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Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food

Useful Tips, Interviews, and Stories to Inspire Food Writers and Bloggers

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If You Want to Write a Biography About a Famous Person or Two…

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image for story on writing a biographyAt a conference I attended recently, a panel focused on two kinds of projects: writing a memoir and writing a biography. Moderated by Cara De Silva, the panelists were memoirists Elissa Altman, Mark Russ Federman, Madhur Jaffrey; and biographers Laura Shapiro and Anne Mendelson.

I zeroed in on Anne, author of Stand By the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America the Joy of Cooking. I had met her decades ago at a Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier. She clutched her typewritten address and read it to the crowd. It was an insightful and wry essay about her experience. She was the biographer of the [Read more…] about If You Want to Write a Biography About a Famous Person or Two…

Smitten Kitchen Shows You 100 Ways to Promote Recipes

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lead image for post about Deb PerelmanOne of the things food writers struggle with most is how to promote recipes in a way that sounds authentic and not too braggy. You know your recipe is “the best,” but you can’t keep saying that for every one you write.

So what can you do to improve your blog posts, recipe headnotes, and social media blurbs? First, I went back to my most visited post: 100 Verbs for Recipes, from Julia Child. Who else could I research, I wondered, who would [Read more…] about Smitten Kitchen Shows You 100 Ways to Promote Recipes

5 Ways To Boost Productivity When Writing About Food on the Side

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image for post on productivity

A guest post by Sarah Burchard

Barbecue sauce turned me into a writer. After 12 years of working in restaurant kitchens, I entered the world of entrepreneurship, launching a line of barbecue sauces and spice blends with a partner. At the same time, I started writing about food on the side with my blog about barbecue, taking notes wherever I went.

After seven fruitful years, I closed up shop and headed to Hawaii to pursue new dreams. While building a new career here and working on it full-time, I’m still [Read more…] about 5 Ways To Boost Productivity When Writing About Food on the Side

What I Learned by Starting a Blog Interview Series

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image for post on starting an interview series.A guest post by Lisa Johnson

A few years ago, I started a food interview series called “You Pick Six.” To my surprise, I have now completed 21 interviews of local food bloggers, food publicists, authors, news anchors, food entrepreneurs and others.

When I started blogging in 2006, I wrote at least one weekly post. But sometimes life gets in the way. Late 2014 into early 2015 was a blur of stress. My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and our family [Read more…] about What I Learned by Starting a Blog Interview Series

What I Learned Writing a Cookbook as a Late Bloomer

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A guest post by Sara Bir

My whole life I’ve dreamed of writing a cookbook. But even with formal culinary chops and years of experience as a writer, it seemed like no one in the publishing industry took me seriously. So I guess you could say I’m a late bloomer.

It probably didn’t help that my two previous book proposals were hardly mainstream. There was my idea for The Great Big Book of Hot Dogs, which I envisioned as a lavish cultural history of hot dogs; and The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook, a book with nothing but pawpaw recipes. Do you even know what pawpaws are? Most people don’t. [Read more…] about What I Learned Writing a Cookbook as a Late Bloomer

How Michael Twitty Wrote the James Beard Book of the Year

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image of Michael Twitty titleI’ve been trying to nail down Michael Twitty for an interview since May, when he won the James Beard Book of the Year for The Cooking Gene, as well as the award for Best Narrative Writing. And the awards are for his first book, which makes them even more impressive.

Twitty’s book explores the history of his Black ancestors through Southern food, his Jewishness, his coming out as a gay man, and more. You will find the history of race, politics and enslavement through his lens. It’s a long, complicated, funny, sad (about his slave ancestors), and thoughtful book that will stay with you. A section about discovering a relative who was a slave made me cry, and his good humor made me laugh out loud. His genealogy history is beautifully researched, something difficult and challenging to do well.

It’s been tough to get Twitty’s attention. This year he’s given hundreds of talks, held cooking events, been interviewed a bunch of times, taken people on a trip to Africa, worked on his second book, and he wrote this piece for Bon Appetit. Before that he wrote some op-eds for The Guardian, if you’re curious about his other published work. Also see his blog, Afroculinaria, which launched his writing career.

He deserves all these opportunities and more. If you haven’t read The Cooking Gene yet, what are you waiting for? It is not your usual food memoir, which is a really good thing. We were overdue for something fresh and complicated. It’s much more complicated, actually, but worth your time. I’ve read it twice.

After a few months of emailing, I tried Twitter to contact Twitty. That worked better. Twitty answered my nosy questions with great thoughtfulness. Some of what he wrote surprised me, because Twitty made me think about old ideas in a new way. In this interview, you’ll also learn about risk, sacrifice, and what it takes to write a national award-winning book.

Here’s Michael Twitty on winning the James Beard Book of the Year, and what it was like to write The Cooking Gene:

Q. How has being a winner changed you?

A. It’s taken a lot to really sink in that I’ve won two James Beard Awards. I am still pinching myself. It’s an incredible honor.

But it does go to the point about manifesting what you want and need.

I downloaded a picture of two James Beard Awards about the time I was writing The Cooking Gene. I stared at that picture every single day. The feelings around those meditations were very clear: I wanted to create a work that was worthy of the Beard canon.

How has it changed me? I want to see more people who are not the usual suspects like me win the award and benefit from its cachet.

Q. Why did you want to write The Cooking Gene?

A. Write the book you want to see, right? Write a book where your passions are unified. For me that’s the intersection of the historiography of early Black America, genealogy, food writing, racial reconciliation and healing.

The Cooking Gene is one part of my story in book form. It’s part of a literary triptych. I was told very early on that stories like mine don’t matter. Too niche. Too minority. That really hurt because it meant that to some, my invisibility was necessary to maintain a status quo.

image of Michael Twitty at Beards

Twitty wore a traditional African caftan to accept his book awards. He was probably the first winner in the history of the Beard awards to do so.

For me the ancestors are the star. In American food writing, references to “Africans” are really lazy and uncomfortable. These ethnic groups are not just “Africans,” as one cultural bloc, but many ethnic groups. They have millennia old cuisines. As consumers, it is really important to restore our respect and humanity to these shapers of the American and global table.

Q. Did people want you to pare this memoir down from its many subjects: Black, Jewish, gay, Southern food historian, researcher of your descendents?

A. There has been that critique by some. But to do so would obscure the point. All of this energy is in one body. We are all like that. But in our personal bricolage, sometimes just talking about one part is not enough. Answering the questions and challenges about our intersectionality through food memoir is really important, especially when you come from cultures where material expression engenders its own vocabulary and narratives.

Q. It’s not really a food memoir. Was that a conscious decision?

A. Oh it’s totally a food memoir, but it’s not the food memoir people are used to. I made the conscious decision to really explore — beyond nostalgia — the life of the African American table. This is one of the first works in American food literature that is not a cookbook that traces the chef back to the chef’s culinary origins. Instead of that being the parsley on the plate, I made it the entree.

Q. How hard was it to find an agent and publisher?

A. After my viral hit post on Paula Deen, about a dozen agents flew at me. Publishers were very keen to see I was already working on something.

Q. It took you six years to write The Cooking Gene. Do you consider that a long time?

A. Well, sort of. I had no idea I was researching a book and that actually made the writing time longer in the end. I should have been more disciplined early on. In other words: take real notes, make real outlines, free write.

In 2012 I did most of my Southern Discomfort Tour with my ex partner. By 2013 I was ready for a next step but it wasn’t until Paula that I had a direction. I had to take two years to do a lot of mental revisits when I could have captured it best the first time around. By 2014 I had a contract. I hit a snag in terms of delivery, and by mid-2017, the book saw the light of day.

Q. What was the process like?

A. Genealogy is really difficult to work with in today’s world. The DNA results complicate matters. I was very dependent on a process that is no respecter of contracts.

I wrote the different layers of the book– genealogical, culinary, personal, genetic — and interviews in stages and kind of did a word lasagna. When you read The Cooking Gene you’re looking at 300 days a year for three years going to a coffeeshop at 4 a.m. and not leaving until 11 p.m. It’s dragging piles and piles of books with you everywhere. I brought 50 books on vacation just to write!

And I cooked. I paid a lot of attention to my feelings during historic food demos and I noted memories that came to mind as I made family recipes. I was constantly harvesting my own culinary history along with that of our Ancestors.

Q. Now you’re working on another memoir about being Black and Jewish, correct?  And there will be a third on “bearness and Blackness?”

A. My next book, Kosher Soul, is indeed slated for publication next year. It will center on Jewish food and learning and the intersection between being Black and Jewish. I’m working on it as we speak. I hope it will be followed by a book about LGBT identity and food, especially being a member of the “bear” subgroup of gay men. Not a secret: we like to eat.

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(Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link.)