The Year So Far in Essays + Fall Newsletter Workshop Launch

I'm finishing a book in August, so here's a chance to catch up.

Aug 05, 2024

I’m launching a new series with The Newsletter Workshop, a two-hour live class via Zoom, this fall.

Here’s the information:

I will discuss my experience building my newsletter, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, over four years and using it to solidify my niche as a food and culture writer; provide examples of newsletters that do different things well; provide questions and exercises that will help you figure out how to better approach your own newsletter; and lead a question and answer section.

We will go over the options for platforms you can use to write your newsletter, how to develop a consistent posting schedule, and how your own reading behaviors can help you figure out your newsletter voice. I’ll be providing a PDF of my presentation beforehand that will include a worksheet with the essential questions to ask yourself about what you want your newsletter to achieve. This will provide you with insight as well as guardrails that will ensure you maintain consistency and inspiration.

WHEN
Tuesday, September 10; Tuesday, October 8; Tuesday, November 12
Session No. 1: 11 AM to 1 PM EST
Session No. 2: 7 PM to 9 PM EST

HOW MUCH
$100 for non-paid subscribers; $75 for paid subscribers (the discount code is in the newsletter chat, or I will send it to you personally)

ONWARD: I’ve spent this year more focused on writing my next book—working title On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, a memoir of food, place, and ecology—but the newsletter has provided necessary ways of doing other types of writing and engaging with other types of thinking.

And while I love writing books, and have especially enjoyed writing this one, I now know that I’m going to feel really freaking good when my first draft is in my editor’s hands and not mine. As I take the time to do that, I feel a lot of fear—but I’m learning a lot through that fear, namely how to harness it to make something better out of it.

My year started out so strong: I wrote a Harper’s Bazaar cover story for their February issue, a profile of supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and announced my book deal. These types of professional highs tend to precede what can feel like a low, when you have to just… work. Here’s some of that work.

January 1: “Both Joyful and Killjoy”

“I still have some fight in me, but I have so little will to bring that fight to other people, to other people who are like me and are trying to grapple with the experience of hitting enormous highs and crushing lows concurrently.”

January 8: “A Breakfast Routine”

“I get very frustrated by the knots empire, capitalism, and colonialism force people into attempting to untangle that often conclude at binaries like the above, either perfect or fucked, by whichever standard of behavior we’re holding ourselves to: These knots leave us at a standstill, infantalized.”

February 5: Defining and Refining a Food Justice Lens

A talk for Bates College: “When we hear the phrase ‘food justice,’ do we imagine a dining table filled with abundant foods? Do we imagine sourdough of locally grown and milled wheat? Do we imagine a workers’ cooperative delivering CSA boxes of regionally grown organic produce? Do we imagine a sliding-scale priced brunch at an otherwise fine-dining restaurant?”

February 12: One Writer, Many Voices

“I’ve said to folks before, and they haven’t believed me, that I’m not comfortable speaking—because once I get going, I’m off to the races, in a bit of a fugue state. I have that anxiety that makes me fill air; I have to memorize questions for interviews. I feel more than adequate here at my desk, with all my books and notebooks; I worry about whether I can bring that to a situation where I don’t have notes (otherwise known as: human socializing).”

March 4: On Memories As Fragments

“I feel more honest when I tell you stories in bits and pieces. Memory is a broken thing, and I am not very good at forcing it into order and narrative. I am not good at lying, is what it is, and storytelling—even the telling of true stories—demands some smoothing-out, some glossing-over in order to make the narrative.”

March 11: Securing the Brand Bag

“It’s a business strategy that works for her, and works for other influencers with millions of followers, but what happens in a crowded space when there’s only one ticket to fat, reliable paychecks? When corporate algorithms control who sees what? And what truths are no longer told when brands need to be appeased in order to keep food on the table? Will the actual investigative journalists please stand up?”

April 1: “On Recognizing My Secular Saints”

“How do I meet the world? I have to ask myself this regularly as a writer, and in working on memoir, I have to ask myself repeatedly, over and over, digging an ever deepening well to understand myself and create art / artifice out of it. We all establish our own cultures, but maybe I turned culture—literature, art, film, food—into religion, in order to place it into a framework I understood. To make a religion that wouldn’t feel like surveillance and shame, but ecstasy and evolution.”

April 8: “Why I Don’t Write About Restaurants”

“A city deserves critics who have deep historical and cultural context; a city deserves well-paid and thoughtful critics who can tell the truth. The work must be done for the sake of making sense of food in said city, for its people. Yet how many cities have the critics they deserve? Recommendations and lists from boosters, tourism boards, and visitors are what the local and macro economic situation has allowed in their place.”

April 15: “What Do You Want From a Cookbook?”

“This is why, though, there are few contemporary cookbooks that appeal to me. I hope saying this doesn’t keep publishers from continuing to send me new cookbooks: I like to look at them, but I am not the target audience for them, for the most part. As noted, I like rigorous text-based instruction and notes. I like staple recipes that have personality, not personality-driven recipes. I like ideas that serve me for occasions both special and mundane. I need grams!!!”

May 6: “Climate Nausea”

“I’m reading about quinoa. Reading about quinoa teaches us so much about how food narratives function in the Global North: Those in affluent nations see something shiny, just like the men with the big boats, and because we want something new, because we survive by making more, more, more new, we fuck some people over who have no voice in the matter, then never think about it again. We say, Remember quinoa?”

May 13: “On Soy Milk”

“All signs point to the end of oat milk’s reign as plant-based champion. But does that mean a thoughtless return to cow’s milk?”

June 3: “How Do You Eat? No. 1”

“But what I personally really want to know about is how people stock their kitchens and pantries. Not just what’s in their kitchen, but how does the infrastructure of the city where they live and who they live with affect what they eat and how they go about getting it?”

June 10: “On Avocados”

“Living in the Caribbean where avocados grow means I’m well aware of their seasonal nature: Either there are avocados, or there aren’t. I could go looking for the imported varieties, but I don’t love avocados enough to warrant going against Mother Earth in this way. I’ll eat them when they’re around, and it’ll be one of those seasonal food thrills, and then I won’t think about them again for a while.”

July 1: “The Algorithm of the Mind”

“‘Business culture becomes human culture’—this is what I was thinking about when everyone was suddenly referring to the change of seasons by financial quarters. My Q1 photo dump… It’s what I’m always thinking about when people are told to continue to “slay” by promoting terrible vegan cheeses or pans that are going to end up in the garbage. At least they’re getting their bag! It’s what I’m thinking about when people thank a brand for inviting them to dinner. Corporations are people in this land, after all.”