🗣 Announcing the Relaunch of From the Desk...

There will be contributors, a book club, and more.

When I started this newsletter in 2020, I didn’t know it would be the foundation of a new way of working for me. I’ve been in digital media since 2009, when I was 23, and have been freelancing as a food writer since 2015. As a freelancer, I usually had what we call an “anchor gig”: a stable base of money to rely on monthly that would pay fixed bills, and beyond that, I’d be hustling, pitching, and chasing down invoices. The periods when I didn’t have an anchor gig were financially ruinous, and when I started this newsletter, that’s what I was facing down: another period without any stable income, only this time it was a pandemic, there were warnings of looming recession, and I was no longer in New York City. I had a book proposal that I was retooling nightly over whiskey sodas, without feeling any real hope of publishing it.

This space, where I’ve been publishing essays on Mondays and flip-flopping between interviews and recipes for paid subscribers, became that anchor gig, that stable foundation, and it also became much more. Indeed, it was a lifeline while writing No Meat Required, for which I received a very small advance.

However, as it is a one-person show—as The Atlantic put it, I’m running a one-woman magazine—I never wanted to put all of my eggs in its basket, so to speak. I wanted to keep doing this for the creative outlet, as well as for the visibility and stability it provided, but I would never say no to assignments to work on it. This was how I’ve also kept it cheap, at $30 for an annual subscription.

And while I will continue to hopefully write books and for magazines, I have to recognize that this newsletter, with a free audience of over 32,000 and paid subscribers numbering over 2,100, has become more than just an anchor gig. To honor the seriousness with which I take being in so many inboxes each week, I’ve been planning a relaunch of this newsletter for 2024. (This was how I, a control freak, processed the anxiety of my book coming out: an editorial rejiggering.)

The changes will be to a broadening of who has a voice here: I’ll be bringing in writers through a monthly contributor essay, and encouraging more conversation through comments and a book club.

It will mean a rise in the annual subscription rate to $50 per year, but those who have been annual subscribers at $30 will be locked in—and anyone else still has until the end of 2023 to become a paid subscriber at this lower rate.

Here’s what everyone can expect in 2024:

• From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy will be moving to a 10-month publishing schedule, with August and December as planned months off. I will be publishing 10 contributor essays per year (see below).

• Each month will include 3 free essays, 3 paid posts, and 1 digest—The Desk Digest—which you can subscribe to if you’d like to receive only one issue per month with links to all that came out, plus a brief editor’s letter.

• The Monday From the Desk… essay format will remain unchanged: There will be two fresh essays by me per month. These are the base of the newsletter, and they’ll always be free for sharing and reference.

• A third Monday essay called The Desk Dispatch will be written by a contributing writer. For this, I’m opening up to pitches for pieces of food-related cultural criticism, media criticism, and personal essays. I will be paying $500 for each contributors’ essay of between 500 and 1,500 words, and I will be working closely with the writer on editing.
  
  This is my way of creating space and visibility for emerging (and established) food writers who want to take risks, whether formally or subject-wise. I’ll share more about this, along with more on my editing background, with pitching guidelines next week. This is the main reason for the increase in cost to the annual subscriptions: If you’d like to support food writers doing new, exciting work and being paid a proper rate for it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. With this rate, I’ll be dedicating $5,000 per year to creating space for food writing that isn’t published elsewhere.

For those paid subscribers, there will be an additional 3 posts per month on Fridays: 

1. From the Desk Recommends… , lists of links and notes on everything I’ve been enjoying. This is a casual newsletter where I’m a little bit more loose and intimate.

2. The Monthly Menu, which will be a cooking supplement featuring what I’ve been cooking, where I’ve been eating, what I’ve been drinking, occasional questions and answers with experts, and recipes I’ve developed.

3. The Desk Book Club will be a monthly space for discussion on four different food nonfiction books per year, ranging from memoir to reportage to, in some cases, more academic food studies work. (We can also use the Chat feature more for ongoing conversations.) 

   
   I’m partnering with Archestratus for the first year, a woman-owned bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to bring all paid subscribers a 20% discount on every featured title. We will be starting with Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson.

Paid subscribers can also choose to receive only The Desk Digest in their inbox, per their subscription options, and thus get access to everything but receive only one email per month to cut back on inbox clutter. Find the option on the “manage subscription” page.

From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy is becoming more of a magazine, and I’m bringing it into alignment with my hopes for the future: These include more books of my own, of course, but also my hope to eventually publish inventive, long-form food writing in print. 

Next week, more about how I envision The Desk Dispatch and how to pitch me your ideas. I’m so excited about this new chapter and hope you’ll come along.

This Friday will be From the Desk Recommends… for paid subscribers, a link roundup on what I’m reading and watching, with a specific focus on something I’ve been discussing a lot with folks: how reading about art teaches me how to write about food.

News

My husband, historian and writer Israel Meléndez Ayala, has launched a bilingual newsletter called Crítica that I will be editing (lightly!). He will be putting Puerto Rico’s politics, economy, and culture into historical context. Subscribe!

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My small capsule jewelry collection with By Ren, whose designs are handmade to order in Philadelphia, is live through the end of 2023. There are cocktail picks with a pearl on them, which are my favorite thing ever! Perfect gift.

Reading

I’ve got two assignments that I’m working on right now that require me to read a lot about gender and performances of domesticity vs. adventure. They’re very different pieces for very different outlets, but they have this nice overlap. Aside from my readings for these (which I’ll discuss at another time), I’m reading Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden by winemaker Anders Frederik Steen.

Cooking

I made some really good beer-battered onion rings that I’ll talk about in the November Monthly Menu (getting a head-start on 2024).