Thought Process
POEM
The First Insect BY DAVID EBENBACH ’94
The first insect must have been lonely; this was way before swarming. They say that the first insect had a very general mouth, good for eating anything. Those were the times. There may have been wings, though you can’t tell from the fossils; maybe
like the rest of us. The first insect probably started small. Maybe it sat there working its very general jaw, testing it, trying one food after the next.
"The First Insect," from Some Unimaginable Animal , copyright 2019 by David Ebenbach. Reprinted by permission of Orison Books. Visit orisonbooks.com. 14
RECIPE
The Foodstuffs of Fiction Jenne Bergstrom ’97 and Miko Osada ’06 have written The Little Women Cookbook: Novel Takes on Classic Recipes from Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Friends (Ulysses Press, 2019), a collection of historically accurate recipes inspired by the Louisa May Alcott novel. “When we were kids, we always wondered what that pound cake in Anne of Windy Poplars tasted like,” Bergstrom says. “A recipe that called for 36 eggs! We were dying to know... We spent our childhoods a teeny bit sad that we’d never get to try these fictitious dishes. And then we grew up and became
librarians, and suddenly, everything was possible.” Though nearly a decade apart in their Oberlin years, the two met when they ended up working at the same library near San Diego (Bergstrom now works at another library) and found they had a lot of similarities: both were interested in East Asian studies, both were Japanese-speaking, both grew up in small towns in the middle of nowhere, and both liked a lot of the same children’s classics, including Little Women. For more information, visit 36eggs.com/our-book
TA N YA R O SEN -J ONE S ’ 97
the first insect just had flying dreams