On Conversation

A short note, and the Desk Salon Series video, audio, and text transcripts.

I don’t use the word “community” lightly, and I’ve repeated this often. It wasn’t a goal of mine with this newsletter to “build community”; in fact, my goals for this newsletter were nonexistent at the time of its launch and have only emerged over time, organically (pieces on this forthcoming). The community here has been organic, as well, and after a year of weekly Salons, I moved our chats to their own Discord server—named TOMATO TOMATO, in honor of future publishing plans I have that will go under this name—in order to give folks more space to talk to each other. Conversation is the goal.

While I am one person who is writing, editing, moderating, and running this newsletter, I hope that my work here is a jumping-off point, a vector, for other people being in touch with other like-minded folks. Subscribing to my work isn’t like subscribing to a newspaper—we’re not here for the news—but it is like subscribing to a magazine: Something ideally enjoyable, occasionally thought-provoking, often inspiring for reading or cooking plans. Something that arrives and provides you a moment to sit with it, coffee or tea in hand. This is what paying supports, but paying also supports access to conversation—and conversation will naturally grow into something akin to a community. That’s what’s happened here.

I want my newsletter-magazine to be a space that provides essays and blogs, but also a place that creates ambient or passive awareness of cultural phenomena, media, writers, and ideas—a place and now a community you can turn to when you want to know how to use a grain, share a song you’re enjoying, and get ideas for what to pick up when you pop into a bookstore.

“making work that violates the hermetic nature of my own museum—as a friendly gesture towards the people who might recognize me.” Yes! This is it. by Eileen Myles in Not Me

I’ve also wanted to, through our Salon Series and Desk Book Club, bring readers into contact with other folks in the writing world. I’m between San Juan and New York, but this isn’t the kind of newsletter that has a concentration of readers in one urban center; folks are around the world: Using virtual spaces—this is obvious, as well as worth stating—we can overcome some barriers to access cultural events and bring lots of perspectives together. We can also find folks who are interested in things we are (food, culture, ecology, namely) even if we don’t have these people around us physically.

Frankly, my main takeaway from the outcome of last November’s U.S. presidential election was that I should double-down on providing easy space for people to come together so that hope’s not all lost. Conversation: we need it. The Salons, the Book Club, the Discord—they’re a neighborhood bar you can pop into when you feel like finding an invigorating (or silly!) chat and some inspiration.

The longer this newsletter goes on, the sillier it feels that it’s based around me as one person, and I have my plans for expansion, but this newsletter is also the foundation of my own culture work—the trampoline from which I’ve bounced into books, teaching, and speaking—and however I can be of use to the people who enable me to do my work, I want to be. If there’s any clout or cultural capital I’ve earned, it’s thanks to your support, and I want to use it to bring more people into the discussion. So always feel free to let me know what else I can offer. I’m here for conversation.

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Here are the Salons we’ve hosted this year so far, from January through May. The next one will feature author Jill Damatac in conversation about her memoir Dirty Kitchen with guest-host Bettina Makalintal. In July, we’ll host Anya von Bremzen to discuss the book club selection Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. The free access code is in email headers or at this link.

Pam Brunton, chef at Inver Restaurant and author of Between Two Waters

“The whole of—Western, particularly—society is skewed in favor of the male experience, the patriarchy, if you will. And kitchens are no different. They're reflective of that. So when you're talking about things improving in kitchens, you're talking about other workplaces as well. And although there may be positive discrimination, recruitment drives and things in politics, in the law, in the police, whatever it is, unless you get to a point where women are at the decision-making level as well, and there's enough of them and they are being enabled to follow through their own decisions, then all you're doing is counting heads in a system that remains unchanged, where women are to behave like their predecessors, right? So, yeah, thinking differently is what's required.”

Layla Schlack, writer and senior editor at Clarkson Potter

“The current landscape, I really feel like I'm just dipping my toes in. I know so much more about how things are selling than I did, obviously, before I started this job. I have access to those numbers now, where you don't, unless you're in the industry. I think the biggest thing that I'm seeing and that I'm learning is that these food media darling cookbooks don't necessarily translate into high sales.”

Carina del Valle Schorske, essayist, poet, and translator

“Different magazines are differently loyal to their own house style, and I struggle with magazines where there's a really strict notion about how that magazine sounds. I'm always more interested in the voices of individual writers than I am in the voice of a publication. To me, that's not a voice. Voice, to me, is inherently an embodied and individual phenomenon, so when you talk about the voice of an institution, that's to me like saying a corporation is a person. We know that isn't true, and we know that the soul of writing is in the voice of the writer. There's a limit to how far I'm willing to go to adapt myself to institutional norms.”

Mayukh Sen, author of Love, Queenie and Taste Makers

“But whatever, she would give quotes to the press about her upbringing in India. I would have to ask myself, like, How much truth is there to that? And, you know, How much is she just completely making up? So that was a real challenge in terms of just kind of building the scaffolding of my narrative through her own words. I really had to kind of toss a lot of what she was telling us about her upbringing, or her parents or her childhood, yada yada. And what I did try to do was locate her interior life when I could, at any juncture.”

Anna Sulan Masing, author of Chinese and Any Other Asian

“I'm really fascinated with the kind of anglicization of all these colonial, ex-colonial spaces and it's just trying to navigate that. And I don't really have the answer, right? Like it's just trying to navigate where this feeling of belonging that I have for England and the UK, and, specifically, that I have for London [originates]. Then I keep coming up against these terms that are othering, even if I am choosing the term diaspora myself. Also this literal or physical idea of diaspora, which is this idea of there being a home place, right, that you kind of disperse from—but how do I disperse from something when I don’t feel like I have one locale? I would say that a lot of New Zealanders and Malaysians don't necessarily feel like they have one locale, because they've grown up reading all this stuff as well.”