In her introduction to The Measure of Her Powers: The M.F.K. Fischer Reader, Ruth Reichl concludes with this anecdote:
When I mentioned how strange it must be, after writing into a void all these years, to suddenly become so popular she replied practically, “When you write you have no idea if you’ll ever be read by any human being.”
“So,” I said, “you write for yourself?”
Mary Frances looked horrified. “Write to yourself?” she said. “It’s like kissing yourself, don’t you think?” She had a habit of dismissing things she considered silly by simply saying, “Oh, ridiculous!” and I half expected her to say that now. But she didn’t. Turning suddenly thoughtful she said, “I have to write towards somebody I love.” (xi)
* * *
I learned to cook because I was in love.
He was tall—very tall. He played in a band. He was smart—oh so smart. From the moment I met him, while interviewing said band for our college newspaper, I was smitten. I would run into him at house parties and around campus, flirt shamelessly, then revel in the narcotic of erotic exhilaration when he would flirt back.
Ours was a slow courtship. And then, one January night, being the gentleman that he was, he drove me back at my dorm just as a huge snowstorm began. He leaned over to brush the first snowflakes from my face, then bent down and kissed me. That was the one perfect moment in our romance.
A wise friend of mine once told me that in every relationship, there is one person who feels more strongly than the other person. I was desperate to win him mind, body, and soul, but my attempts to impress this man with my intellectual prowess resulted in me getting my ass kicked, metaphorically of course, on every topic I tried: philosophy, politics, theology, literature, post-modernism.
So I decided to cook him dinner.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I chose that particular path in my attempt to make him fall wholly in love with me. At that time in my life, the sole cookbook in my arsenal was the Betty Crocker cookbook, a recent Christmas present from my mother. Spiral bound, it had recipes in it for dishes like meatloaf, stew, chili, chicken bakes—not exactly the food of seduction.
As I replaced Betty Crocker back on her shelf with a sigh, I remembered K.’s chicken. While I was home on Christmas break, a sweet friend of mine had made me dinner: chicken tenders from the frozen aisle in the grocery store, defrosted, marinated briefly in store-bought ranch dressing, doused with bread crumbs from a blue cardboard container, then baked. I remembered it as being delicious.
I went to the store, some cavernous Midwest grocery, where I bought huge hormone-stuffed, saline-pumped breasts of chicken, a plastic squeeze bottle of ranch dressing, the aforementioned blue cardboard container of breadcrumbs, and two big heads of broccoli.
He arrived promptly at six, bounded eagerly into my kitchen, and asked “What are we having?”
As he gazed around him at the broccoli still in its plastic bag, the chicken sitting in the gluey white dressing, the tin of bought breadcrumbs, and the other accoutrements of the dinner on the red plastic counters, I could feel his disappointment.
Bravely, he headed over to the broccoli and began to chop it, carefully, into small florets to be sautéed. Meanwhile, I began to cook the chicken, feeling just as I did during our conversation on determinism versus free-will.
When I couldn’t tell if the breasts were cooked completely, he slit open one of the gigantic breasts to gauge its readiness. They were crispy and golden on the outside, raw and bloody in the center. He gently moved me aside, turned the heat down, and took over for me at the stove. Relieved but ashamed, I sipped wine and watched. At that moment I inwardly vowed to learn to cook. I knew it was the only way I would ever find love.
* * *
As I was learning to cook, I was also learning to write. Immediately after completing my undergraduate degree in English literature, I started a graduate degree in English literature with a concentration in the Writing of Poetry.
Just before my graduation in 2001, an older woman in the program pulled me aside one day. “You’re a good writer,” she said, “and you have talent, but you won’t be really great until you can write about something that other people are interested in—something besides sex.”
But sex has always been all I want to write about.
My first “real” poem, written for an Advanced Workshop for Poet Swans and taught by the marvelous and amazing Sister Eva Hooker at my undergraduate institution, St. John’s University, was called “First Communion” compared giving a blow job to receiving Eucharist. In my defense, I had just fallen in love, and everyone knows what happens to your mind when that happens, especially in your early twenties. The poem itself was prose-y, bulky, and unwieldy. But bless her heart, Sister Eva treated my work respectfully and evocatively. Like all the poems I wrote during my undergraduate years, that particular piece has long been recycled— but I’m still writing about sex, and I’m not going to stop.
Until my early twenties, Catholicism provided very strict parameters for me to explore my sexuality, using terms like “sacrament” and “fornication.” Needless to say, the extreme dichotomy presented me with some pretty extreme views on the act of sex—sex was sacred. Sex was profane.
And of course, I ended being a really sexual person from the get-go. When I was 16, I finally got my first kiss, and I asked my mother if I could go to a movie with my new boyfriend. “No,” my mother said. “I don’t want you sitting in a dark movie theater getting all lusted up.” When my parents imposed no such restrictions on my sisters, even encouraging them to date, I thought it was just because they had loosened up in their old age. But my mother told me recently that the reason they only restricted me was because my sisters weren’t as sexual as I was. So apparently even as a virgin I was still sending out the vibes.
And of course, when I did lose my virginity, and for many years after, I had only guilt, shame, and judgment as a way to understand my experiences with the actual act of sex, my own individual and developing sexuality, and the desire continually welling inside me. As a result, my poems, for many years, were sort of like going to confession—acts of contrition— complete with the self-imposed penance of sharing them with my poetry group or at the occasional reading.
And then two things happened to change how I understood sex: I went back to graduate school to get an MFA in poetry, and I started teaching literature (not in that order.)
* * *
I am tenured English faculty at a local community college, where I teach writing, creative writing, and literature. Shortly after I earned tenure, I went back to graduate school to get a second Master’s degree—this time an MFA in poetry. My first semester of graduate school, I had complete and total writer’s block. It was August in Seattle, and the produce at the West Seattle Farmer’s Market was unbelievably beautiful: fresh peas, beautiful bok choy, tiny little baby carrots with little roots still attached . . . it was so much easier to fantasize about what I wanted to do to those vegetables than it was to write a poem. “Write about cooking,” my then-advisor, Joe Millar, would urge. “Write a poem about making something hella good,” he wrote to me in a letter. “Like a soup or something. And then have it be about a relationship.”
So I wrote about food. And while writing about roasting a chicken, I found myself writing about my divorce. Writing about stirring a risotto turned into a poem about my sister entering a Carmelite monastery, as well as my own emerging feelings about Catholicism. And fondling a stack of heirloom tomatoes gave me sudden insight into how men might view the variety and the imperfection of women’s bodies with desire.
In our graduate program at Pacific University, I got a little bit of a reputation for writing “foodsex” poems. But I found that poems were not the best medium for the kind of writing I wanted to do about food and sex. There seemed to be too much missing.
Rather, a particular genre of creative nonfiction—the lyric essay—an essay that moves and operates like a poem—seemed to work best. So you’ll find on this blog meditations on the metaphor of food to reflect on sex.
* * *
For my first few years, especially while I was in the tenure process, I only dabbled in sex in the classroom—bringing out the occasional evocative poem, like Marie Howe’s gorgeous “Practicing,” Dorianne Laux’s fabulous poem “Kissing,” or Sharon Olds’ “Sex Without Love,” but I never really pushed myself, or my students, to really explore sex in a sustained way.
Then I received permission from my department to teach Introduction to Reading Drama. The first time I taught the class, I fumbled my way through Oedipus Rex, Othello, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece How I Learned to Drive, and Edward Albee’s The Goat. Later, as I reflected on the various ideas that had emerged through class discussions and seminars, I realized that love of the other, or, more importantly, sex with the other, was an incredibly interesting common theme. In Oedipus, of course, he’s married and thus screwing his own mother—in Othello, much to the dismay of the Venetian court, the Moor is sexing a white woman. In How I Learned to Drive, an uncle wants to make love to his niece, and in The Goat, an Oedipus-like character, Martin, is in love with, and fucking, a goat.
Inter-racial love, love between members of different classes, incest, bestiality . . . these are subjects that contemporary American culture deals with largely through talk shows, and that medium leaves little room for love, compassion, empathy, or understanding. Rather, it seems talk show formats invite only judgment—displaced onto the individuals who are struggling to understand their desires. How can we be fully human if we don’t understand the complexity of desire—not just the desire in others, but in ourselves?
Let me give you an example: Vogel is alarmed at the growth of “victim culture,” and Drive can be read as a reaction to its rise: “’I hate the word victim,’” she has said. ‘It’s a buzz word people use these days. We’re all victims just by virtue of being alive’” (qtd in Bigsby 327). Vogel says she wrote the play to explore the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us. As a teacher, as a woman, as a writer, I found that question incredibly provocative. And so, that quarter, my students and I explored that question: “What gifts does Uncle Peck give his niece, Lil Bit through the course of the play?”
As we discussed the characters and their evolution (devolution in the case of Peck), we found ourselves asking similar questions of our own lives. As we explored how the play conceived of sex and love and the Other, we wrote and shared our own stories of the people who had hurt us; the people who had harmed us (in the act of sex and otherwise), even as they loved us desperately. Thinking about those people in terms of the gifts they had given us turned out to be transformative, which led to self-awareness and healing.
So for the last few years, I have themed all my literature courses around sex and love. My syllabus actually has a warning label. But even the most conservative of students stay on. Teaching plays, and, in particular, teaching Shakespeare, has taught me so much about the act of sex, the fluidity of sexuality, love, courtship, and gender. I have long yearned for a forum to share some of these insights into literature and sexuality, and I intend for this blog to be that place—I want to use the genres of creative nonfiction to do a sort of literary scholarship.
* * *
M.F.K. Fischer’s words about the paradox of writing seem particularly significant to this situation, my foray into this world of blogging. I have no idea if I’ll ever be read by any human being. But I am not writing for myself.
Like M.F.K. Fischer, I have to write towards someone I love.
Sometimes, after a discussion of courtly love in Romeo and Juliet, my writing is towards my students. Sometimes, after exploring the unresolved conflicts in one of Shakespeare’s comedies, say A Midsummer Night’s Dream, my writing is directed towards my colleagues. Sometimes, after a night of lobster grilled with hot peppers and even hotter sex, my writing is directed to a lover. Other times, after a particularly provocative consummation of a meal, my writing is directed to other self-proclaimed “foodies.”
And always, always, my writing is directed to my friends— my wonderful friends— whom I love so very, very much. Without them, I would have no experiences to write about, no one to write to. And as I am not the best correspondent, as many of them will attest to, this blog is always, always, always, a letter to them about how I’ve been lately. And, to respect their privacy, all names have been changed or omitted entirely. Dear reader, you understand.
So this blog, in essence, is driven by love—a collection of love letters to my various worlds.
And if this is to be the first of many love letters, I’ll sign off as I always do.
Peace,
Jen
