THE “NEW DOMESTICITY”
While writing my food memoir, Tasting Home, I avoided reading anything analytical about women and food. (I had been a professor for most of my life and d...
Category: Blog
FIVE QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN WRITING ABOUT FOOD
Since my interest in writing about food lies mainly in the emotional work that cooking for, and dining with, others perform, I always begin a piece on fo...
WHEN A BROTHER DIES
“Even siblings we don’t see, who live differently from us, who move in their own world, may be shoring up our lives, our sense of family, our feeling of b...
THE QUEEN OF PIES
Mother liked to say that Dad married her for her pies. And they were some pies. I know because I grew up on them. The undulating edges of Mother’s crusts were n...
A SANTA FE STATE OF MIND
It is late afternoon on our last day in Santa Fe, and our reunion suppers with old friends have come to an end. We have packed, tidied our rented casita, and ha...
THE SECOND BEST PIECE OF WRITING ADVICE I EVER GOT
The best piece of writing advice I ever got came from Bird by Bird by Annie Lamott. It had to do with accepting the idea of “shitty first drafts.” The second be...
RETURN TO DEATH VALLEY
My husband Bill and I sat in the dining room of the Furnace Creek Inn. Arched windows, heavy wooden beams, and circles of metal chandelier-—the Inn felt like ...
DEATH VALLEY DATE NUT BREAD: ON THE FRONTIER WITH MOTHER
My mother’s love of glamour began in the Mojave, not as unlikely a place for romance as it might seem. She was twenty-six when her sister Marit and her brother-...
SOUR MILK BISCUITS: ON THE FRONTIER WITH DAD
My parents belonged to a generation that was on the move. Along with so many others in the 1920s and 1930s, they’d left midwestern prairie homes and migrated to...