Emily in France 🇫🇷 Does Everyone Love Reading About Food?
I love writing about kitchens, fictional and real.
When I joined the writing workshop that would change my life, I found that writers of fiction have myriad ways of dealing with the fact that fiction writing is an industry where the work gets done long before one can hope to be paid. For want of a wealthy benefactor, most of us need to make a living in other ways.
Some writers choose a career as far from writing as possible: teacher, vet, tour guide, office assistant. T.S. Eliot was famously a banker... and what's more, he refused, quite angrily, Hemingway's attempts to crowdfund (in a boot) cash so that he could quit. For some, seeking refuge in an occupation divorced from writing is the only way to have the energy for the latter.
But others in the group had done what I have done: fashioned a career that was writing adjacent, so that pretty much everything we do is writing, whether it's about housewares or international news or, in my case, food. The benefits of such an arrangement are myriad. The downsides? Sometimes it's hard to stop one writing pursuit and jump into another.
I've found my balance, most of the time, but I do find that my journalistic pursuits sneakily weave their way into my fiction. I never intended to write food-focused novels, and yet lines of dialogue or description featuring food are pretty omnipresent in my work.
Never has this been more true, however, than in a short story I contributed to the recently published anthology In the Kitchen, whose official launch is taking place (via Zoom) on Friday! I'll be reading from my short story, "My Sister's Hands," but for those who can't attend, here's a little sneak peak:
I quiet the thoughts and steer Carter around the trees, to where he can see what I already knew to be there: my sister’s hands guarding a mass of basil leaves, radiating their aroma of mint and pepper. Her hair pours down her back in a maple sheet, hanging on her cable-knit sweater the color of vanilla ice cream. She presses her face into her palms, closing her eyes and breathing in the scent of the herbs. She knows we are here.
What I'm Writing
1. The standards for making Salers Tradition are so strict, there are only four people still producing it in Auvergne today. For USA Today.
2. My BBC story on why French people love to complain got picked up (in French) by Courrier International.
3. The Accidental toys with language and point of view in a fresh, lively way. More on the blog.
What I'm Reading
1. Thousands of trapped sheep had to be rescued from the snowy French Alps, in Barron's.
2. One Scottish island is looking for new residents to join its current population of 36, in Travel + Leisure.
3. Donald Trump has swung the Republican party from conservative to populist, in the New York Times.
A bientôt !