Fishing Charter: Cocktail Parties

Corporate Lawyer Dept: This is exactly where writer Ben Ryder Howe found himself about 10 years ago, when he and his Korean-born wife along with a force of nature that is her mother decided to open a convenience store in Boerum Hill, a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. This is also the premise for his first book, My Korean Deli: Risking it All for a Convenience Store , according to The Star. Still, prestige and cocktail parties with iconic editor George Plimpton didn t pay the rent in Brooklyn. He and his corporate lawyer wife, Gab, found themselves burnt out and broke. In an attempt to save a little cash for a nest egg to buy a home and start a family, they moved into her family s basement on Staten Island. It was a small house and crowded with an amorphous and extended family of Korean immigrants, who apparently had little regard for privacy and even less for personal space. Plus the constant smell of kimchi and many dream of a second career, be it running a bed and breakfast or maybe a little hobby farm or finally settling down to write that book. For those who actually write books, however, a second career is nearly always less fantasy and more necessity. Now, a second career at a convenience store may not compare to your far more romantic, say, sport fishing charter fantasy. But Howe isn t your average starving artist, either. At the time, he was a senior editor at The Paris Review , perhaps the most celebrated literary magazine in America. As reported in the news.
@t george plimpton, korean immigrants