additionally, BENT ROAD was named One of the Best for 2011 by the Library Journal and one of the top 100 books for 2011 by the Kansas City Star.  Lori currently lives with her family in west central Florida.