Writing is a Kitchen

** read this essay as a riso-printed zine! **

My grandparents’ kitchen has two windows that look out onto the street. One over the sink, the other next to the dish cupboard. The second of these windows, the one by the dish cupboard, is the one we stand at. Leaned forward, forearms on the counter, we watch and report back. Here is the neighbor taking out the trash cans. The one with the terriers? No, the other one. Here is my mom’s old high school classmate, walking by. Come quick, here’s someone with a cute dog! I switch places with my mom and stir the soup while my aunt, who is setting the table, shimmies by.

Of all the rooms in my grand-parents’ house, I love the kitchen most.

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The food writer Samantha Seneviratne describes baking as the act of realizing your own desires. “Every baking project,” she explains in the preface to her 2019 cookbook The Joys of Baking, “begins with the imagination of pleasure. Something sparks it. A desire: perfect plums at the market. A craving: salty-sweet. A memory: summer walks with ice cream. A feeling: the dizzy throes of new love.” Yes. Like the day I browse the produce section of the grocery store, no fixed idea in mind, until my eyes alight on ruby-red stalks of spring rhubarb and the vision hits me—rhubarb-ginger cake—and I buy as much as my crisper drawer will fit.

You could say the same of writing. To write this piece I imagine many pleasures. When I moved into this place I bought a large white desk with library-style pulls on the desk drawers. Now I imagine the pleasure of writing at this desk. It welcomes me in the evenings the same way my kitchen on quiet weekend mornings welcomes me to bake. Seneviratne notes that baking projects take shape around “an idea of sensuous experience,” whether in the process (the feel of sticky bread dough between your fingers) or in its outcome (the taste of it on your tongue). My projects take shape around the sound of a satisfying sentence. The image that I knead and prod until it comes together. The cayenne pepper heat of a dramatic scene.

As I expand my practice, my imagined pleasures deepen. Typesetting and imposing and printing. Freshly inked pages shooting out from the printer. Taking all the pages in my hands and rereading them, hearing my own voice in a register that sounds true to who I am and, critically, who I want to become.

Writing requires a degree of solitude, but solitude is different from loneliness. It doesn’t preclude conversation, as chroniclers of both the culinary and literary arts have stated: the writer and food columnist Laurie Colwin, in the acknowledgments to her 1988 book Home Cooking, writes, “Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” Writing consultant Helen Sword’s aptly-titled Writing with Pleasure draws a similar conclusion: “No book is an island.”

I may live alone, but I never feel lonely in a kitchen, or when I bake. When a recipe calls for lemon zest, I remember baking guru Dorie Greenspan’s tip to rub the zest into the sugar (“aromatherapy for the cake and you”). I bake with a new ingredient—guava paste—and note its texture and flavor in the final result, so I can report back to my mom. I don’t feel lonely when I write, either. I think of my favorite teachers, who taught me how to write; my family, my very first readers; and my favorite authors, whose ideas I’m still in dialogue with, and whose prose reminds me what I hope to achieve with my own. In the twinned solitudes of writing and baking, I taste the sweetness of life in the company of others.  

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When I write, I remember. This, too, is a pleasure. A salve for the anxiety I carry: that I’ll forget those days in my grandparents’ kitchen. That someday I’ll wake up and be unable to recover the joyous sounds of our commingled voices.

Such small things I want to keep. How the windowsill holds an origami crane I made when I was ten or eleven, delicate creases formed by my stubby, nail-bitten fingers. On the other windowsill, the postcard my brother sent from his trip to Antarctica. His angular print records the birds he saw when they went ashore in South Georgia. There is the blue and white teacup my mom used to ladle the soup into speckled bowls. The speckled bowls match the speckled plates my aunt puts on the table. The gurgling Mr. Coffee coffeemaker with its scabbed hot plate, cranking away at my grandmother’s 12 PM coffee, which I take to her place setting when it’s time to eat.

The pleasures of remembering make my ribs ache.



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In her book Writing Down the Bones, the writer Natalie Goldberg argues that remembering—made possible through the act of recording—is one of the writer’s core responsibilities:

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. . .

This is what it is, to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about the orange booths in the coffee shop in Owatonna. (pp.43-44)

In her words I see my family, us letter writers, greeting card aficionados, paper calendar keepers, photos-with-a-note-attached senders. Writing the story of how we lived into a black At-a-Glance calendar, a postcard kept on the windowsill. This essay that I will print and staple, each word and line an attempt to keep my family from slipping through the net not just of my memory, but of the archive itself.

Does that make us all historians, or just writers? The writer Grace Paley posited that the fiction writer (though this likely applies to the memoirist, too) lacks the veil of clarity afforded to the historian. In a 1960s lecture called “The Value of Not Understanding Everything,” she commented that historian sees herself and others “in the hot light of truth… can know and tell how all the mystery of America flows out from under Huck Finn’s raft.” But the writer—struck nearly dumb by the staggering weight of her “ununderstanding”—is “nothing but a questioner.”

Both a writer and a historian can record details. But having spent ten years of my life dedicated to the study of history, I would suggest that neither a fiction writer nor a historian enjoy the luxury of clarity. People, facts, lives, answers slip through the archive’s net, lost to the historian, who can only squint at brittle pieces of paper and arrange them in the best possible approximation of truth.

Whatever I write, as historian or novelist or something in between, I inexorably arrive at the same un-understanding. I can never reach the full truths I desire. I can only know our kitchen through what it meant to me, and even then, I still don’t know how deep its magic and its loss are burrowed into me, how far I’d have to dig. Can I recapture it, and how? How do I live feeling unrooted, my family scattered all over? I can’t go forward in time to know what we will do without our gathering place. Without our tree roots deep into the earth, now severed by the chainsaw of a For Sale sign, by time passing relentlessly forward.

I can only believe that if I keep writing, someday, I will know. I will know what we will do. How it will all turn out. This is the ultimate pleasure I imagine, the one that can never be realized, and therefore the sweetest of all.


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Days in my grandparents’ kitchen turned into nights. Often, after everyone else went to bed, I brought out my laptop and wrote for another hour or so at the kitchen table. Light above me, and a light under the kitchen cabinets to keep me from tripping, but the rest of the house, dark. My family, above and below, sleeping. And in the kitchen’s quiet darkness I feel the house—its floors worn to creaking by aunts and cousins and sisters and grandchildren, by weddings and funerals and a thousand changes of seasons, by the magic of ordinary days playing cards in the porch with my grandfather—I feel the house inviting me into its long history, saying yes, you too are part of us, welcome in.

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