CORINTH — Something strange happens to one’s perception of time during a busy shift in food service.
Crammed with a million tasks, each hour can feel like an eternity, while on the outside time marches on at its usual steady clip.
“There’s restaurant time, or clock time, and there’s like imagined time, and there’s past time, like history,” Corinth author Sasha Hom said in a recent interview.
Hom’s novella “Sidework” plunges the reader into this time warp as it follows an unnamed protagonist, a Korean American adoptee living out of her car with her husband and four kids, during her seven-hour shift waiting tables at a bustling diner.
Published last year, the novella earned Hom the Vermont Book Award for fiction this spring.
The book is in many ways a fictionalized account of Hom’s own experience working at a diner in California and then living out of her family’s car after evacuating their intentional living community amid wildfires and heading to Vermont in 2020.
At the time of the evacuation, Hom was pursuing a master of fine arts at Warren Wilson College, and parts of “Sidework” and her other assignments were completed on the road. Living out of a car with four kids and a couple of dogs doesn’t leave much space for creative endeavors, so she got in the habit of waking up at 2 a.m. to write, relying on short naps to sustain her throughout the day.
She’s kept up a similar routine at her new home on a 600-acre land co-op in Corinth, where her family lives in a yurt and runs a goat farm. By 4 or 5 a.m., she likes to be in the separate yurt she uses as a studio, writing.
To create some structure while drafting “Sidework,” Hom built the book around short vignettes between the diner staff and their customers.
“I was thinking about the restaurant as its own universe and how each little table was its own planet,” Hom said.
Time is compressed, with some sections of the book covering just a single minute of service. Hom uses that temporal constriction as a launch pad for exploring the inner worlds of the protagonist and her co-workers. We learn about their back stories, what brought them to the diner, what they worry about, what their dreams are.
That sense of polyphony becomes stronger in the chapters that switch from the protagonist’s point of view to that of her co-worker Ty, or, “The Young Handsome One,” as she calls him.
Ty isn’t a great employee, but his problems run much deeper than that. They sit right under the surface, just like protagonist’s and all the other characters crammed into the busy diner.
Staff share an intimacy with one another, the kind that accrues from hours spent in the trenches of diner work, pouring coffee and gossiping. But from another angle they’re foreign to each other; so much of their lives exists outside the four walls of their workplace.
Part of how Hom bridges those two worlds is with the concept of sidework. The book opens with a list of all the tasks employees are meant to complete on their opening shift: take out butter (first), fill all creamers, put ketchups on tables, fill salt.
Sidework can feel like the insurmountable extra burden on top of everything that’s expected of the servers, but it’s also what keeps the diner running smoothly, Hom said. Outside of the diner, it’s the same. Sidework is what’s required to take care of family, to keep a house running, to make the world continue to turn.
“Sometimes the sidework is the work,” Hom said.
Music in the field
The Afro-funk and reggae band Sabouyouma is slated to perform at Feast and Field this Thursday in Barnard. Led by Guinean balafonist Ousmane Camara, the Burlington band marries the traditional West African sounds of the congo and djembe drums, bass and trumpet. Etienne Charles, the Trinidadian composer and jazz trumpeter, will take the stage on July 9. Feast and Field starts at 5:30 p.m. each Thursday through Sept. 24, with live music beginning at 6 p.m. For tickets (sliding scale) and more information, go to feastandfield.com.
Music in the Junction
Ray Vega, the host of Vermont Public’s Friday Night Jazz, will return to Northern Stage on July 8 to perform with his Afro-Caribbean jazz ensemble at the Byrne Theater in White River Junction. Regular tickets are $40 to $62 and $29 for students and young adults ages 25 and under. Go to northernstage.org or call 802-536-1737.
Sam the bot
“Deepfaking Sam Altman,” director Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary about his quest to create a chatbot version of the OpenAI CEO after being denied an interview with him, will screen at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 7. A discussion with Dartmouth faculty will follow the screening. For tickets, which start at $9, and more information, go to hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
