The perfect pairing for all your stillhouse reads

THE HOLIDAY SEASON IS UPON US!

As 2018 steadily approaches, we've go a few drink recommendations
 to pair with your favorite Stillhouse Press selections.

Carmen Gillespie’s latest collection interrupts the everyday to bring us the spiritual visitations of Sally Hemings, her half-sister Martha Wayles Jefferson, and other famed and forgotten residents of the Monticello plantation. These poems reach into the distant past to unearth songs of pain and longing, weighty with the long history of American silence that continues to circumscribe our lives today.

Monticello Spiced Rum Punch

History is a tough pill to swallow. For this, we'll need plenty of rum.  Adapted from this Bon Appétit recipe, this rum punchis made to satiate partygoers and historical ghosts alike. 

 Ingredients

  • 1 cup Kopper Kettel chai spiced rum

  • 1 cup George Bowman rum

  • 1 cup fresh grapefruit juice

  • 1 cup meyer lemon juice

  • 1/3 cup Luxardo maraschino liqueur

  • 1/4 cup simple syrup, 2 teaspoons bitters (Angostura works well)

  • 1 cup sliced mangoes

  • 1 cup of assorted citrus fruits, sliced into rounds

Directions

  1. Add all ingredients to bowl. Mix well.

  2. Chill.

  3. Serve with ice.

Maybe mermaids and robots are lonely. Maybe stargazing dinosaurs escape extinction, and ‘80s icons share their secrets and scams. A boardwalk Elvis impersonator declines in a Graceland of his own, Bigfoot works as a temp, families fall apart and come back together.

The Elvis Peach

Rumor has it, Elvis once reportedly drank so much peach brandy it nearly killed him. Adapted from Food & Wine, this brandy-based brew will take you from fabulist faraway worlds to Great Recession realism in a single sip.

Directions

  1. Add the rum, peach brandy, black tea, simple syrup and lemon juice to a large pitcher.

  2. Stir, add the water and stir again.

  3. Refrigerate until cold.

  4. Serve in collins glasses with citrus garnish.

Ingredients

When Mark Polanzak was seventeen, his father spontaneously combusted on the tennis court, vanishing forever. It is also entirely possible that he died of a heart attack. 

The Gin Fiz Wallop

Like Polanzak's hybrid memoir, each slurp of this fizzy little number is scarcely what you might expect.

Ingredients

  • Combine 2 ounces Catoctin Creek Watershed Gin

  • Juice from 1/2 a lemon

  • 2 teaspoons of simple syrup

  • Club soda

  • 1/2 package of Pop Rocks

  • Pinch of granulated sugar

Directions  

  1. On a small plate, combine Pop Rocks and sugar

  2. Wet rim of highball glass with a slice of lemon

  3. Add gin, simple syrup, and lemon juice to cocktail shaker and shake well.

  4. Strain into glass, careful not to disrupt the rim.

  5. Top with club soda and serve.

Bryan Borland’s third poetry collection examines what it means to dig—to undertake the intense labor of unearthing the personal/political/artistic self and embracing the consequences of that knowledge.

The "DIG This" Manhattan

We're craving bourbon for this sexy love story, the way readers crave
their next Stillhouse fix. Adapted from this Ted Allen cocktail, you need this Manhattan like you need blood in the throat. 

 

Directions

  1. Add ingredients to cocktail shaker.

  2. Shake well.

  3. Rub an orange pee along the rim of your martini glass.

  4. Strain drink into glass.

  5. Garnish with one (or two!) cherries.



Ingredients

For poet Anna Leahy and scientist Douglas R. Dechow, quintessential children of the Space Age, love for each other and love of space are inseparable. The moon landings, the shuttle program, the prospect of manned travel to Mars: each stop in humanity’s journey to space has marked a step in their ongoing love affair with each other and the cosmos.

[Generation] Space Punch

Adapted from the Belle Isle Craft Sprits recipe, this spacey brew will have you reaching for your dearest... or maybe just another mug of this stellar concoction. 

Directions

  1. Combine ingredients in punch bowl.

  2. Add ice.

  3. Garnish with rosemary and serve immediately.

Ingredients

  • 1 bottle Belle Isle Ruby Red Grapefruit

  • 2 bottle sparkling wine (try Virginia's Horton Sparkling Viognier)

  • 5 ounces St. Germain elderflower liquer

  • 5 ounces white grapefruit juice

  • 3 ounces lemon juice

Lindley-0100.jpg

 

Lindley Estes is a first-year fiction student in
George Mason University's Master's of Fine Arts program
and an editor for the Moonshine Murmurs blog.
She's partial to bourbon. 

Better Together: Anna Leahy and Douglas R. Dechow on Co-Authoring & Space

By Evan Roberts

“Hers, mine, and ours,” says Douglas R. Dechow, co-author of Stillhouse Press’ "Generation Space," a memoir that follows the beginning and end of NASA’s space shuttle program. These are three distinct writing methods that exist between Dechow and his co-author and poet, Anna Leahy. Both together and apart, the couple has a long and prolific history of space exploration coverage and authorship, including Leahy’s book "Constituents of Matter" (Kent State University Press 2007) and Dechow’s "SQUEAK: A Quick Trip to Objectland" (Addison-Wesley Professional 2001).

“Anna writes to learn and her writing process is overtly one of discovery,” Dechow says. “I could contrast that with my own process, which is more an attempt to codify something that I already know or believe, to see what I know or to test what I believe.” But together they are greater than the sum of their parts, explains Dechow. In the process of their joint authorship, a “deep intermingling” of their writing methods occurs and produces new, collaborative writing intentions.

But apart, the writers are just as different as their methods. "Generation Space" alternates between their disparate perspectives: Leahy has the mind and experience of a poet, and Dechow of a scientist. But Leahy claims their perspectives are not irrevocably different. “Our differences emphasize each other’s strengths, which may be why we were attracted to each other in the first place. As a scientist, Doug keeps a lot of detail organized in his head. For instance, he recognizes technological objects—aircraft, rockets—at a glance and often can rattle off the historical or engineering contexts of artifacts. Over the years, I’ve let myself off the hook a bit for doing that sort of work, knowing that I could count on Doug.”

Much like their shared passion for space exploration, their passion for writing provides a firm foundation for the couple’s personal lives. “We disagree regularly and sometimes irritate each other, but we rarely argue—writing together has strengthened our ability to disagree and keep moving forward. Being able to revise a sentence together—to treat something external to ourselves as the most important task—probably helps us keep the rest of our relationship in perspective," Dechow says.

There’s a certain proof of compatibility that can be found in the co-authoring process, he explains. “We have grown to know each other’s voices so well that there are undoubtedly sentences that I suggested to Anna that wound up in her chapters and vice versa. Of course, every so often, I would catch a sentence and say, ‘I can’t believe you wrote that. But, it’s your chapter, so you can say it the way you want.”’

“Our first conversations, when we were getting to know each other, were about writing,” says Leahy, who admits that the writing process can sometimes be strenuous on a relationship. “If we had tried writing together early on in our relationship... I think we would have botched both the writing and the relationship. For us, the relationship had become strong before we became co-authors.”

Regarding future space exploration, particularly commercial space’s part in that future, Leahy says their interest has always been predominantly with the government-funded NASA. "In a competition between NASA and capitalist ventures, our hearts were with NASA, its rich history, and the importance of its programs to science. In Generation Space, we talk about our initial resentment of commercial space and a conversation with Garrett Reisman, a former Shuttle astronaut who now directs crew operations for SpaceX."

But commercial ventures certainly have their place, Leahy says. "As we looked more deeply into commercial space, we understood its potential to pick up the technology that NASA had developed and run with it — NASA had taken the risks, and NASA’s work belongs to all of us. Commercial space is set to complement NASA’s ongoing efforts.”

From the dawn of human civilization, we have always had our eyes set on the constellations. The cause of our enduring fascination with the stars, according to Leahy, “Humans are a curious bunch, in both senses of the word curious. We want to know the unknown. We want to understand what’s out there. When we explore what surrounds us—the universe—we push our thinking to its limits... In Generation Space, we grapple with what that really means—with what it means to be here because there exists an out there of space.”

Anna Leahy and Douglas R. Dechow work and teach at Chapman University in Orange, California. Anna's first book, "Constituents of Matter" (Kent State University Press, 2007) won the Wick Poetry Prize. They have written the Lofty Ambitions blog together since 2010.  Anna is the author of the chapbook, "Sharp Miracles" (Blue Lyra Press, 2016), and her nonfiction book Tumor is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2017.  Doug is the co-author of "SQEAK: A Quick Trip to Objectland" (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2001) and "Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson" (Springer, 2015).

Evan Roberts is the former editor of Moonshine Murmurs and has worked as an editorial assistant, reader, and media contributor for Stillhouse Press. He graduated from George Mason in the fall of 2016 with his Bachelors of Art in English.