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I had the pleasure of attending the latest installment of the always-satisfying Pen & Podium lecture series presented by The Denver Post. The guest authors for the session were Fances Mayes, of Under the Tuscan Sun fame, and Ruth Reichl, food critic, former Gourmet magazine editor, and known by foodies everywhere for her memoir Tender at the Bone.

The moderator asked the question “How do you make memoir writing not just personal, but transcendent beyond your own experience?” Reichl and Mayes both agreed that it was in the writing itself - by how you portray events. Mayes went on further to add, “For example, you can say, ‘I want to make love to you,’ or, there’s Pablo Neruda’s ‘I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.’” The audience laughed and sighed and felt the frisson of Neruda’s titillating verbal embrace.

Good art, good food, good living all reach towards communion through beauty and/or by sanctifying the ordinary (which can be depraved). The point is to touch and be touched and to keep our eyes and arms open to the experience of being human…together.