Good morning, world wide web. Hope your coffee is iced and your croissants are not from Costco today.
Here’s the news of the day: when I went out for my morning garden inspection, which I usually conduct in my pajamas and fur lined Boston Birkenstocks, I spotted one single SNAP PEA POD. My first harvest! THRILLING.
Yes. I am the meme of the urban gardener who spent at least $350 to build a raised garden to grow what I could buy for $3.50 at Walmart, but let me tell you. Putting a seed in the ground and then seeing a real life vegetable pop up has been a worthwhile endeavor. I’m reminded almost daily just how much I forgot from 7th grade biology but we’re trying to be #lifelonglearners around here.
Also. Squash blossoms. I squealed. Will see if these turn into actual zucchini, which, from my research, they will not because there is such a thing as are male and female flowers and whoa who knew.
Now, onward to the actual content of the newsletter today.
If you’re new around here, I’m Allison East. I love books and cooking and theology and writing and eating and hosting friends around my table and being a mom and being married to
. I absolutely despise running, mosquitos, dill pickles, and hot lettuce. I run a literary and creative agency called North Parade Press. I work as an agent, design books, and work with brands to tell their stories.June marks three full years of writing Editor & Chef! You know me, I’m all for a celebration. I thought I’d share a few reflections, and jot down a few goals I have for the upcoming year of writing. Tally ho!
XOXO
Allison
Three years!
I started writing this newsletter June 2021 in a postpartum haze. I was desperate for some sort of creative grounding after the birth of my daughter. And after some encouragement from friends to get back to writing, I set out to carve out a small space for myself. And really, that’s what it has been. Sure, like anyone on Substack, I have daydreams about having a huge subscriber list, endless essay ideas, ample time to write whenever I want, and while we’re at it, a gourmet food store in East Hampton.
In reality, I’ve got a small coalition of readers, only occasional bursts of writing inspiration, zero editorial strategy, flies in my kitchen, unread stacks of books on my bedside table. Unfortunately, Ina Garten has not reached out to me about launching a spinoff Barefoot Contessa location in Oklahoma, can you believe it!
Now, on this occasion of three years of writing, a look back and a look forward. (In all honesty, full disclosure, etc. etc, I often go back and read my own writing and laugh out loud.)
Highlights include:
If you’re a recent subscriber, I hope you enjoy a dive in the archives.
Looking to the future, I have a few simple goals for Editor & Chef.
Write a monthly essay. This has been the bread and butter of the newsletter. I’ve learned over the course of my writing, that I am not great at sending out a weekly email of recommended reading or consistently cranking out meal plans or recipes. So that is not what this is! I like long form writing. I like to follow a burst of inspiration that flashes across my mind in the middle of the day. I don’t think that means I’ll never share recipes I love. I’ll just keep letting you walk around in my brain and see what’s happening in here.
Grow my network of writer friends. Substack is a great place for this, and I continue to stumble across new publications almost daily. I am hoping this year to establish more connections with other writers and find encouragement from more creative community.
Read consistently. I continue to realize the best way I can grow as I writer is to make real time for reading books.
And that’s it! I am trying my best to not get sucked in to some black hole performance vortex of social media and get fixated on subscriber numbers or content calendars. This is a place for me to explore ideas at my leisure, and I intend to keep doing just that.
To conclude this reflective little number, I’ll top it off with an excerpt from my very first newsletter ever.
REFLECTIONS FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT — JUNE 2021
Last night, I attempted to get at least two minutes of reading in before falling asleep, which is about all I can manage these days. (I have finished all of two books since February. Not a good year for my Good Reads challenge.) Blatantly ignoring the tower of books on my nightstand, I downloaded one of my favorite books from the library to my kindle because I cannot find the print copy that is lurking on a shelf in my house somewhere. I tapped along for my two minutes, feeling comforted by the words of one of my favorite writers. And in the last seconds of that sleepy in-between state of semi-consciousness in which I have just enough brain function to comprehend basic sentence structure, I read a paragraph in Madeleine L’Engle’s Circle of Quiet that kept me awake a few minutes longer.
“Cooking is the only part of housekeeping I manage with any grace; it’s something like writing a book: you look in the refrigerator and see what’s there, choose all the ingredients you need, and a few your husband thinks you don’t need, and put them all together to concoct a dish. Vacuum cleaners are simply something more for me to trip over; and a kitchen floor, no matter how grubby, looks better before I wax it. The sight of a meal’s worth of dirty dishes, pots, and pans makes me want to run in the other direction. Every so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody—away from all these people I love most in the world—in order to regain a sense of proportion.”
Seeing as most of my thoughts are about cooking, the state of my kitchen floors, and how bad I am at keeping up with dirty dishes, this paragraph could have just as easily been plucked from my own subconscious. But the part I resonated most with when I read it the other night was about being thrown into total disproportion. In my case, having a baby has really done a number on me—more so than I ever anticipated. And I’m learning more and more that every so often, I need to regain my senses. This has never been more true than after a) living through the pandemic, b) having covid during a polar vortex, and c) becoming a mother to my sweet child.
In the four months since Evelyn was born, my head has been feeling so noisy, like I can’t cram one more thought or existential question into it. I am constantly circling around a drain of thinking about how to be a mother and a wife and a daughter and a friend and still pursue things that interest me and bring me joy and use the skills and gifts I have and make sure everyone in my household gets fed approximately every three hours. Mixed up in the wonder of motherhood and the beauty of marriage and the joy of cooking, I have felt myself get a little lost. Where did I go in the midst of all of this?
I lay awake at night and wonder about purpose, vocation, meaningful work, and what I’ll have for breakfast. Maybe I’ll eat a cup of yogurt and hate it. Wouldn’t all be bright and beautiful if we just got to eat poached eggs on sourdough every day. Did I make the right decision to stay home from work? Am I out of my grocery budget this month? I wonder if the baby will wake up in the night again.
I am, perhaps, in total disproportion.
And if that is indeed the case, how then can I learn to rightly order things—to wrangle my thoughts into some sense of proportionality? By that I mean, how can I achieve appropriate emotional responses to the days in front of me? How can I navigate my life with “economy and grace,” as Tamar Adler writes in her fabulous book The Everlasting Meal. Well, continuing in our L’Engle-themed discourse, Madeleine goes on to say to regain that sense of proportion, she gets away to clear her head to a place that is all her own—her "circle of quiet”. In her case, this place is a brook in the woods behind her house. When she feels untethered from herself, she follows a trail of twine she wove through the bushes to get to her spot and clear her head, even if just for a few minutes.
“If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.”
By this point, you might be wondering—what does any of this rambling have to do with me telling anyone my thoughts on cookbooks and novelists in a newsletter I am truly hacking my way through? I guess this is all just a very wordy way to say I am after something like Madeleine’s "circle of quiet.” Even if just for a few minutes or a few words (hopefully fewer words than this going forward), I want to have a place that is my own to think and create and spout off about my favorite way to make chicken salad and tell someone that Deb Perelman is writing another cookbook (out next spring).
Much like Madeleine, cooking is one thing I can manage with some degree of grace. Not to get all weird “the kitchen is my dojo” type thing on anyone, but my little kitchen is a place where things make sense to me. Everywhere outside of my kitchen, I am incredibly clumsy and seem to be on the brink of a crisis about whether I should go back to work, or open a bookstore, or start a small publishing house, or bootstrap some social enterprise/non-profit venture focused on literacy in the developing world, or get a Ph.D. in children’s literature, or write a screenplay, or just be a mother for goodness’ sake. I would also like to go to culinary school and write novels?
Am I okay? Is this just what life is like?
I told you my mind can be a noisy place. I definitely should take a walk in the woods and sit in silence.
If I am truly looking for a circle of quiet, a veritable room of one’s own for all you Virginia Woolf lovers out there, a kitchen is actually quite a loud place. And I truly can clang around with the best of them. Yet somehow, when I sit down with my notebook to think about groceries for the week or when I rummage around my refrigerator knowing that I can create something that nourishes others and maybe tastes pretty good too, I feel a little less crazy and a little more sure of myself.
I can manage my kitchen with a little grace while I concoct my dishes and my husband graciously offers to wash up my mess as part of our mutual division of household labor. I can feed my daughter truly what feels like one hundred times a day and I can love her into becoming her own little person. I can grow into this new me, even when I feel a little out of whack and unfamiliar with what I want to do or who I want to become. And I can keep trying to read late into the night while my baby sleeps, reaching for the words of others like the twine woven through the woods to lead me home.
As I thought about Madeleine, about her kitchen graces and her circle of quiet, I inched slightly back into alignment and I fell asleep.
THANKS FOR BEING HERE!
XOXOXO
Allison
“Putting a seed in the ground and then seeing a real life vegetable pop up has been a worthwhile endeavor.” YES! I also squealed (autocorrect first changed that to squawked 😆) this morning as I counted four itty tomatoes and seven jalapeños bursting forth into the muggy air! Yippee! It’s my first year with a garden, and it brings with it all the garden/growth/nurture analogies people speak about.
Three years is a wonderful accomplishment! I was captivated by the excerpt from your first newsletter. Thanks for including it. You detailed those feelings of “where did I go?” so well. I’m in my second year of marriage and motherhood (I’m a stepmom!) and phew, what a wild ride. I haven’t known how to handle all of my desires/dreams with the shifting needs and dynamics around me. Maybe the time I set aside in these early years to write and tend to my creativity can be like those tiny seeds you spoke of… and perhaps one day I’ll find a real life book or something else has popped up. 😉
All that said, I look forward to your newsletters to come, Allison! Thanks for creating a cozy and thoughtful space here.
So glad this yummy nook of a Substack exists!!!