The Day the Books Arrived

I want to tell you what it felt like to hold a copy of Eat This Poem in my hands. I wanted to tell you sooner, right when the box of books arrived at my door, but I needed to think. Process. Absorb. Gather my thoughts.

So, let’s start at the beginning.

The books were scheduled to arrive at my publisher’s warehouse in Colorado on February 17, so you can imagine my excitement to receive an email a week early saying the books were here (!!) and UPS would be picking them up in a few hours (!!).

It was Friday, and I was expecting them Monday, so all weekend I tried to distract myself. I bought champagne and chilled it in the refrigerator. I brought my dog to work on Monday to help the time pass more quickly. But when I got home from work, both my dog and my son in tow, the books were not there.

Of course, I was disappointed.

I made soup for dinner, and every time I opened the fridge to pull out stock or half an onion I’d saved, I saw the champagne bottle, reminding me of the occasion I was waiting for to pop the cork.

The next day, I realized something.

As excruciating as it was to wait (also, for two nights in a row, I woke up at 3 am and tossed and turned before falling back to sleep, plus, I had a perpetual knot in my stomach), I found tremendous peace in one small and obvious detail.

The book exists.

Even though I don’t have my box filled with the proof of my years of work, the book exists. I told myself this over and over as I walked after lunch. The book exists. It will be published. It is published. You made this. It exists.

It’s worth noting I’m not the most patient person.

I’ve softened over the years, but usually when I want something or I’m ready for something, contentment is not always my first instinct.

Waiting the extra 24 hours was excruciating and anxiety producing, but it forced me into learning yet another lesson about creativity, which is, everything in its timing.

So even though I couldn’t hold it (yet), I knew it was out there in the world.

And on Tuesday, the book did come. A small package rested against my front door when I came home, again, with Henry in my arms. I still had to wait for Andrew to get home from work before opening it. I couldn’t have this experience without him, so again, I busied myself, first playing with Henry for a few minutes in his room, then scooping a pile of food into Emma’s bowl, then starting to pull leaves off the chard I was planning to saute with garlic and oil before swirling with spaghetti.

I pulled out the champagne glasses.

As soon as the keys turned in the door I screamed “Ok, let’s go let’s go!!” and started tearing into the package. Andrew came over and picked up Henry, holding his phone with one hand to try and take a few pictures.

Slowly, I pulled out two copies of Eat This Poem, then ran my finger over the raised cover. I pulled open the flap, looked at the photo and bio I had submitted months earlier. I flipped the pages, smelled them, and saw the words I’d nearly memorized after years of writing recipe after recipe, story after story.

One day I was sitting in Starbucks, writing notes next to a poem, and now I was holding the book I hoped for so long I would get to write. I want you to curl up on the couch with it, underline it, dog-ear it, use it.

Strangely, the publication of a book is both an end and a beginning.

The end of one writing journey, but the beginning of a relationship between my words and everyone who might read them.

So as much as this book is mine, soon it will be yours, too.

5 Reasons Poetry Matters, Now More Than Ever

“Poetry arrived
in search of me.”

This is how Pablo Neruda describes his intimate and mysterious relationship to the craft. His experience echoes many others—poets and writers who have difficulty explaining why exactly they write, only that they cannot not write. One day they went about their lives, when suddenly they were struck, compelled, or inspired to put pen to paper.

My experience was similar. As an assignment for my sophomore year, second period English class, we were asked to flip through the pages of a dusty copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and read the first poem our eyes landed on. That night, I went home and scrawled a poem into one of my notebooks. I didn’t know what it meant (and hardly had an inkling it would lead to a literary cookbook), and often wondered why writing, in particular, was the thing I had to do.

Poets are not strangers to doubt, fear, and the types of questions that link themselves and their work to a greater purpose. We struggle to find our place, see our inherent value, and embrace our unique set of experiences and stories that need to find a home on the page.

To this end, here are a few reminders of why poetry is useful, meaningful, and necessary to the world, now more than ever.

1. Poetry sparks meaningful conversations

When given a national platform—like the occasions when Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, and Elizabeth Alexander read poems at presidential inaugurations—poetry becomes an accessible medium conveying universal ideas and sentiments. It gives us something to talk about and a path to guide our conversations, particularly during a historic transition of power. But poetry doesn’t just make a statement in politics. You can find verse lining buses in Seattle, in Michigan’s national parks, and it’s even been used as a tool to help empower prison inmates.

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2. Poetry makes us feel something

When I set out to choose poems to include in the Eat This Poem cookbook, I was looking for one thing: an emotional current. I wanted to feel something when I read the poem. I wanted to be moved, inspired, and connect to the story on the page. Like all art, poetry is subjective, and what might resonate emotionally with me may not resonate emotionally with you. But the point is, the best poems make our hearts beat a bit faster, or make our hearts swell just a bit when we arrive at the last line. Poetry has the power to do that—ignite our emotional lives and stir our souls, even if just for a moment.

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3. Poetry gives us words when there are no words

Wherever there is chaos—internal chaos in our minds our bodies, or an occasion bigger than any one person can bear—poets become translators of emotion. The aftermath of 9/11 produced poetic responses now collected in anthologies. Poems also circulated during the 2016 presidential election, like “18 Compassionate Poems to Help You Weather Uncertain Times” from Huffington Post or Vox’s “Feeling terrible right now? Maybe some poetry will help.”

Poems tend to surface during life’s most important milestones and transitions, too, like weddings, births, and funerals. When we’re overcome with emotion, poems provide a sturdy foundation from which to express what’s swirling in our heart.

Don Share explains is beautifully: “You get this feeling that people can call on the poets when they need to, and that’s a great moment for poets—when they have an audience because we need to know how to go about reaching the next day of our lives.”

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4. Poetry makes the mundane meaningful

“Someone who pays attention to the world” is how Susan Sontag once described writers, and it’s truly one of the most important aspects of the craft. Poets, in particular, tend to have a knack for this, identifying the fleeting flickers of our inner life we often brush past or ignore, delicately rendering the natural world, and putting words to emotions we have difficulty expressing.

"A lot of people might think that poetry is very abstract, or that it has to do with having your head in the clouds, but poets, actually, walk on the earth. They’re grounded, feet-first, pointing forward. They’re moving around and paying attention at every moment." This is Don Share again, explaining a common misunderstanding that poets might not be relatable, or that their minds flutter off to other, interior worlds. But poets and writers are here, today, experiencing life in all its richness and heartbreak. Then they tell about it.

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5. Poetry satisfies our hungers

There’s a poem by Kathleen Lynch called “Appetite,” where she explains how we come into the world “hungry for milk and flesh,” how we are always looking for satisfaction, even when we are full. It’s a poem I eagerly included in the Eat This Poem cookbook because it speaks to a universal, somewhat mysterious and illusive need inside each of us—that is, having our hungers satisfied, both physically and emotionally.

Do we ask for the food lineage we inherit? No, I don’t believe we do. We are born into families who teach us to love the food in our blood from past generations. And yet, when we grow up and leave home, those cravings remain.

While we wait for meals to cook, poetry can help fill the gap with nourishing words, coating our hearts like soup on a spoon, or our grandmother’s tomato sauce. Whatever it is you need, there is always a poem to carry you.

What are some of reasons you love poetry? Let me know in the comments!

*Some of these links are affiliate links, which means I receive a very small payment at no extra cost to you.

A Big Writing Mistake—Or, the Most Overused Word in My Manuscript

A few days after Thanksgiving, I received a note from my editor that the book was going to print very soon. Next week! That meant in early December, Eat This Poem was off to the press. I wrote back, exactly: “Eeek! (And also, pretty exciting!)”

Getting to this point was roughly a seven month process that included several rounds of revisions—from my editor, me, and a team of copyeditors trained to find inconsistencies like “Can we say yellow onion instead of brown onion?” or “Pepper is listed in the ingredients, but not in the directions.” There was also a line that said “bring out the earthy beer flavor,” which should have read “earthy beet flavor.” Thank heavens for them.

Way before this happened, though, I noticed a big writing mistake.

As I sipped my tea and read each chapter, words began rising up from the page. Familiar words. I decided to run a search in my Word doc, and discovered one particular word was used throughout the manuscript exactly 20 times!

Nudge

Once I realized the oversight, I went back and found a new way to say whatever it was I was trying to say. I left a few nudges, of course. I do love the word, after all, but decided three or four mentions was far better than several dozen.

That’s what happens when you read and re-read—you notice things you never noticed before.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, this kind of writing mistake is a relatively easy one to fix. A quick use of the search feature let me know exactly how many times the word appeared, and from there, it was just a matter of working through all the mentions and deciding which to keep and which to change.

Want more lessons from my book-writing journey? Catch up on past posts!