9 minute read
THE THINGS THAT MATTER
french 75
CLASSIC COCKTAIL
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The French 75 is a classic cocktail that is easy to make. Fresh lemons are used for a refreshing citrus flavor, honey simple syrup for a bit of sweetness, and champagne for the luxurious bubbles!
INGREDIENTS
1.5 ounces quality gin such as Hendrick’s ¾ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice ¼ cup raw local honey ¼ cup water 3 ounces chilled quality Champagne
DIRECTIONS
1. For simple syrup, combine raw honey and water in a small saucepan over medium heat. Whisk until the honey is completely dissolved. Set aside to cool.
2. In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, add gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup. Shake for 20 seconds. Strain into a cocktail glass and top with champagne.
3. Garnish the glass with a twisted lemon peel.
SUE MONK KIDD
A childhood in Sylvester in the 1950s inpired the works of this world renowned author.
The things that Matter
Award-winning and international best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd knew early on in her childhood in neighboring Sylvester that she wanted to become a writer.
“I knew very early,” said Kidd. “I think a lot of it was because of my father telling stories. He was a masterful storyteller, and when I listened to his stories, it made me want to tell stories.”
When she was 10 or 11, Kidd said she began to start telling people that she wanted to be a writer, “whether they wanted to know it or not.” But as she got older, people that she told began to advise her to choose something more “practical.”
“You have to understand the time,” Kidd said. “I graduated from high school in 1966, so the feminist world hadn’t made a big dent in Worth County. They would say things like ῾maybe if you could become a teacher or a nurse, you would have something to fall back on in case you ever had to work.’ That was the assumption. It was a long time ago and a different world. But at the time, that made sense to me, I guess, because I became a nurse.”
Abandoning her love of writing for more than a decade, Sue Monk Kidd got her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Texas Christian University, married, and had children.
It wasn’t until she was 30 years old that she began to listen, intently, to her childhool desire.
Co-written in 2009 by Kidd and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, Traveling with Pomegranates explores and records the changing stages of a woman's life.
Sue Monk Kidd with her mother, father and daughter at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
But at that point, with a family to support, Kidd knew that if she wanted to write, she still had to earn a living to help support her young family. Despite wanting to write fiction - the type of fiction she'd one day be known for - Kidd turned her attention to writing nonfiction instead.
“I started freelancing articles and short stories that were based on my life,” said Kidd. “I wrote for Guidepost Magazine, inspirational stories and newspaper articles, all kinds of things like that, and I eventually wrote two books of nonfiction.”
Those two books were When the Heart Waits published in 1990 and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter in 1996.
“They are called spiritual memoirs, although I didn’t know to call them that at the time,” said Kidd. “I was just writing about my life and my spirituality.
“Somewhere around the age of 40, I began to want to write a novel. It was very scary for me because I had spent the last 10 years developing a career of writing nonfiction, writing spiritual books. I was a contributing editor at Guidepost Magazine at that point, and I think the expectation was that I would just go on doing what I was doing. This was a whole other brave new world for me. I knew nothing about how to write a novel.”
But Kidd stepped foot into that brave world and wrote the first chapter of what would eventually become her debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees. However, the book had a few setbacks before it became the overwhelming success Kidd is now known for.
After writing the first chapter, Kidd took what she had to a writing conference where a teacher looked over it and said he didn’t think it had “novel potential.” He advised Kidd to turn it into a short story, which she did. The short story was published in a small academic journal, and that was that for three years.
But later, after winning a fiction contest, Kidd got the chance to read in New York at the New York Arts Club, and she decided to read that first chapter turned short story.
That night, a literary agent came up to her after
her reading and said they hoped the story was the first chapter of a novel, and Kidd replied that, as a matter of fact, it was.
But still, after Kidd went home and turned back to the project, it took her another three years of writing before she sent it to the inquiring agent.
Before she knew it, Kidd’s debut novel was an overwhelming success, with the movie rights being auctioned before the book was even published. And the inspiration for this first novel that was such a success? Kidd’s childhood in Sylvester, a small town just outside of Albany.
“When I was growing up in Sylvester, we had a house in the country right outside the city limits where bees lived in a wall inside of the house,” said
Sue Monk Kidd and Oprah Winfrey after an interview on "Super Soul Sunday" in 2014.
Kidd. “They came literally every year for I think it was 18 or 20 years those bees showed up. They tunneled into the wall and they made honey in the wall.”
Kidd said she can remember cleaning up puddles of honey off the floor in the guest bedroom where the bees had made their home. It was while talking about this experience that Kidd got the idea for the opening scene of The Secret Life of Bees.
“I got a picture in my head of a young girl around 14, lying in bed while bees leaked out of the wall and flew around the room,” said Kidd.
and I developed the story from there.”
The inspiration from her childhood didn’t stop there though. Growing up in the rural South during the 50s and early 60s, Kidd said she witnessed and took in so much of the racial injustice of the time and the Civil Rights Movement.
“It turns out that my first novel is about civil rights,” said Kidd. “The Secret Life of Bees is based largely on growing up in Sylvester during this time. I knew from the very beginning when I decided to become a writer and write my first novel that it would be about civil rights. I felt a responsibility to tell about that, to see if there was something redemptive that could be in this story.
“While it wasn’t really autobiographical in the
sense that I’m not anything like my character or my family is not like that family I wrote about, it was autobiographical in other ways. In the setting and in the time and in the events that were taking place and I did actually draw on specific things that happened in my life at that time that I put in the novel.”
Although it would take seven years (from 2001 to 2008) for the novel to actually be turned into a movie, Kidd said that this was a very interesting and fun process.
“When I got a call one day from a producer in Hollywood who introduced herself and said she would like to turn this into a movie, (I had) that kind of feeling where you think someone is pulling a massive prank on you or something,” said Kidd.
Throughout the filmmaking process, Kidd was a consultant, giving feedback on the script, the cast, and other details.
“I got to be on the movie set,” said Kidd. “I
even got one of the director’s chairs with my name on it, so you can imagine how much fun I had with all of that.”
More recently, The Secret Life of Bees was turned into an off-Broadway musical.
And while 2002's The Secret Life of Bees is one of Kidd’s most well-known works, she has published another five books – fiction and nonfiction – and is currently working on another nonfiction book.
Her most recent novel, The Book of Longings, she describes as her “most audacious novel.” It imagines the possibility of Jesus having a wife, her life, and her telling of the stories of Jesus in the Bible.
“I have tried not to shrink away from anything controversial if I’m following the true thread inside of me creatively,” said Kidd. “I feel like I have to be true to that. This novel began when I was reading National Geographic magazine about an ancient manuscript that by the way turned out to be false, it turned out to be forgery, but at the time, no one knew that. It was a manuscript about Jesus’s wife, and I was struck by the idea of that, and it occurred to me that the world would be very, very different if Jesus had had a wife and her life and her story had been part of all of it.
“It was a way to (show a feminine lens), and those things matter a great deal to me. I was asked not long ago in an interview, they said, ‘You write mostly about race and gender, why is that?’ and I said, ‘It's because they matter to me.’ They matter deeply to me and much of why they matter to me is because of where I grew up and in what time (period) I grew up.”
Kidd said she wouldn’t change her childhood nor the things she saw growing up in Southwest Georgia.
“I wouldn’t take anything in the world for growing up in that area,” said Kidd. “It offered me a great deal of beautiful memories, but it also gave me so many challenges. It gave me the impulse to write, and it gave me the stories to write about. It gave me reasons to write. I’m very grateful. I go back.
All my life I’ve returned there over and over. It’s my ancestral home, and it means a great deal to me.”
Learn more at suemonkkidd.com
Sue Monk Kidd on the set of The Secret Life of Bees.
Sue Monk Kidd with her newest book, The Book of Longings.
