“Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to?” (Odell xiii).
It may be the least understood rhetorical appeal. My students come to class with at least some understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos, but kairos is mysterious, abstract. I sometimes describe it as comic timing, the ability to know when a punchline will land or when to add a joke in an otherwise serious speech. This makes it granular, syntactic, probably reductive.
In the introduction to Saving Time, Jenny Odell distinguishes kairos from its sibling ancient Greek word for time: “Chronos, which appears in words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like ‘crisis,’ but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or ‘seizing the time'” (xvii).
Seizing the moment make more sense to me. Supposedly, Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s still not clear to me if the quote is accurate or apocryphal.
I bought Saving Time on a whim in a one-room basement bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day. It was in a “general nonfiction” section alongside history, memoir, science, psychology, and self-help.
I only started reading it today (fittingly, May Day), but because I did not manage my time well this month, the one book I finished in April was Alexandra Teague’s memoir Spinning Tea Cups, about family, time, kitsch, tourism, grief. One line that I keep returning to is the first sentence of an essay titled “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that reads, “The deadest of all the dead people in our family was my mother’s father” (152).
The sentence is syntactically simple, just a subject (the deadest), a verb (was) and an object (my mother’s father). It is the first sentence in an 18-page essay about the narrator’s grandfather, who died in 1944 aboard the USS Mount Hood. The last phrase, my mother’s father, effectively shrinks seven decades and three generations into three words, while The deadest of all the dead people in my family is an epigenetic treatise, a genealogy. But it’s not the construction of the sentence that gets to me so much as the moment, the atmosphere, in which I read it. This, too, is how kairos works. No matter how much time one spends revising and polishing and perfecting, timing, in the end, is everything.
The Lenin quote is easy to utilize for anything that feels momentous. Venture capitalists pushing new tech have even used it to sell their hype. If it’s not apocryphal, it’s probably about identifying resonance, patterns. Seizing the present crisis and holding firm, not backing down. Odell maintains that kairos is more hopeful because, unlike neatly demarcated and sold units of time, kairos allows us space for contingency, for possibility.
That writing moves away from the author once it has an audience is difficult for a perfectionist like me to contend with. Perhaps writing is to chronos as reading is to kairos. On one side is a long, repetitive process of self-interrogation, of trial and error. On the other is the singular opportunity to collaborate with someone else’s craft, to seize the moment and allow oneself to be moved. And being moved, being open to the contingency that other writers open up to me through their experiences, is the reason I want to read so much in the first place.
Here’s what I’m working on lately: a presentation for my university’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium.
Left: Geppetto and Pinocchio, Bemporad & Figlio, Firenze 1902. Right: Jim Henson and Kermit, 1979.
It has not been uncommon for college instructors to repeat, sometimes word-for-word, the same hype around generative AI that the very companies selling AI have pitched to potential investors. Increasingly, though, I share Ed Zitron’s assessment that the internet is undergoing a process of “economic rot” which he describes as “conditions where we celebrate people for making ‘big’ companies but not ‘good’ companies,” or as Cory Doctorow more pointedly calls it, enshittification.
The more I read about generative AI, the more I find myself aligned with pedagogy scholars who have voiced skepticism about the ongoing panic about it. Gavin P. Johnson invites us to “(re)consider a few things we already know about teaching with and through technology” (Johnson 169), most intriguing of which is that new technologies “do not exist in isolation from cultural practices but rather reflect and reify the practices and ethics of the designers” (170), and that “the never-ending, lose-lose arms race to prevent the crisis of (possible) plagiarism” tends to treat students as hostile would-be criminals, and mutates pedagogy into a form of policing (172). Meanwhile, Sandra Jamieson writes that “A pedagogical response calls on us to trust students; to teach them the work of writing and include AI in the process instead of focusing our efforts on ways to catch those who use AI or reject it as unethical” (Jamieson 156). This includes a reframing of form, genre, structure, and convention.
The problems that generative AI present us with are not problems of cognition, but of articulation. Any creative writer knows this to be true. This is perhaps what Kazim Ali means when writing that a “text is a body because it is made of the same flesh and blood and breath as the writer. The ‘mind’ which declares intention is a collection of senses, sense-responses, and memories. Chemically it is invented in the brain. Thought is matter” (28).
Artificial intelligence is essentially a form of branding for the commercialization of a series of genuinely complex, advanced algorithms that are impressive as far as algorithms go, but the word intelligence is too often mistaken as a synonym for cognizant, just as generative is not the same thing as creative. As Ed Zitron has repeatedly pointed out, programs like ChatGPT don’t actually “know” anything. Instead, in his words,
Modern AI models are trained by feeding them “publicly-available” text from the internet, scraped from billions of websites (everything from Wikipedia to Tumblr, to Reddit), which the model then uses to discern patterns and, in turn, answer questions based on the probability of an answer being correct (Zitron, “Bubble Trouble”).
Peter Elbow asserts that “writing with no voice is dead, mechanical, faceless. It lacks any sound. Writing with no voice may be saying something true, important, or new; it may be logically organized; it may even be a work of genius. But it is as though the words came through some kind of mixer rather than being uttered by a person” (Elbow 287-288). I liken this style of writing to a puppet without a human hand. The language is there, the form is there, the structure and shape are all there, but on its own, it is no different from any other iteration of the same structure.
To what extent is all genre, all formula, all socially constructed literary expectation, not just a form of puppetry? AI writing consists of formulaic estimations of correct form and structure that are recognizably fraudulent without the intervention of a human touch.
As an extension of this metaphor, I want to bring in the 2023 video game Lies of P, a gothic steampunk adaptation of Pinocchio in which the player emerges half-formed in a fictional Victorian city that has created animatronic puppets as a servant class. Because of a malfunction, the puppets turn on their masters.
The player occupies an ambiguous space as a puppet capable of the uniquely human skill of lying. To progress through the game, the player must repeatedly lie about his social authenticity to gain access to human spaces, and this is such a central part of the game that telling the truth even once can change the game’s outcome.
I like this metaphor more than robotics or cyborgs because it gets at the technical accuracy of what students seemingly try to accomplish with the use of AI writing, which is to pass off inorganic thought as their own. We should not teach students to simply imitate collegiate writing, but to write as a reflection of their organic thought processes.
After the creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, died in 1990, another performer filled the vacuum and animated Kermit the Frog in his place, and viewers recognized the obvious distinctions despite the fact that the puppet was the exact same from one puppeteer to the next. Student writing should be, and I use this word intentionally, revered for its originality in the exact same way. The form of a student essay might not change, but the voice a student brings to the form is in every instance unique, and it is that authenticity that we should help to cultivate, now more than ever before.
Ali, Kazim. “Genre-Queer.” Bending Genre, edited by Margot Singer, Nicole Walker, 2016, pp. 27-28.
Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Jamieson, Sandra. “The AI ‘Crisis’ and A (Re)turn to Pedagogy.” Composition Studies vol. 50, no. 3 (2022), pp. 153-158.
Johnson, Gavin P. “Don’t Act Like You Forgot: Approaching Another Literacy ‘Crisis’ by (Re)Considering What We Know About Teaching with and Through Technologies.” Composition Studies vol. 51, no. 1 (2023), pp.169-175.
“To write of the self is to write not the story of one’s journey through the labyrinth—it is to write the labyrinth itself. To write of the self is to write in the shape of a wound that never stops healing” (Tudor-Sideri 125).
The former utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, is today a living museum of nineteenth century visions of what the twenty-first century could have looked like. It is a time capsule of previous generations’ hopes for the future. It is layered with iterations of its namesake project, a place of harmony. There are centuries-old cabins along the Wabash River, two labyrinths, low brick walls around deliberately patterned gardens. There is a roofless church, a library, a once-futuristic Atheneum.
The Tree of 40 Fruits is one of the newest editions. Created by a sculptor at the University of Syracuse named Sam Van Aken, New Harmony planted (transplanted, installed, relocated) two such trees in 2016. Each Tree of 40 Fruits is grafted with multiple branches from many different stone fruit trees, yielding a wild assortment of plums, peaches, almonds, cherries.
I have visited New Harmony once per season so far, and I will have to come back again to see what fruits the tree will boast. It is too early to show even a hint of its produce, but its branches are already awash with different leaves of lime green, crimson, and eggshell. Some branches are flowering already, while others sprout green-red bulbs.
The tree itself is another vision of the future, a new limb grafted onto the town’s foundation. It fits with many of the other ill-fit features the town has accumulated, the collection of golf carts, the alley-narrow beer garden, the Twin Peaks-themed coffee shop where I get a sunburn reading about theories of tourism and kitsch in Alexandra Teague’s new memoir.
I am still making my way through the pile of books I brought back from AWP. It is a wild assortment of memoirs, chapbooks, zines, slim volumes and limited runs. All of them are from small presses, most of which have been adversely affected (if not outright betrayed) by Small Press Distribution‘s sudden decision to not only shutter their doors, but to, at least momentarily, restrict presses from accessing the books currently in their possession.
Writing that “it is unclear when and how we will be able to access the 18,289 Black Lawrence Press books that were in the SPD warehouse as of last week,” Black Lawrence Press editors created a GoFundMe to cover such an apparent loss of inventory. Elsewhere, presses like Gasher Press and Malarkey Books and Sarabande Books have noted that the best ways for you, as readers, to support independent publishing are to 1) buy books directly from publishers (which ensures writers get a bigger cut of the profit), 2) request independent books at your local library and local bookstore, and 3) support presses and writers by per-ordering books, getting ahold of ARCs to write reviews, and share indie titles and presses with your peers. In other words, you need to participate in the literary community, much the same way you need to participate in democracy and gardens and family.
These are hardly sustainable solutions. If anything, these are only the seeds of a better publishing system that we could build. Usually, such discussions are about procuring the fruits of workers’ labor, so that the workers who produce commodities no longer need to relinquish the majority of exchanged funds to bosses and landlords who produce nothing. Art is slightly different. It is produced to be shared rather than used, not to be eaten or rendered or plastered, but to repeatedly be enjoyed.
One such indie book I have repeatedly enjoyed (or been pleasantly baffled by) is Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Exploring memory, folklore, self, reflection, and probably ten other themes I’m not smart enough to pick up on, I still find comfort in the language she uses to perplex, at one point writing that “if ecstatic blissfulness represents the sole possibility of tending to the ontological rupture between consciousness and life, between the individual and the world, then achieving it can only happen when I have embraced the agony caused by that rupture, for a painless wound does not crave healing” (93).
I don’t know what a utopian vision of indie publishing will look like, but I think it’s imperative to move through the growing pains of web decay and bear markets by enacting, continuously, our own visions of what it can look like. What I do know with absolute certainty is that market forces or big tech will not save publishing, and that venture capitalists who treat presses as “assets” have only ever been, and should permanently be regarded as, vampires on the publishing industry.
Written language has existed for five thousand years, spoken language for about thirty-three thousand. I write and read for the exact same reasons that every religion and every culture in human history is grounded in the cyclical reiteration of our favorite stories.
I think there’s something utopian about fruit trees. It’s not just the biblical imagery of a garden or paradise, but the symbiosis of fruit that has evolved to be delicious to so many species. We get fructose and glucose, fiber and potassium, vitamins and pleasure from eating fruit, and in turn we toss the rock-hard seeds into other meadows and riverbeds or pocket them for other gardens.
Tending to trees is a matter of cycles, not trends or endless growth. There’s no boom and bust market, but the reliable flow of extremes in summer and winter so that atmospheres and organic matter can find harmony in spring and autumn. It’s not utopian to want harmony in publishing, but harmony between writer and reader is, at least, a necessary starting point.
Here’s what I’m working on lately: a paper on folk horror films for the College English Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Witch (2015)
THE GENRE
Scholarship about horror often highlights the genre’s ability to “render abject the subject of its gaze” (Chambers 12). 1980s body horror resonated with the AIDS epidemic, just as the Saw franchise is best understood in the context of the invasion of Iraq, and the zombie craze of the 2010s in the context of the Great Recession. Despite its rapid cult following, there is less consensus about folk horror.
Jamie Chambers notes that “theoretical approaches to folk horror remain in their infancy” (10) and Paul Cowdell writes that while “clear generic definitions are elusive,” the genre has a distinct atmosphere: folk horror films “rely on location in a landscape that acquires almost the status of an active character” whose influence results in what Adam Scovell calls “‘skewed belief systems and morality’ [enabling] the plots’ actual ‘happening/summoning’” (Cowdell 296).
Others have argued that folk horror exploits rural communities as sensational and backwards. As Chambers puts it, “folk denotes a productive way of seeing with an unstable inference of us and them” (17). Elsewhere, Cowdell argues that folk horror necessarily relies upon interdisciplinary interests in folklore studies, claiming that “The Wicker Man, then, would not exist without the development of an actual discipline of folklore” (309).
Is folk horror merely the abjection of folklore? While I find it admirably subversive to suggest that because the movies we love are just reboots of older folk stories, then we are not, in fact, morally or socially better than our ancestors, I also find this definition limiting. With obvious exceptions (The Witch), the legends in folk horror are usually fictitious. The traditions that drive the imagined peasant communities in Children of the Corn, The Wicker Man, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw are diegetic imitations of actual folklore.
Instead, folk horror is defined by the countryside, historicized between economic relations. Antonio Gramsci’s words on the subject are now famous to the point that they’re a meme: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” The question I want to pursue is whether or not those monsters are the peasants left behind by modernity, or modernity itself.
THE UNHOLY TRINITY
Most scholars agree that three unrelated English films, known informally as the Unholy Trinity, mark the first era of folk horror: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973).
Witchfinder General is based on the real self-proclaimed witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who abuses his authority in seventeenth century England. The Blood on Satan’s Claw portrays the satanic influence of Pagan artifacts on rural youths, who can only be saved by a witchfinder-like state agent. Meanwhile, The Wicker Man depicts a neo-Pagan Scottish cult whose mere existence challenges the English state’s internal stability by selecting a devout Anglican police officer for human sacrifice.
The most striking thing about these films is how ideologically incongruent they are. Whatever binds them together, then, is their shared depiction of an unresolved conflict between agricultural communities and an increasingly powerful class of landowners.
ENCLOSURE AND THE COMMONS
A Field in England (2013).
Economies in Europe were structurally and politically diverse during the thousand-year reign of feudalism, but were mostly built on social contracts between peasants who lived on the land and lords who held religious and political titles to that land. Peasants were also granted access to parcels of common land useful for procuring firewood, hunting and gathering, and grazing.
As early as the 1200s, feudal lords began violating those contracts by terminating customary rights to fish, graze, hunt, or harvest. Ellen Meiksins Wood writes that “enclosure meant the extinction, with or without a physical fencing of land, of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood” (83). A much larger wave of enclosures began in the sixteenth century, placing the means by which one lives to see another day—food, water, and shelter—exclusively under market forces.
“As a result, enclosure could lead to the elimination of small owner-occupiers, who were bought out by large proprietors” (623), writes S. J. Thompson. Meanwhile, Silvia Federici notes the relationship between enclosure and the violence of the witch trials. In Caliban and the Witch, she writes, “women were those who suffered most when the land was lost and the village community fell apart” because “a nomadic life exposed them to male violence” (73).
Folk horror calls back to what capital presumes to be extinct: the practice of holding resources in common. Witchfinder General portrays the agents of enclosure as monstrous, cruel figures. In contrast, The Blood on Satan’s Claw suggests that enclosure is a necessary step in social progress, and The Wicker Man depicts a community struggling to recreate premodern agricultural (emphasis on cultural) conditions.
THE HORROR OF MATERIAL CONDITIONS
One central premise of folk horror is that people and wilderness should be separate, that monstrosity emerges from too close an association with the land. This is the logic of Enlightenment-era liberalism. John Locke explicitly argued that land can only be considered property if the people on that land use it for profit, oras he called it, improvement.
Thompson writes that “improvers defended enclosure on the grounds that it was more compatible with individual liberty than the open-field system it replaced” (639). Employing the rhetoric of natural liberty and natural rights, the agents of enclosure redefined nature itself. Locke argued that “the value inherent in land comes not from nature, but from labor,” which in Wood’s assessment means that, for Locke, “unimproved land is waste” (Wood 85). In the sixteenth century, improvement looked like agriculture. By the 1960s, agricultural spaces had replaced the commons as the imagined backwaters of modernity.
The Wind (2018)
This is much more evident in the US corollary to English folk horror, known as hicksploitation. Ranging from Deliverance (1972) to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), American “hillbilly horror” is arguably more exploitative. In these films, isolated (usually white) communities in overgrown landscapes become monstrous. These films center harsh landscapes that are difficult to “improve,” despite the most industrious efforts of long-gone colonialist projects, which themselves become the subject of more recent American folk horror. The Witch (2015) and The Wind (2018) both emphasize the isolation of frontier spaces.
For Chambers, “the pleasures of the folk aesthetic frequently arise from depictions of cultural-geographic difference” (26). While I think Chambers underestimates the critical thinking skills of horror fans, his observation that the appeal of films like The Wicker Man for western liberal audiences is an imagined rural authenticity seems correct. Folk horror scratches a very particular itch; it confirms about ourselves whatever we want it to.
Today, there are dozens of studies about a contemporary epidemic of loneliness, contrasting a genre of memes about the desire to leave modern society and live in a cabin in the woods, to “retvrn with a V” to “the past,” because “medieval peasants” presumably worked fewer hours and because life was somehow “better” in “the past.” These memes traffic in the same metonymy for “the good old days” that folk horror encodes with monstrosity.
With more scholarship, I want to explore the ways that recent folk horror has reinterpreted landscapes from wastelands into spaces of mystery and open exploration, ecologically but also historically and economically, where present conditions can be seen, with both admiration and disgust, in sharp relief from afar.
Chambers, Jaime. “Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the ‘Unholy Trinity.’ Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, Winter 2022, pp. 9-34. EBSCO, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2022.0014. Accessed 3 October, 2023.
Cowdell, Paul. “‘Practicing Witchcraft Myself During the Filming.’ Folk Horror, Folklore, and the Folkloresque.” Western Folklore, vol. 78, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 295-326. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26864166. Accessed 18 October, 2023.
Federici, Silva. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2014.
Thompson, S.J. “Parliamentary Enclosure, Property, Population, and the Decline of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. The Historical Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2008, pp. 621-642. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20175187. Accessed 19 March, 2024.
Wood, Meiksins Ellen. The Origins of Capitalism. Monthly Review Press, 1999.
“The desire to write comes (is the feeling you get) from certain readings: the kind of reading that agitates you into making a trace of itself. Or to put it another way, and reaching a little further for an answer to his outrageous, unanswerable question, Barthes arrives at the following claim: ‘to want to write is to want to rewrite,’ he says. And then: ‘Every beautiful work, or even every work to make an impression, every impressive work, functions as a desired work, but I would say, and it’s here that it starts to get interesting, that every work I read as desirable, even as I am desiring it, I experience as incomplete and somehow lost, because I didn’t do it myself, and I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it; in this way, to write is to rewrite.'” -Kate Briggs, quoting Roland Barthes, 115.
i
I can’t remember where I heard (a professor, a book, a lecture, hearsay) that creative nonfiction is about distinction.
The genre is trustworthy hearsay, an oxymoron. The phrase creative nonfiction already raises more question than it answers.
I think of distinction as central to observation, and central to questions, the kind worth asking: What am I doing with my day? What makes it different? What distinguishes this breath this meal this prayer this walk from the last?
I’ve always hated February, how eager it is to be finished despite how slowly it takes. In my head, the month is pale blue, like gas station mint gum that loses its flavor as quickly as its shape. How do I distinguish these days beyond shades of murk and rhyme? What makes this February distinct from the previous thirty?
I am writing about February, if translator Kate Briggs (translating Roland Barthes) is correct, because I want to rewrite February.
ii
At a panel at a conference in Kansas City, Lilly Dancyger says that creative nonfiction is about asking questions, which only raise more questions. It’s the act of asking that matters most, not the questions or the answers but this Socratic mitosis. I write this in my notebook, but fail to cite who in the panel said the following: “There are no answers, just a deepening and sharpening of the question.”
In Evansville, a rideshare driver tells me about her life in this city that is actually a town. She tells me about her plans to leave. She tells me that people born in Evansville find themselves stuck because of one of two things: they get wrapped up in the legal system, its labyrinth of parole, fines, probation, and technicalities, or because of poverty. This is not a town anybody wants to stay in.
The west side of town is where immigrant labor built bricks and commerce on the Ohio River. The east side is where the new money pools. The east side of town is a horizonless expanse of malls and chains and products and solutions and parking lots that never reach a quarter of their capacity. Buildings stand apart, hands in their pockets, trying to be noticed.
Driving home from the conference on Superbowl Sunday, the roads are quiet and I have ten thousand things to think about/through/with. I listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, podcasts, music. I laugh so hard at a podcaster’s stupid joke about the Internet, tears in my eyes, that I almost drive into a ditch. It seals the deal, really, to commit to a decision I had made months before. To get it over with.
iii
It is windy on the Ohio River. On the first Sunday of Lent, a season of repentance, I dress in black for a vigil. I recognize a few faces from the library, from bookstores, from somewhere indistinct. Some wear keffiyehs. Some carry flags. It is too windy to light the candles we hold but we manage. We share the flame from civilian to civilian as the wind snuffs it out. When my candle goes out in a burst of wind, I turn to a stranger and she lends me her flame. I share the fire with someone else after another gust of wind. Our hands numb, I think, but we keep the fire alive together. Is it a different fire from candle to candle? Do we carry the same message, or does it change meaning with every curved hand protecting it from the elements?
People speak. People listen. A man describes his memories of Palestine before the Nakba. Another, his memories as a refugee in Syria. I am glad that there is so much turnout from Evansville. I thought about driving to Louisville or Indianapolis for such a vigil, but even here, there are enough hands to protect the fire from the wind.
iv
I used to think of Sundays as the simplest days. I have used them to do chores, prepare meals for the week, and rest for the next morning. That’s what a sabbath should be, a reiteration of itself, a returning-to. Right?
Briggs likens translation to a group of women dancing in a gym. One line of women cannot see the dance instructor, so they imitate the moves the women in front of them do. Likewise, the women in the row behind them cannot see the instructor, so they imitate the women in the line ahead of them as they imitate the women in the line ahead of them. Each dance move is a translation of the instructor’s through the translation of each concurrent row of dancers.
I go to the library before the screening and help the coalition set up for a documentary. I see more familiar faces. I see colleagues from the university. There is coffee, there are books, art displays about the fact that gauze may originate from the weavers of ancient Gaza City. And there are platters of dates. Once, I worked for a chef who insisted during Ramadan that we, her prep cooks, put down our knives and ladles and join her in breaking her fast at sundown with a feast of dates. That was in May, 2021, during another Israeli bombardment of Gaza, or, as one Israeli official has described it, mowing the grass.
Is it enough to call a sabbath, a sabbatical (a respite, a prepared-for invitation to contemplate) a translation of the previous? Does this mean the dance instructor is God resting on the seventh day and we are all, in some way, trying to imitate the restfulness that follows Creation? And what does that mean for the eighth day? What comes after a sabbath? Is it recreation, a translation of the same creation, an apocalypse of the old to make way for another creation? Are these Sundays a thesis, antithesis, or synthesis?
I like how Barthes (translated by Briggs, one dancing after the other) describes it: “I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it.” This is about reading literature and responding by writing literature, but I think the same is (must be) true of looking at one’s weekly calendar, at oneself and one’s place in the community. I want to retrieve the previous week by redoing it. I want to find my previous self, shake him like a dusty rug. I want a second chance. Should or shouldn’t doesn’t (shouldn’t) matter. That I can do better is what propels me, what keeps me writing and rewriting and rerewriting.
“Where exactly do people think they are going? A life can be significant without having a goal, just as a work of art can be. What is the purpose of having children or wearing shocking pink tights? Works of fiction like Tristram Shandy, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, and Mrs. Dalloway can serve to free us from seeing human life as goal-driven, logically unfolding and rigorously coherent. As such, they can help us to enjoy it more.” -Terry Eagleton (114).
This Christmas, I asked my dad if I had too many books. It was hardly a joke for how obvious the answer was.If anything, what I need are more shelves for the books I will inevitably accumulate.
My family never misses a chance browse a used bookstore. We locate them like churches, make plans for visits while on the road. The more obscure titles, the more chaos among the shelves, the better.
Among the stacks, there’s a randomness that can’t be replicated by any algorithm. It would take a whole biography to explain how a book came to appear on a shelf, whose hands produced, gifted, read, bought, lost, or relinquished it. Buying books secondhand (or thirdhand or forty-seventhhand) is a way of picking up where someone left off, gambling with time well spent.
Years ago, when I visited my uncle in Appleton, Wisconsin, one of the first things we did was go to a local used bookstore. I don’t remember the name of the bookstore now, but I remember how sunny it was inside, how the outside looked more like a hunting cabin. I remember how familiar my uncle was with the owner, chatting about new artifacts, Indigenous authors, sharing ideas they had read about, both of them listening to each other. How easy he made it look.
I remember buying a paperback novel about, or from, the Cold War, and thinking about a story one of my history professors told me about stumbling across the one manuscript he needed in the trunk of a car near a book fair in Oman.
The first thing I did when I learned that my uncle passed away last month was to go downstairs and stand in front of my bookshelf, scanning the titles, until the sun went down. I’m not really sure why, but it was the only thing I could do that made any sense. I looked at the titles, the books my uncle had given me as gifts, the ones I’d wanted to suggest back.
Since moving to Indiana, I’ve mostly been going to the library for books. The stacks are more curated; there’s less chaos, maybe something I’ve needed. After finishing grad school, I cobbled together a year’s life with odd jobs at a restaurant, a state park, freelancing, and, for a few months, working in a library. That was when the second used bookstore in my Idaho college town closed its doors. The owner and I actually did get to know each other a little. She was talkative and curious, with a thick Boston accent and a penchant for obscure political treatises, the kind you could never find in a library.
The pace of the library is pleasant, though. I was tempted to earmark and underline the copy of Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature that I checked out three weeks ago, but instead I resorted to taking photos of paragraphs with my phone. It’s a simple but thoughtful and extremely British text, erudite in the way that’s difficult not to read in Stephen Fry’s voice. I appreciated his generosity with the purpose of literature, how flexible he lets the form be.
Can books help make life more enjoyable? Eagleton contends that books “do not so much contain meaning as produce it” (144). This, too, cannot be replicated algorithmically.
Two Christmases ago, in a bookstore in Missoula, my brother handed me a book he’d found by chance, The True Subject, a collection of lectures writers have given at conferences and workshops. I never would have found it otherwise. In one lecture, Mary Clearman Blew writes of memoir that “any story depends upon its shape. In arranging the scraps that have been passed down to me, which are to be selected? Which are to be discarded? The boundaries of creative nonfiction will always be as fluid as water” (Blew 62).
This month, I’ve been all scraps and no story. For years, I’ve only been able to write in fragments and braids and collages. Some writer friends agree. It’s just where our heads are at these days.
Blew, Mary Clearman. “The Art of Memoir,” in The True Subject, edited by Kurt Brown. Graywolf Press, 1993, pp. 59-63.
“On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away.” -Melissa Febos
Since moving to southern Indiana in August, I’ve kept the refuse from the produce I cook with, storing it in plastic cubes in my freezer. For four months, I added skins, stems, and seeds to the stockpile, until yesterday, when I emptied the freezer-burned garbage into a pot of water, sprinkling in peppercorns and cooking over medium heat to make, approximately, a month’s worth of vegetable broth.
Stock and broth can be used interchangeably when discussing vegetables, but I prefer broth because it describes the process, stemming from the Germanic bru, itself the origin of brewing. That process demands patience. Broth is versatile, a necessary part of soup but useful for plenty of other dishes.
But the main reason I make broth is to repurpose produce that I would normally throw in the garbage. The thawing mess is a grafted-together pile of compost: onion skins, carrot ends, sprigs of parsley I couldn’t find a use for, the top of a butternut squash, the seeds of a bell pepper, wrinkly garlic cloves, kale stems, squeezed lemon rinds, half a jalapeno, tomato innards, stray mushrooms, apple cores. Summer into fall into winter, cooked for hours into a liquid the color of Irish breakfast tea.
The nutrients in vegetable skins and stems are locked within unpalatable textures and disquieting flavors. Cooking broth is a way of transforming endings into beginnings, or at least the beginning of another meal, a way of expanding limits.
What have I accumulated this year that I can’t stomach? How can I be resourceful with the loneliness and anxiety I’ve kept hidden away, shoved deep in the cold parts? What dormant memories can I distill to warm me for the winter? Here at the beginning of 2024, in looking back, I really don’t have much to work with. I am at the cutting board again, still hungry for a better world.
Kristine Langley Mahler writesthat the “ending of every essay is the same ending of every heavily weighted moment: a return to routine with the incredulity that life goes on, as boring and insultingly indifferent as the moment before the change began. It is not a literary trick to revert to banality as much as it is an acknowledgment that epochs end without fanfare; they begin without obviousness; we are meant to pay attention all the time” (27).
Generally, I dislike New Year resolutions. Spring and fall present more obvious opportunities to measure change, but winter is a dormant period. We’re meant to slow down this time of year, stay together, stick to our routines and cook the apples and squash we accumulated during the harvest. This is, of course, an extremely limited experience with seasons, true to just a handful of ecosystems, and even here, in so many thick, leafless forests on the Ohio River, seasons are becoming, if nothing else, false expectations.
The end of predictable seasons has been on my mind all year, but especially this month because I’ve been reading C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey, a near-future dystopian novel about a professional chef wrestling with her ambitions after a sun-blotting smog causes most crops to go extinct. Shortly after she is hired by an enormously wealthy financier to cook elaborate meals at his private estate, to woo scientists and technologists over the long-gone cuisines of their childhoods, the narrator discovers that her taste in organic produce has vanished after years of flavorless, extinction-resistant monocrops:
“After tasting from my employer’s menu, guts roiling with cream and questions of my future, I found myself craving a dab, a pinch, just a soupcon of mung-protein flour. That metallic tang, like medicine. Without my knowing, it had gotten familiar—a link, as I floated alone through days of terrifying uncertain abundance, to the world of gray plates and empty shelves, of starving children in Louisville and Addis Ababa. I imagined small faces pressed against the glass as they watched me throw out pounds of pommes dauphine. The sameness of the smog, it occurred to me, had also felt safe: it was unchanging” (20).
This metallic tang of gray sameness resonates with me. I’ve gotten comfortable in a sick abundance of distractions, screens, voices. So many of the experiences I’ve accumulated have been blandly scripted, redundant, disposable. Lately, it’s gotten to a point where I’ve forgotten that life isn’t meant to be a numb replication of itself.
My disdain for the Gregorian calendar, rigid and anticlimactic, likely has more to do with my disdain for quantification. I understand the impulse to number one’s achievements at the end of the year, to tally up pages written, books read, publications, rejections. But a fixation on numbers, to me, is unappetizingly stale. I don’t remember the meals I cooked in August, or September, or October. I didn’t keep track of new recipes, numbers of ingredients, nutrient totals. What I know is that the broth I cooked from those meals’ residue is layered, unfixed, earthy the way a body is after sweating in a forest but by some miracle a tiny bit sweet.
If I’m going to look back at the year, I don’t want to measure it by numbers, but by the taste and texture of what the year has made of me. How many podcasts did I listen to? Which ones? Your guess is as good as mine, but I learned a lot more than I used to know about the history of Palestine, the politics of unionizing, drafting novels, the nervous system. I learned that Soviet science textbooks are still used in India because their tone was far less condescending than western textbooks, that Martin Luther was fond of fecal jokes, and that perfectionists tend to engage in more self-harm. I read more novels than memoirs. I got better at cooking spaghetti squash. I spent more time on trains, more time looking at rivers. I talked with different writers. I live in Indiana and I teach with more joy than I used to.
It might not be the case that writing, on its own, can shake me out of my numbness, but when Melissa Febos calls writing a life-saving practice, it gives me hope: She writes, “I cannot imagine nurturing a devotion to any practice more consistently than one which yields the reward of transformation, the assurance of lovability, and the eradication of regret. No professional ambition could possibly matter more than the freedom to return, again and again” (151).
If writing doesn’t change the writer, how will it change the reader? Writing this ridiculous blog post after over a year of adding nothing to this silly little website has been, if nothing else, a taste-test of who I am right now.
I want a life of textures, a year of multitudes. I don’t want abundance; too many Americans have too much of that already, to the detriment of the planet. What I want is a more precise way of being. I want smaller numbers and slower minutes. I want to pay attention to everything, for attendance to become a devotion all its own.
My neighbors are letting their fruit rot. For weeks, I have walked by a house with three bountiful peach trees at the edge of the sidewalk, spilling fruit onto their lawn and gravel driveway, where it has turned into a mash and rotted under October’s weekly record-breaking temperatures, leaving a smell like stale beer in the air.
I’m tempted to nab a few good ones, take them home, can them or make a pie to bring back to the neighbors. But they have boarded their home with PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Sometimes a man uses a chainsaw on the lawn to cut large chunks of wood next to the peaches. POSTED: PRIVATE PROPERTY. DO NOT DISTURB. This is Eastern Washington. This is the American West. I leave the wasted fruit alone. THIS LAND IS MY LAND.
I try to eat with the seasons. Eating locally, eating fresh, is easiest in the summer and fall, when fruit plummets freely from the trees with the evolutionary expectation that animals will eat it and take the seeds to flourish elsewhere. Taste is a necessary part of a thriving ecosystem. As Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it, “food arises from partnership” (126).
Winter is a different story. Without natural abundance, I try to choose to refuse unseasonable produce. Frances Moore Lappé wrote, back in 1982, that the American diet, defined by “unbridled freedom” to eat, grow, and sell whatever, whenever, is “a frontier concept” that has led to lasting damage: “There’s only so much farmland in the United States, and it’s shrinking, not growing. Yet we give some the right to own 100,000 acres when we know this denies dozens of farm families the right to own any land at all. Is this democratic?” (Lappé 110-111).
I love fall, and all the food associated with it, from peaches to winter squash. Thanksgiving and Halloween both derive from western European harvest festivals—Harvest Home in England, Samhain for the Celts of Ireland and its Welsh equivalent, Nos Galan Gaeaf. As much a way to prepare for winter as to celebrate the harvest, what remains of these old festivals today are the stories they associate with changing seasons.
While agriculture shaped a city-centered and often vegetable-based diet along the Mediterranean, the “modes of production and cultural values” at the edges of the Roman Empire—Celtic and Germanic—“had for centuries criss-crossed the great forests of central and northern Europe,” which shaped food access, and therefore cuisine: “Hunting and fishing, the gathering of wild fruits, and the free pasturing of livestock in the woods” made wild meat the primary dish for many Celts (Montanari 6).
Agricultural development was not necessarily absent, but less structural. Roman colonization “forced the Celts to start growing wheat on a large scale; once the wheat had been reaped and threshed the grain went to Rome,” and after the Romans fell into decline, a series of “invasions and poor or failed harvests sent people back to wild cereals” throughout the early Medieval period (Toussaint-Samat 129). Likewise, after the relative climatic stability of the Bronze Age, “the weather took a turn for the worse towards the beginning of the first millennium” across much of Europe, when “heavy rainfall and strong winds impoverished the soil, peat bogs proliferated, deforestation was rife and upland farms were deserted with alarming swiftness” (Jenkins 15).
Far from reliably cyclical, agricultural development experienced constant disruption, and as farmers adapted, so too did the culture. The harvest festivals of the Celts focused on bonfires, harvesting and storing barley and other wild cereals, apples, turnips, and ale brewed with wild hops. The prime feature of the feast was whichever animals could feed the most people, while guaranteeing they had enough cattle and pigs to make it through the winter.
After Julius Caesar led the first Roman invasion of Britain, he and others claimed that the Druids committed human sacrifice for religious purposes, for which there is modest archaeological evidence. While that evidence does notsuggest the sacrifices coincided with the Celtic harvest festivals that predated Halloween—the period of human sacrifice may have been over long before the Romans arrived, who had a vested interest in portraying the Celts negatively anyway—legends about rural pagan sacrifice for mystical purposes have persisted. In The Wicker Man (1973) the residents of Summerisle endure failing harvests, either because the gods are unhappy or because the GMO fruit strains the island’s leader brought from the mainland are unsustainable in northern Scotland. Likewise, an elder in Midsommar (2019) introduces an isolated Swedish village’s festivities by remarking, “And what poetry that it’s now the hottest and brightest summer on record,” in a cheerful voice.
The 2021 Welsh language film The Feast is more overt. The film follows a wealthy, politically powerful family in the Welsh countryside who want to throw a feast for a traditional farming couple, Mair and Lori, whose land Gwyn, the head of the household and the local MP, wants to open up to oil drilling. Mair is angry at the prospect because it’s her farm, but also because of an old, vague legend about a goddess locked where the oil is, a hill called the Rise. Unfortunately, Gwyn and his business partner Euros have already started secretly drilling.
The family hires a maid from the countryside, Cadi, to help cook the feast, consisting of wine, a seasonal but tropical fruit salad, and rabbit. Cadi is mysterious, quiet, horrified at the death of the rabbits but fascinated by the people in the house, especially two spoiled sons. One, Guto, asks her for drugs, and she takes him to the woods to find psychedelic mushrooms. Another, Gweirydd, is a disgraced doctor known for his sexual aggression.
The film has a somewhat obvious ecological message (drilling for oil will incite the revenge of the land), but I think that’s the most surface-level interpretation. Read as folk horror, it’s about a working class woman whose presence disrupts and uncovers a wealthy family’s secrets, her labor in the kitchen an infiltration of the natural world into the enforced order of the aristocracy.
Glenda, Gwyn’s wife, helps Cadi prepare the feast. Early in the film, she praises herself for using local ingredients but complains about the local market’s limits while opening a Styrofoam package of mail-order produce: mangoes, pineapple, and pomegranate. Gwyn comes in with two freshly shot rabbits, casually dropping them onto the counter for Cadi to skin. The food is a mix of local and imported ingredients, all of which the family can access with their wealth and the scale of their land for hunting.
As a food movie, The Feast does something surprising: Every scene of someone eating is utterly disgusting. Euros eats with his bare hands, jamming rabbit deep into his throat, at times sliding his fingers well past his teeth. Gweirydd brags about his special diet of raw game meat, a version of the paleo diet, while the mushrooms Guto mashes into his food cause him to hallucinate maggots in his leg, which Cadi (either in reality or as another hallucination) graciously licks from his leg to devours in front of him. That leg is eventually severed in the woods by Gweirydd, which Glenda, in a trance, cuts into bacon-thin strips while Euros fills his jaw with unidentifiable meat.
The Feast is an eco-Gothic parable that ties together the rural symbolism of folk horror, the class anxieties of Gothic literature, and the environmental terror of ecohorror. Director Lee Haven Jones has explicitly stated that Cadi was inspired by the Welsh story of Blodeuwedd, in which two magicians create a woman from flowers and oak to give the legendary hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes a wife. Much like Frankenstein’s monster, though, Blodeuwedd is angered at her creators for bringing her into their world to serve someone else’s needs, and takes revenge on them.
With rural, agricultural settings as the backdrop and harvesting a common plot device, folk horror often calls back to premodernity. Many classic English folk horror movies—The Witch, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and A Field in England—take place in the seventeenth century. Starvation is a looming threat in folk horror, before something even worse emerges from the woods, the same woods the ancient Celts used to scavenge freely for their food. Horror often reflects broader social anxieties—body horror mirrored the AIDS epidemic, ecohorror reflects climate change. What secrets buried in the woods does English folk horror seek to uncover?
Seventeenth century England saw another round of political disruptions to established agricultural practices. Parliament began passing a series of laws known as the Acts of Enclosure, which codified “the abolition of the open-field system, an arrangement by which villagers owned non-contiguous strips of land in a non-hedged field. Enclosing also included the fencing off of the commons and the pulling down of the shacks of poor cottagers who had no land but could survive because they had access to customary rights” (Federici 69).
The Enclosure Acts allowed English lords to privatize the commons—the woods and fields that peasants had used to freely gather food and firewood for centuries—as well as state-owned and communal Catholic land. Previously, King Henry VII had propped up individual peasant families by mandating that small-scale farmers possess a minimum standard of sheep and acreage, the effect of which, according to Francis Bacon, allowed English farmers to “keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.” In Marx’s formulation, the destruction of the commons and often violent privatization of state land, “given away, sold at ridiculous prices, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure,” coincided with the expulsion of peasants from their familial estates. With nowhere to go, they became the first proletariat, a class of workers who, for the first time in history, were legally required to purchase the privilege of shelter (Marx 884). Building on this analysis, Silvia Federici looks at the effect of enclosure on women through the lens of Europe’s witch hunts, which “destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe” (Federici 103). By privatizing state and common land, by legislating away centuries of agricultural relationships to reclassify as “private property” as many forests and lakes as possible, the state-sanctioned beginning of capitalism marked a severe turning point in people’s relationship with land, and therefore food.
Nia Roberts as Glenda in The Feast (2021), making a good case for vegetarianism.
Horror has plenty of gastronomical elements: Dracula drinks blood, zombies eat brains, and cannibalism appears in everything from Silence of the Lambs to Sweeney Todd. In ecohorror, as in folk horror, food is understood to be a collective problem that dwells on contamination. Food is poisoned, crops fail, or we bring into the kitchen something unwanted. Food in horror is often a reminder of how fragile we are to interruptions in season, diet, and health.
Gwyn’s motive in The Feast mirrors the enclosure acts, and Cadi reflects the classed, gendered, and ecological consequences of enclosure. English folk horror calls back to a world that was understood to be held in common. Anyone could fish, hunt, or pick fruit in the wild forests, so starvation was primarily a concern during winter. A successful harvest, after all, was an important communal affair.
Maybe I’m a coward for not picking those peaches. The warm months are finally over in Spokane, and the fruit is no longer falling from the trees. I could have baked a late harvest pie, a dozen pies even, but instead I stick to what I have from my grandparents’ little garden, carrots and tomatoes and buttercup squash, making chili and roast squash. I cook for myself. Private property has broken so many people’s brains out West that it’s become a kind of religion. It can turn people into outright monsters. If there’s one lesson horror movies have taught me, it’s that you never, ever, leave the group and set out on your own.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2014.
Jenkins, Geraint H. A Concise History of Wales. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Kimmer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweet Grass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Lappé, Frances Moor. Diet for a Small Planet. Ballantine Books, 1982.
Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. 1. Penguin Books, 1990.
Montanari, Massimo. The Culture of Food. Blackwell Publishers, 1994.
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. Blackwell Publishing, 2009.
Every year, members of my family mark St. Patrick’s Day with loaves and loaves of Irish soda bread, which is partly an excuse to put currants from our many gardens into a quick bread for Spring. Where my grandparents live in western Montana, peppered with copper boom towns, massive St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are a holdover of the Irish who worked the mines alongside many other immigrant communities. Most Keenes I know aren’t Catholic, and we’re not connected to the nineteenth century Irish diaspora, so we’re not exactly using family recipes. Nevertheless, the soda bread is a way for my family to connect with each other and with communities in the Northwest. Baking bread is an excuse to celebrate, or maybe it’s the other way around.
I don’t make quick breads often. For me, the joy in baking is the artistry of leavening, which requires patience, dedication, attention. We rarely made them in baking school, too, focusing instead on the science of yeast. Quick breads, leavened by salt and acid releasing carbon dioxide when applied to heat and moisture, have their name for a reason.
Linda Civitello writes that the popularity of Irish soda bread in the US was in part because the 1847 famine in Ireland “produced an atypical diaspora. When Europeans migrated, the men usually came first, in order to work and then later send for their families. With the Irish, however, a disproportionate number of single women” emigrated (39), finding work in US and Canadian households as maids or cooks.
When visiting some Keenes near Portland recently, one of my cousins told me that when he was in high school, boys were not allowed to take home economics, but because he and his friends wanted to learn to cook, they struck a deal with the teacher to show them some of the basics during her grading hour.
This gendered division of culinary labor has deep roots. Civitello points out that women “have been connected to bread making since antiquity. . . The Old English word for ‘loaf,’ the staple of life, was hlaf. ‘Loaf-keeper,’ hlaford, became ‘lord’; loaf-kneader, hlafdige, became ‘lady'” (6).
For most of human history, bakers relied on yeast that was locally available, either from old batches of bread, the residue of beer brewing, or yeast cultures that had to be maintained. In ancient kitchens, “the presence of yeast was mostly accidental” (Gisslen 4) because any mash of grain collects those microscopic organisms on their own. In medieval European bakeries, it was common for cooks to tend ovens separately from bakers, whose professional focus was on leavening (5). Baking was often mysterious because its ingredients were difficult to quantify, recreate, and package. No two yeast sources were alike.
What makes Irish soda bread Irish isn’t the soda, though, which only became common in Ireland in the 1830s as a cheap alternative to yeast. The use of soda ash, or potash (potassium) from burned plant material, was common in the Americas centuries before. Instead, what makes Irish soda bread Irish is the buttermilk, which farmers had on hand to provide the acid necessary to act on the soda.
Louis Pasteur identified yeast in 1857, around the same time American chemists began packaging commercial baking powder to eliminate the need to add acid to leaven quick breads. These developments democratized bread, but they also made it much easier to commercialize and monetize.
By the time I was in high school, it was a given that baking is a science, not an art. My own high school cooking class was taught by a former military man from the South. A decade later, in baking school, I found myself disappointed that it wasn’t the art of baking I was being taught, but the science of cost efficiency. I was being trained to be a good employee, not a skilled baker.
It’s almost a cliche to distinguish baking from cooking by the chemistry involved in the former, which itself is false because all cooking involves chemistry. In other respects, distinguishing cooks from bakers is also gendered.
There’s a scene in the 2021 film Pig in which Chef Feld, played by Nicholas Cage, reconnects with a baker, Helen, played by October Moore. Feld has been off the Portland culinary scene for decades, and is only returning to find his stolen truffle pig. It’s unclear why he left the scene, but in his absence, the cooks he inspired became manipulative, self-serving, violent sell-outs, trading their own interests for trends, all except for Helen.
In the logic of the film, cooks are cutthroat and solipsistic, while bakers are patient and generous. This dichotomy reflects the gender roles in a traditional action movie (the men stoically kill the bad guys on behalf of women who then tend to their wounds), and while Pig starts like a typical action movie, it ends somewhat differently.
After talking with Helen, Feld changes his approach. When he confronts Darius, the restaurant owner who stole his pig, he doesn’t exact his revenge. Instead, he cooks the meal he once made for Darius and his now comatose wife years ago. We see him cooking slowly, patiently, finally serving a meal that brings Darius to tears. In the film’s logic, Feld acts as a baker, not a cook, using the dish (“a bird, a bottle, and a salted baguette”) as a medium for human connection.
Bread is often a symbol for human connection. Political analysts describe household economic policies like taxes and local infrastructure as bread-and-butter issues. One Bolshevik slogan during the Russian Revolution called for three things: Bread, Peace, and Land. The Labor slogan bread and rosescomes from suffragist Helen Todd’s statement, “we want bread for all, but roses too,” a call for material sustenance as well as social freedoms. Bread distinguished pastoral nomadic societies from sedentary agriculturalists who settled along rivers to grow their grain. In Biblical tradition, God tells the Israelites to eat unleavened bread in their hurried exodus from Egypt, and in the Gospels, Jesus breaks unleavened bread during Passover the night before his crucifixion, resulting in the production of billions of unleavened communion wafers for the Catholic Eucharist.
In baking school, I became deeply depressed, in part because I had volunteered to overwork myself, but also because the program dissolved the sense of connectivity that I had associated with baking. I had to admit to myself that I was there not to learn new skills, but to monetize one of my hobbies, and in that monetization, I became alienated from it. Mark Fisher describes the process like this: “Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems” (34).
So, I make a loaf of soda bread and think of family. I don’t have buttermilk, so I add vinegar for the acid. I use oat milk, too, and a recipe I’m unfamiliar with. It comes out soft and crumbly and a little dense. I cut into it too fast, too eager to taste it. I place a chunk on my tongue and chew it slowly.
Civitello, Linda. Baking Powder Wars. University of Illinois Press, 2017.
GIsslen, Wayne. Professional Baking. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Zero Books, 2009.
The last month has been a blur. I spent the holidays on the road visiting family and friends, driving long hours across the inner west. Days before Christmas, I met up with my father in southern Idaho. From there, we drove to Salt Lake City to visit my grandfather as he returned from the hospital to settle into hospice. The details are for another time, but he passed away shortly after.
One of the last things he said, something that I keep thinking about, was how much he enjoyed the chocolate cake he ate the day he left the hospital. It was a small, tangible memory, something that let him direct the conversation toward a simple pleasure, away from the situation. I remember the way he emphasized the dessert clearly in his otherwise unclear voice, a little louder and more precise, so that we could share the memory with him.
I entered the new year in a series of late-night panic attacks, my heart rate spiking and my mind racing, unable to sleep nights in a row. These come and go but lately they’ve been getting worse. The holidays are an increasingly difficult time for me, which I deny because I want to enjoy them. For a few years now, I’ve started to rely on cooking to calm me down, especially baking. It gives me a small, tangible activity to focus on, something to keep my mind and body occupied.
After the funeral in southern Idaho, my dad and I wandered into a used bookstore in his hometown, run by volunteers. I perused the cooking section and was intrigued by a rare artifact: A cookbook issued by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in 1981, addressed to Salt Lake families to provide “easy, economical recipes that will add variety and interest to your diet.” The very brief introduction insists that its readers should cook, “nutritious meals to build strong bodies and alert minds” (ii). The dessert section is the longest and most obviously used, peppered with little brown stains from batters or syrups, though someone has drawn a large X across a recipe for graham crackers and written “Awful” above it.
This is Mormon country, where keeping “strong bodies and alert minds” through diet is considered a divine ordinance commonly referred to as the word of wisdom. Terry Tempest Williams writes that the word of wisdom, “a religious doctrine of health, kept the women in [her] family aligned with good foods: no coffee, no tea, tobacco, or alcohol” (Williams 183). She attributes her family’s long life prior to atomic testing in the 1950s to this strict Mormon diet, and she’s not alone. Physicians and sociologists have studied Mormon communities to determine a correlation between the word of wisdom and statistically lower-than-average cancer rates among practicing Saints (Badanta et al., 1581).
It’s also commonly accepted that Mormons eat a lot of desserts, especially ice cream. Without coffee or alcohol, sweets are the only remaining vice for LDS social life.
My grandfather was not particularly religious, nor did he adhere to the word of wisdom. He had a good, long life, anyway, enjoying it as much as he could. He was a trucker with a union job procured before the era of deregulation, and much of his social life was in the Elks Club. In fact, the local Elks Lodge hosted a small meal after the funeral, consisting of sandwiches, pasta salad, and cookies for dessert.
Dessert as a concept comes from French culinary tradition, referring to the last course of a meal. Its etymology, though, has nothing to do with sweets or cakes. The prefix des means “remove,” from Latin dis, as in dissolve, disassociate, distance. The root, sert, comes from service. Dessert, then, is the removal of what has been served, a clearing of the table.
October through December is the prime season for bakery sales, as bakers work overtime to satisfy demands for pumpkin pies, Christmas cookies, and treats for New Year’s parties that pair well with champagne. Claire Saffitz writes that a love of baking—and by extension a love of desserts—is “about embracing cooking and eating as fundamental sources of pleasure,” and that through her own recipes, she favors “an approach to food that is celebratory, abundant, and at times a tad luxurious” (Saffitz 12). This is the opposite of the word of wisdom, which treats food as purely utilitarian. Dessert doesn’t just mean closure, but a triumphant closure, something to celebrate: birthday cakes, the cakes at retirement parties, even wedding cakes signal both an ending and a beginning.
I have hardly felt celebratory lately. Every New Year’s ends up being the same for me: I want to clear away the old year’s detritus and start with a clean table, but when I tug away the tablecloth, a mess of dirty dishes remains. I never find closure. The idea that “a new year means a new you” feels like just as much an illusion.
Unable to afford therapy, I start each year trying to manage my anxiety similarly to the word of wisdom. I cut back on caffeine and alcohol, cut down on salt, rededicate myself to eating piles of vegetables and homemade fruit-based desserts that mold in a week. I take vitamin D supplements to make up for the limited sunlight. I imagine that I can minimize panic attacks by regulating what I consume, but I can never tell if it works.
Nevertheless, two weeks into January, I took pleasure in baking a small layer cake for my girlfriend’s birthday. I spent the hours she was at work baking two sponge cakes, one chocolate and one vanilla, waiting for them to cool and then carving them into thin discs and layering them between swaths of butter cream, then frosting the stack in thick chocolate ganache with piped buttercream kisses and chocolate shavings on top. It may not have been abundant or even luxurious, but it was at least celebratory, and in the process of baking, I felt calm, even a little cocky.
This year is not off to a promising start, but I keep thinking about the chocolate cake my grandfather mentioned. It mattered enough that he enjoyed it, that he made room for that joy. There isn’t much to celebrate these days, as this country fails once again to serve the welfare of its population, but I want to find what little there is, bring to the table what little I have, and make it last through yet another terrible year.
Author unknown. Deseret Recipes. 1981.
Badanta, Barbara, Giancarlo Lucchetti, Rocio de Diego-Cordero. “‘A Temple of God’: A Qualitative Analysis of the Connection Between Spiritual/Religious Beliefs and Health Among Mormons.” Journal of Religion and Health 59 (2020), 1580-1595.
Keene Short 