Editor & Chef 101

Hello it’s very nice to meet a few more of you

Good morning and welcome.

A few days ago I posted this note and now there are more of you here, so that’s kind of hilarious.

Welcome to Editor & Chef, the mostly coherent epicurean ramblings of an occasionally mad woman.

I’m Allison East. I run a small literary agency called North Parade Press, and I love to cook and write. I work primarily as a book designer, occasionally as a literary agent, and a lot as a mother. My newsletters are often personal essays on cooking and reading. I’m deeply inspired by Nora Ephron, Laurie Colwin, Julia Child, Madeleine L’Engle, MFK Fisher, and Robert Farrar Capon.

I am married to Mitchell East, we have three beautiful children and we live outside of Oklahoma City. In my wildest dreams, I’d run a gourmet shoppy shoppe in the Cotswolds and write spiritual memoirs probably.

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A few nights ago, I tried to embody my own circa-2000 style and be a cool mom. I let the kids have a “mom sleepover” in my room which just means my husband was out of town and I didn’t want to put the children to bed individually. So, I let them all sleep in my bed, and I regretted making the offer almost instantly.

All that to say . . . I woke up kinda sweaty.

If you’re a new subscriber, first off, hi hello and thanks for joining. Bit of a gamble on what you will receive from me, but it’ll be some combination of writing about cooking, mothering, reading, working, the publishing industry, and following Jesus. Yeah, quite the combo, I know. A real treat for you.

My goal for the fall when the children return to school is perhaps to create some kind of editorial calendar. I have various ideas for posts strewn across a variety of digital productivity softwares, and turns out I will probably just do better to buy a new Moleskin journal and write down my thoughts there instead. Only, my 4-year-old keeps taking apart my nice pens. Yes, you read that correctly. She loves to disassemble pens and leave little pieces of them all over the house. Which is really fun for pretty much everyone, I’d say. So not only do I have to login to Evernote, Notion, my Notes app, To-Doist, and a random Word document to access my own ideas, I have to also order a metal detector and put together a spring-loaded ballpoint.

If there was a college degree for motherhood, it would be the hardest and strangest course on offer. And if I were writing that course, here are some of the classes you’d have to take:

• How to cross a street while carrying a diaper bag, computer bag, pushing a stroller, and holding a two-year-old’s hand so that no one gets run over by the presumably empty trolley car puttering by.

• Sibling conflict mediation/criminal justice.

• Small machinery mechanics.

• Snack Management (full-time job).

• Library Science (library with kids 101: read every issue of

  Sarah Miller
  ’s newsletter).

• Museum Curation.

• Junk Removal.

• Janitorial Service Training.

• Pediatric random rash identification.

• Chicken nugget budgeting (a course on both how many chicken nuggets can your child reasonably consume and how much of your actual income do you want to allocate toward this end).

In addition to learning all these high-level skills, I am constantly asking the questions of what is for dinner and what book should I read. I would like to nourish my body and mind and soul in the midst of the mothering. I would also like to maintain some semblance of a vaguely intellectual pursuit so I don’t just melt into an iphone. These are difficult tasks. None of which were taught in my undergraduate or master’s degree programs.

Do I feel like I am succeeding in much of anything? Depends on what day it is and on how much Red 40 my children have been in contact with. Some days, I want to scream, “This is so hard!” And other days I tell myself I would have *actually* died as a pioneer on the trail. But I would have had the best chuck wagon food, probably.