When I graduated from college with my English degree, everyone asked, “Are you going to be a teacher?” It was the only thing anyone expected I could do with such a seemingly useless education and no connections in media or publishing, no sufficient money for unpaid internships. The subtext, which I was too bull-headed and naive to really understand, was that I wasn’t born the kind of person who gets to care about what she does for work.

I’ve watched The Last Showgirl and the new season of The Bear and I’ve thought about this more: what a head-in-the-clouds idealist but also what a fucking obsessive you have to be to defy the laws of the world and money that way. And because I was both of those things, I held fast and gritted my teeth and made myself a writer, only to find out I love teaching. I had to reject this knee-jerk impulse everyone around me had, though, or I would’ve hated my life. Now teaching is what I love most about my job. I just took the backroads here—the scenic route.

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I’m not the kind of teacher who expects something from students: I want the students to expect something from themselves, and I’m just there to help usher them toward whatever that might be. I’m a partner in thinking, as teacher or as editor.

My background is not in academia; it’s in media (with occasional sojourns into hospitality). I write and publish for the public. I have to read academic writing in order to inform my public work, but for the most part, it’s a slog, and I find it sad that a lot of people spend a lot of effort on work that isn’t intended to be pleasurable, only useful. When I find academic work that’s both pleasurable and useful, that’s the sweet spot, and it’s rare. I get the purpose of this esoteric writing, though, and I appreciate it. It’s always exhilarating to force my brain to work in new ways to understand, say, archeological and other scientific studies. I only wish there were more overlap; I wish all writing were intended for the public, written with the reader and not only peers and colleagues in mind.

Teaching within a graduate program is obviously different from teaching the workshops I offer to the public, and because there are assignments and requirements in the graduate program, I teach toward those. Workshops are more about extruding my own experience into something others can learn from, though I very much prefer teaching toward a learning objective rather than professional goals.

But I basically do the same stuff; I’m always the same teacher. I always need the students to want more from the class than just access to whatever magic tricks they think I have, and they have to show up with care and enthusiasm, or they’ll get nothing from my own: I try to show and tell simultaneously, and you can learn from someone showing you their brain and their methods if you’re willing to do some work. Not everyone is willing to do some work; people committing to a course of study tend to be more so, which is what’s refreshing about teaching in that kind of setting.

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People often ask me for advice on how to be a food writer, and I think this is just the most awful question. (I do think there are bad questions; I’ve asked quite a few in my own life.) There’s no general advice; there’s only reading and writing, religiously. I’ve never taken a writing class. I’ve only read and written, read and written, read and listened to the interviews with the people whose work I like, gone to the readings, re-read the work, over and over. I’ve learned through what’s been shown to me, and thus I teach people in a way that mimics how I learn. I want to know, too, how other people learn in order to expand how I teach.

I always think of myself as a public writer, one of these people who for whatever reason has cultivated an audience but isn’t really appreciated by institutional gatekeepers. I’m not getting grants or fellowships or awards, and I’ve taught because I got an email asking me to teach. I haven’t gone out for anything in a long time. I put myself out there but I don’t apply for things; I pre-reject myself. This is perhaps how the doubt of the people in my youth stays alive in me. I also think I can’t be critical of institutions if I’m a willing participant, seeking accolades and achievements judged through a lens I don’t value. I value teaching, though, and I value being asked to teach. It’s like translation. Teaching and translation—these are the measures of my work.

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The best thing about teaching, to me, and especially what I learned from this semester teaching a class I designed called “The Food Essay” in Boston University’s gastronomy program, is watching students get better and work at getting better, and hearing them sharpen analysis in discussion. In this class, students had to write four different types of essay; I edited and gave editorial feedback on each; and for the final project, they had to do their revisions and write an explanation of their methods as well as imagine their audience for publication. It was a class about applying food studies research and thinking to a public writing practice—so I guess it was a selfish class, one to create the food writers I want to read. I think you’d want to read them too.