Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how rich and varied non-Han Chinese culture is today, and just how endangered. In a year when China is in the news more than ever, the book serves as a reminder that the country is more than its capital city. I spoke with Jeffrey and Naomi a few weeks ago at the Random House Canada offices.

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Your own personal history is woven throughout this book and one gets the sense that these areas have been important to you for a long time. So why this book now? Why wasn’t it, say, your second book? What has changed politically, or in your own experiences, that made you want to write this book now?

Naomi: Well the ones out earlier, we put bits of those things in them—in our first book, Flatbreads and Flavors, we managed to squeeze Tibet in there, there was a lot of Xinjiang in there, and we started the book with flatbreads from Kashgar. But even now on our sixth book, we think this is lucky to be able to write about somewhere that is relatively so far out. So to have a contract even after a track record of six…that’s got to be our answer, partly. This has always been an interest of ours.

Jeffrey: in fact, a long time ago, Naomi wanted to do a book on Tibet. And I kept saying no way in the world…

N:…will anybody ever publish it. Stones and Silk, I thought. That would be a title.

J: Our editor was working on our second book with us, the one on rice, and she said, “you know, I’m okay to have my feet in the mud…”

N: “…in the rice paddies…”

J: “But please not over my knees.” (more…)

Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time”

(Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time.”)

This month marks the release of the third book in a series of collaborative memoirs by Bigfoot and Walrus contributing illustrator Graham Roumieu. Bigfoot: I Not Dead is a tender yet violent addition to Bigfoot’s ongoing self-exploration project, sure to please both fans of his previous work and those who aren’t yet familiar with him but enjoy furry creatures, mutilation, poetry, existential anxiety, and/or hard-learned life lessons.

Readers in Toronto should be sure to attend the book’s launch, which takes place Thursday night at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Pages Books’ “This Is Not a Reading Series.” Michael Winter, Nathan Whitlock, Douglas Bell, The Walrus’s own Jeremy Keehn, and others will speak about what Bigfoot means to them. Second floor, 7.30pm, free.

I reached Bigfoot last week at his home in the woods.

How has your life changed since your first book came out?

Bigfoot hang dirty laundry on line for all to see. Some things just needed be aired out on wind of disclosure. Others so heavy shit-encrusted that they fall off of line into mud and now scrutiny birds pick bits of corn out of it and neighbor steal and put on Ebay. Not totally regret writing books but wish sometime to go back to old technique of whisper secrets into hollow stump. (more…)