Ways of Working: Celebrating 5 Years of From the Desk...
On minor literary forms and the collage essay as an economic necessity.
When I began this newsletter and was able to take it seriously, many people were sick and dying. This is a pattern in my life, and likely the lives of many others: Something terrible, whether personally or on a global scale, finally allows me the space or gives me the push to do something I’d already wanted to do.
In the case of this newsletter, it was to write essays about things that were on my mind, especially about food. In March of 2020, I’d been a freelance food writer for five years and rarely, I thought, writing anything good or meaningful. The photos in my computer from the year I launched tell me everything: I was reading so much, and I was writing essays that were too long, but finally, I was getting traction for being the writer I actually wanted to be.
At first, it was luxurious because of freelance unemployment checks and utterly free time. In exchange, there was death all around and incredible uncertainty about the future.
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Time is a luxury object. I’ve found myself more drawn to fragments and collage since life has gone more or less back to normal. For the last almost five years—No Meat Required sold in June 2020—I’ve been in continual work on a book. That first book came out in August 2023; when I was done with the book tour, in early October 2023, my next proposal went out on submission. It sold on my birthday in November of that year; 2024 was spent writing; and it was in January of 2025 that I finished the first round of edits. More work is imminent, on the writing itself and on figuring out how to market it. Ideally, I’ll have a new proposal ready to go out before the end of this year to sell before On Eating comes out on April 14, 2026.
When I’m not writing or editing or promoting a book (right now), my brain feels completely different: expansive. But I know that my long-form energy has had to go into books and will, with any luck, forever go into books. It’s why I’m writing more collage essays, which enact their meaning and the space they take up in my life: fragmentary but expansive, reflective of all my reading, of putting the parts next to each from feminist art writing, literary criticism, and food writing.
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Fragmented attention is a problem for anyone with a digital life (by reading this, you have a digital life). I don’t know how to get back to the slowness and attention span I was capable of when I started this newsletter: There are too many demands: in the world, on my screens, in my work. I have to keep more balls in the air to keep myself afloat, as expenses have increased astronomically in the time that I’ve been writing here. Instead of fighting this, I try to use it: When I need to chop up an essay rather than work on it more, I do. And sometimes, I think it works out better than it otherwise would and expresses more truth about the conditions that created it.
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“The socialist feminist identity is itself as yet a collage of disparate, not yet fully compatible parts,” writes art critic Lucy Lippard in her essay “Issue and Taboo.” “It is a collage experience to be a woman artist or a sociopolitical artist in a capitalist culture.”
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I love all the forms of writing considered “minor”: “The aphorism is the stunted family secret in a modest but respectable dynasty of 'minor' literary modes: diaries, journals, notebooks, letters, essays,” wrote the critic Brian Dillon in 2003. I’ll add to it the recipe. I’ll add to it the glossy magazine—a mode in support of advertisements that I think can be subverted for political and cultural gain. Let the slick of gloss lure the reader into new ways of thinking. Indie mags on matte paper and xeroxed zines—they have their place, of course, and I adore them. But I want to feel like I’m reading Vogue while I consider the precariousness of culture work and how it’s being used as a subject by artists. I want the pages to easily slip through my fingers. Luscious. “Look and feel” are important: I never want to be found preaching to the choir; I want to figure out ways of using old or popular modes to reach new people.
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“Despite or perhaps because of their ordinariness, because cooking is so basic to and so entangled in daily life, cookbooks have thus served women as meditations, memoirs, diaries, journals, scrapbooks and guides,” writes Janet Theopano in the introduction to Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. “The cookbook, like the diary and journal, evokes a universe inhabited by women both in harmony and in tension with their families, their communities, and the larger social world.” The cookbook: a minor literary mode.
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I was going to make this piece a list so that it might be more “clickable”—“TK Ways of Working” was in my editorial calendar. But my way of working is living, thinking, and sitting down to write. It doesn’t lend itself to creative guru list-making, to pretending I speak from atop a mountain.
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I was reading Laurie Colwin’s 1992 essay “A Harried Cook’s Guide to Some Fast Food” in Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing From Gourmet to teach it in tomorrow’s class on the food essay. In the margins, I wrote, “a meal / a menu—is a collage.” The way she wrote the essay from the perspective of the “harried cook,” mentioning her daughter being of age to make salad dressing but not much else, and built out the meal and its instructions—loose and textual—with reference to some “now-unrecalled magazine article” is an essay that in its structure and style enacts its meaning (thank a Jesuit poetry professor I had for my obsession with this phrase). Who else but a harried cook could tell you how to cook while harried? How else could you believe her? Anyway, I’m seeing my obsession everywhere now. That’s clear.
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“Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage,” writes David Shields in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. “Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.
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“The fragment, I found in writing Art Monsters, might be the feminist form par excellence, a resource for artists who are tired of not recognizing themselves in the mirrors held up to them,” writes Lauren Elkin in a 2023 Spike essay called “How to Make the Woman Artist Exceptional.”
Here she focuses on “the slash” as a means of resistance, as a way to look at the work rather than the life. I see fragment, collage, and the slash as a way of working within and through the demands of the day. The more I want to see my domestic labor as in the same flow as my work, the more I understand the fragment, the slash, the collage as necessary to baring the interruptions.
If food writing, the essay, the collage, the recipe, the cookbook, the blog are minor literary modes, women’s forms, then why should I bother pretending? Why shouldn’t I do it all the way I want to do it—the way that fits?
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1 Way of Working
Do it how you want to do it and keep doing it the way you want to do it until another way emerges. Repeat.
News
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This month, the Desk Book Club is reading Black Food Geographies by Ashanté M. Reese. We will have the Zoom discussion on Sunday, March 30, at 1 p.m. EST. I will send the link and my reading notes on this Friday, March 21. (The schedule is a bit off because I’ll be in Italy the week before at a conference.) You can buy all the 2025 Desk Book Club picks at this year’s partner bookstore, D.C.’s Bold Fork Books, for 20% off with the code in the header (or email me).
Join me for the fourth installment of the Desk Salon Series on Sunday, April 6, featuring Clarkson Potter senior editor and writer Layla Schlack: paid subscribers have free access with the code in the header (or email me) and anyone else can buy a ticket for $10. There will be ten of these over the course of the year.
There are workshops happening on food writing and food media, and you can find them at my website. Paid subscribers have 25% off to each, using the code in the header. (Or, once again, email me.)
This left me teary-eyed. Congratulations on 5 years!!
This collage format of writing made me want to write ~ it’s like prose poetry meets the essay meets the listicle etc…
Art Monsters sounds like a cool book. Have you read it?
P.S. I am on page 46 of No Meat Required and thinking about assigning the entire book in my Social Justice/Sustainability section of Intro to Sociology in the Fall. Added bonus that Ani makes a poster cameo in the intro 😊