CliFi, Currywurst in Berlin, and Dishoom in London
Coping with the crumbling state of our environment with food from all over the world.
Greetings from Perugia, Italy, with a stopover in London—where we absolutely had to take a one-hour train ride into the city to go to Dishoom, a London institution which is truly one of Writing Atlas’ favorite family of restaurants in the world. Dishoom is inspired by the food culture of the Zoroastrian refugees (from what is modern-day Iran) who landed in Mumbai, specifically the “Irani cafés and the food of all Bombay.” (This was the second wave of Zoroastrian-Persian refugees to India, the first being the Parsis who arrived in Medieval times during a wave of Muslim conquest.)
If you have never been to Dishoom, you must go. They have nine locations, all in the United Kingdom. Lines and waits are long, but they serve you warm chai while you wait. Breakfast is a mix of British and Indian cuisines, and is absolutely delicious. One of our favorites is the bacon naan roll and sausage naan rolls, wrapped with eggs.
Another is the uttapam “pancakes” which are just slightly sour, to give it a kick. They are topped with creamy shrikhand (a form of sweet yoghurt), fresh berries, toasted coconut flakes, and jaggery syrup.
Our next newsletter comes from Dylan Malloy, a student at Emory University double-majoring in Business and Playwriting. It would be an understatement to say that Dylan’s work in theater has spanned the likes of place. Her plays have been produced everywhere from Los Angeles to the United Kingdom. She’s worked with actors and actresses who can now be seen in series run by major streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. At Emory, she organized the Oxford New Play Festival twice, the plays of which have been produced and shown across the world since. Her work is seriously accoladed and awarded, including The River Cycle, a play series that interrogates the climate crisis in Colorado. Similarly, her newsletter for Writing Atlas examines several stories that are interested in the matters of environment, how ours is currently at risk of destruction. She picks a selection of cli-fi, as climate fiction has been dubbed, a term first attributed to writing Dan Bloom, an old friend of the Writing Atlas team.
Dylan Malloy’s CliFi Curation
Plympton’s 2018 collection of original stories on Amazon, Warmer, done in partnership with world-renowned authors, examines the Earth in periods of extreme change. Characters on the outskirts of society watch as the environment shifts around them and learn how to form deeper connections with others as a result.
In “Controller” by Jesse Kellerman (full text here), the protagonist, Raymond, takes care of his elderly mother in her scorching-hot home. She insists upon keeping the heat turned up to the nineties, and when Raymond protests this temperature, she becomes angry and territorial. Kellerman expertly spins the details of this world into art: chocolate ice cream melting across the wall, a fly dancing across Raymond’s skin. Raymond’s life becomes oriented around the rhythms of caretaking, and in this way, the house feels like a micro-Earth, the temperature climbing by the day, tensions growing.
During one of their numerous fights, Raymond’s mother tells him that “[i]f you were happy, you’d leave.” For once, he confronts the way that she has exploited him, demanded obedience, and oriented the entire world around herself, down to the temperature. By asking for his help, she controls his life and erodes his ability to form connections with other people. This dynamic mimics how fear of global warming and the changing climate can set up residence in people’s minds, making them hesitant to consider the future and imagine a new life for themselves. Raymond’s stasis can be attributed not just to his relationship with his mother, but to his inability to picture a life outside of the sweltering world of his house.
Later in the story, Raymond’s mother describes herself as “hollow” without him. With this line, it becomes clear that this woman has no future outside of her son. She uses the heat to stand in place of love and affection. As she cranks up the temperature, she also mimics the warming world, creating a connection between herself and the planet she inhabits. In this way, the heat in “Controller” ties the characters together in mutual loneliness and grief.
“At the Bottom of New Lake” by Sonya Larson (full text here) follows Chuntao, a teenage girl whose parents immigrated to the United States. In her free time, Chuntao explores a lake at the edge of her town that is the remnant of a massive flood that destroyed a neighborhood of mansions. Swimming through the wreckage yields treasures such as grill tongs, an ice bucket, and a fur coat–evidence of the carefree lives of the wealthy, to whom Chuntao cannot relate. She invites a girl from school, Sandra, to swim with her and feels stirrings of attraction for the first time, only to be interrupted by her science teacher. The next day, the teacher, Mrs. Fletcher, begins to teach an overwrought and melodramatic unit on climate change. Chuntao is apathetic. The floodwaters have already risen and the damage is done; nothing matters now except crushing on Sandra from afar and dreaming of a relationship with her.
In the world of this story, the waters are stagnant, and the tension comes from the thrill of experiencing love for the first time. Larson describes Sandra as being “so gorgeous … so effortless,” and Chuntao reserves a specific type of wonder for her. Compared to the flooded wasteland of her hometown, she looks upon Sandra with even more awe and interest. The climate cannot be changed, but Chuntao’s relationship status certainly can.
Chuntao pursues this romance partly as a means of detaching from the grim reality that her teacher forces upon her. She claims that she spends time in class “learning about all the shit they did to us. Wasn’t this video basically one long, taped confession?” Both Chuntao and Raymond in “Controller” have no control over their physical environments and feel the repercussions of others’ actions, but they resign themselves to their helplessness and distract themselves with their relationships. For Chuntao, a budding relationship with Sandra is an exhilarating break from an exhausting existence. For Raymond, focusing on his mother’s needs diverts his attention from the fact that he has nothing to look forward to in his life.
In contrast, “Ark” by Veronica Roth, author of the bestselling Divergent series, takes place in an entirely different apocalyptic scenario: a world-ending meteor is headed on a collision course towards Earth. People have been aware of the meteor for decades and have spent the time preparing spaceships to take all Earthen citizens to live elsewhere in the galaxy. This story does not center the climate crisis, but it highlights how relationships sustain people in the midst of despair.
Samantha, a horticulturist, busies herself examining samples of plants while living in a community of fellow scientists who have no living family to mourn them. As the meteor draws near, Samantha decides that she will not fly to safety with the rest of her team. She will stay on Earth and accept her death, believing that the end of the world is the most beautiful, spectacular thing she could possibly witness. One day, Samantha and the other scientists sit in their dorm and listen to music, discussing associations they have with each song. The music resurrects memories of dead spouses, siblings, and parents. Samantha wonders if, after they leave Earth, “they would spend all their time looking backward–at Earth, at the life they had built there... living in their memories as they coasted toward a distant planet, then dying with them.” The strange intimacy of this moment reminds Samantha of college, and she feels a newfound closeness with her peers. Sharing their memories in the wake of environmental destruction does not take away their pain, but it makes them feel less alone as they experience it. This scene can be compared to Chuntao swimming through the ruins of the lake houses and marveling at the artifacts of the ruined homes. Though she can’t change the pain of the past, she can find the beauty in the present.
In her final days, Samantha visits Hagen, an older scientist, and assists him as he tends to his species of orchids. She reveals that she has found a new species of orchid, previously undiscovered in all of human history, and begins to cry. Hagen holds her and tells her that “[t]here is so much left for you to see.” This simple kindness grounds Samantha and helps her find peace as she awaits the Earth’s destruction. These three stories, when read in tandem, act as a mosaic of lives in flux as the Earth changes around them.
Dylan’s Favorite Playwright: Annie Baker
Annie Baker is one of my favorite playwrights, and it’s interesting to read about her writing journey. She won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for The Flick (about three underpaid movie ushers), and was named a MacArthur Fellow (aka the “Genius Award”) in 2017 for “mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language.”
Dylan’s Favorite Emoji(s): ❤️🔥
I love ❤️🔥 this emoji because it represents passion and excitement for life.
Dylan is a junior double majoring in playwriting and business at Emory University. Her plays have been produced in California (Los Angeles), New York, Georgia, and Colorado, as well as the U.K. Actors known for roles with Disney+, CW, Paramount+, and Amazon Prime Video have starred in productions of Dylan’s work. She is a two-time winner of the Hollywood-based Blank Theatre’s Young Playwrights Festival, and she received a designation for excellence only given once before in the company’s history. As a producer, Dylan organized Emory's Oxford New Play Festival for two seasons; during her tenure, eleven plays written and directed by Emory students received world premieres. Dylan has also received Emory’s Artistine Mann awards for best playwriting and best fiction writing by an undergraduate. Originally from Colorado, Dylan is the author of The River Cycle, a five-play series examining human connection and the climate crisis in rural Colorado. Every play in the series has been performed.
Here’s a mini food tour of some of our favorite bakeries across the United States. Our first and most recent feature has to be this Hokkaido custard bun from 85C Bakery Cafe, which we grabbed while we were in Texas. It came with rave reviews and did not disappoint.
The bun itself is unbelievably soft, and the filling is the perfect texture, not too fatty tasting or too sweet. “Like biting into a pillow.” It sells out often (we missed it twice), so make sure to go early in the day if you want one.
One of our favorite pastries in the world are the croissants from Arsicault in San Francisco, an establishment that was named the best new bakery nationwide by Bon Appetit in 2016. These curvaceous beauties—which come in plain, chocolate, chocolate almond, ham and cheese among other varieties—put limp crescent-shaped ones in most glass cases to shame. Writing Atlas folks used to spend $28 on Uber to the west half of the city to get $40 worth of croissants, but luckily Arsicault opened another shop in Civic Center, within walking distance of major public transit routes.
Last but not least, Persephone in Jackson, Wyoming has has been rated the top bakery in the state (admittedly, the ninth largest state of just under 100,000 square miles has a population that is one-third the size of island of Manhattan, but Persephone can hold its own to any New York City bakery). All the more impressive since baking at 6,000 feet above sea level means you often have to tweak the recipes to account for the dryness and the change in atmospheric pressure. In addition to kouign amann and spinach feta croissants, they have cinnamon brioche and pumpkin maple bread.
Our final culinary update comes from Berlin, Germany, where one intrepid Writing Atlas engineer felt he ate his way through every currywurst in town while attending the 2024 Wikimedia Summit!
Currywurst, for those who have never had the pleasure(?) of encountering it in person, is a German fast food dish consisting of sausage, usually the quintessentially German bratwurst, covered in spiced curry ketchup and powder to make a satisfying (and filling) street-side snack. It’s one of the most popular dishes in Germany, and such a part of their popular culture now that politicians are expected to have a photo taken with currywurst in hand. That being said, there is a reason why this dish hasn’t really taken off any where but Germany. But definitely worth sampling.
That concludes our across-the-world food journey (for now), as well as our panic about said state of the world! As always, we turn it now to you, Writing Atlas fam. Do you have any culinary adventures you’d like to share with the world, or are there a bunch of short stories you’ve been itching to talk about? At Writing Atlas, we’re always looking for new stories and cool moments to highlight! If you ever would like to curate stories, or share quirky photos, foods, cool places to visit or roaming stuffed animals with the community, please let us know by leaving a comment or otherwise reaching out to us! As always, keep visiting our Writing Atlas homepage as we keep rolling out exciting changes and updates!
Sincerely,
Your Writing Atlas team
P.S. Those shrewd-eye among you might notice that among this newsletter’s curation is an author who drew attention from a 2023 New York Times Magazine piece called, “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”