Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Anne Fadiman never set out to write The Spirit Catches You. Shocking, right? Here's the deal: she originally visited the Lees to write a single article about Lia, but The New Yorker's abrupt cancellation of her piece (yet another instance of injustice) led her to transform it into a fully fledged book. Talk about failing upwards. (Source)
You know you're a nerdy writer when your dog is named "Typo." Such is the case with Anne Fadiman, who named her dog after the bane of every copy editor's existence. It probably helps that her husband, George Howe Colt, is a writer as well. Let's just hope their canine companion helps them avoid living up to his name. (Source)
Anne Fadiman loves ice cream. For real. Scream all you want, but you can't beat Fadiman in terms of ice cream fandom—she's even written essays about it. If those got rejected, we wonder if she'd turn out a whole ice cream book? (Source)
In contrast to the book's depiction of the Hmong as deeply traditional, there is a small but growing community of Hmong rappers in St. Paul, Minnesota. Awesome. It just goes to show that spittin' sweet rhymes crosses all cultural boundaries. (Source)