I’ve always felt a bit challenged by bread-making.  I never seem able to knead enough  (perhaps I need to lift weights or do press-ups), and my loaves are invariably a disappointment. So, for something different, I recently bought a 120-year-old German sourdough starter from the local health shop and, after reading up on various techniques (who knew there were so many bread sites?) prepared to ‘activate’ it.  I felt a bit nervous, to tell the truth. The instructions seemed fairly technical and I’m never at my best with lists. Anyway, the ‘activation’ worked, perfectly, and first time. Though things did look a bit iffy when a thin, nasty-looking brown liquid formed on top–‘hooch’, apparently, good stuff that they make beer out of, or a by-product (I’m a bit unclear as to which). Anyway, you need to stir it in. Or throw it away, depending on whose blog you’re reading. So many experts. I must have done something right because that first loaf looked beautiful–big, blowsy, bounteous, if slightly singed on the bottom. Although, this might also have had more than a little do with my kneading assistant (I put it down to the golf).

Lacking her assistance for my second loaf, I started reading up on ‘no-knead’ bread. Apparently those little gluten things (bubbles? strands?) like to be left alone. You don’t need to play chaperone. You just need to put the dough in a bowl, put it in the oven with the light on (not that it’s afraid of the dark, but that it makes for a good incubation temperature), with a tea-towel tucked snugly around it, and do something else. In my case, go for a walk. Not for the duration–not when a no-knead first rise can take a minimum eight hours. I started thinking, on my way down Berghofer’s Pass, about bread and books. I’m trying to finish a first draft of a new book, The Name of the Crime, so as to have something substantial to work on when I go to Fogo Island, in Newfoundland, in the middle of the year for a three month residency. And, with each book, I always forget how hard it is to write. I always forget that I’ve just got to trust in the process. Walking, I started making the connection (yet again!). How, whether writing or making bread, it doesn’t help to keep prodding or constantly inspecting the thing. That furiously pummelling something, anything, can leave you with flatbread–or flatprose. And that though that first loaf may have looked and tasted okay, truth was (much like my first draft), it was a bit dense. Overworked. Lacking the unbearable lightness of sourdough. Or good writing.

When I’m writing, like most writers, I suspect, I’m more than usually open to things–just about everything moves me to joy, grief, laughter, anger, surprise. I think it’s part of the deal. That a writer gets to walk around with their nerves exposed. It’s often painful, but the only hope you’ve got of letting what-needs-to-be flow through you, of finding the right words to carry the emotion. I’m also (habitually) inclined to want to hurry things along. It can be an uncomfortable feeling, beginning a new book. Like you’re not sure it’s going to ‘activate’. In fact, ‘hooch’ is probably as good a word as any for the many purple adjectives and loopy, interminable sentences that seem integral to this stage.  Beginning a book (middling and ending it, too) is when what my favourite Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, calls my discursive mind, is more than usually active. That little chatterbox of judgement and negativity, that keeps a writer awake at night wondering how or why she ever thought she could write. Well, the good news is, making sourdough is something of a life-saver. And not just because it means you get to eat bread fresh out of the oven, slathered with butter and strawberry jam. It’s a lesson in patience. The way long walks are a reminder that exercise isn’t just good for bone density, but general denseness.  Not-kneading is a reminder that everything, novels included, will eventually rise. Given time.