The World's Ending, I'm Still Writing
A newsletter about why I publish weekly (because the other essay isn't ready)
Keep publishing. That’s all, I tell myself. This one consistent goal can transform from feeling embarrassingly small to nearly impossible.
And of course, there’s more. What I really want is to write essays (and books) about how hunger, estrangement from each other, animals, and the earth, and injustice overlap. I want to look closely at what’s happening in my local food system and connect it to national and global issues. There is a growing literature that complicates the traditionally glossy world of food magazines and insists, reminds, that what we eat and the quality of our lives are always closely connected. There is no such thing as a-political food, but what are the specific politics of the food I’m eating?
Earlier this week I read Olga Koutseridi’s essay, “Invisible Labor of Being a Food Writer in 2024.” She writes eloquently about the seemingly endless list of work and the pressure to keep up a polished veneer. Olga writes, “Of course, what we see on social media is a highly crafted product and a carefully directed performance. Making the labor of it all completely invisible. We don’t know or get to see the reality of what it takes to create social media content, write articles and books, shoot and edit photos and videos. We only see the version that artists and creators choose to share.” Writing honestly about the work – making the labor visible – is a necessary accompaniment to the food-focused work. I’m always grateful to read about it when other people are writing, but I still feel a twinge of failure when it’s my turn. Like today.
Writing encompasses all of my paid work, but by hours it’s part-time – although it occupies a ‘full-time’ portion of my brain. I’ve been freelance for ten years, since my oldest was born and the reality of childcare costs and my desire to be with my child coalesced. My fourth child is now nine months old and I’m the parent at home (including homeschooling my kids) while my husband works a 9-5. While I have zero desire to write about parenting for publication, it deeply informs the way I write, when I write, how my brain is wired, and the hours I have to write.
This newsletter in the form it is now, came soon after I had my youngest child last June. I had been publishing this newsletter for 6ish months and republishing old work while I took time off writing new essays for her first six weeks. (Time I could only take “off” my unpaid newsletter because my husband has a job that has a regular pay schedule, plus those “luxuries” in the US like healthcare and parental leave.) I’d been wanting to publish interviews about art and creativity, but the piece missing that I couldn't figure out at first and was causing the project to stall was – why? To what end? To just talk about creativity in a general sense? When the interviews weren’t happening how I envisioned, I started publishing anyway. But it wasn’t quite right until I realized what I really wanted to write about was food, climate, and labor through a liberation / social justice lens.
With my essay “Death is Part of the U.S. Agrarian Utopia” I tapped into something new for me. The essay marks a turning point for this newsletter, and probably for my writing and personhood overall. It also marks the time that you started finding me, reading the essays, and letting me know by numbers and reception that I was onto something. Numbers aren’t the only marker, but they can be telling: When I started this newsletter in January 2023 I had 301 subscribers collected over years of other newsletter attempts. In August 2023 I had 326. Today I have 718, with very little ‘promotion’ effort on my part because there often aren’t enough minutes left in the day. I’m really proud of what I’ve published and grateful for the conversations that have come out of it, online and in my local community.
And some weeks I run into the brick wall of time much sooner than anticipated. It’s Wednesday and I usually have a solid draft by now, or close to it, that I wrap up on Thursday and schedule for Friday morning. I’m nowhere near that with the essay I’m working on. It’s unspooling and rather than hack it in half, or thirds, and polish it up to make a decently solid point, like I often do — I decided it needs more time. I don't want to cut it into pieces. I want to finish it and send it out then, or see if a magazine will publish it. All that takes time, much more time than I have between now (Wednesday night) and Friday morning. I return to my goal of continuing to publish, if not my ideal essay at least marking the time, the day, and my work that is very real even if it is impossible to show you entirely right now.
Feeling like our lives are too busy to write about how hunger is connected to injustice is connected to the genocide in Gaza (and other global atrocities) is the point. It’s a real feeling, and the US systems of oppression thrive when people decide they don’t have time to write their justice-focused newsletter or organize in their community. If participating in counterculture activism is optional it’s a sign you (talking to myself) are benefiting from an unjust system. This newsletter isn’t optional for me and is a practice of sustained focus even while my writing hours are few. It isn’t about proving anything except to myself: That I am practicing writing, reading, deconstructing, and publishing.
The more I read and write the more I see how much more I have in me to write, and I just pray I live a long life and can continue. Coming to food writing at a time when the writers ahead of me are sharing honestly about how hard it is (shoutout to
’s recent IG stories, ’s writing about recipe development, and Olga’s essay, but there’s more) is weird. I feel late to a party — missed the early enthusiasm and showed up for the brutal honesty. I hope that as I grow as a writer I can publish more and edit other people’s writing and do more than I am now. But I think if knew the world was ending during my lifetime, I’d keep doing what I’m doing. Writing, reading, talking to other people online and in my neighborhood, and publishing here on Fridays.A huge note of thanks to
and for starting “an inclusive food writing community on Discord for women who publish newsletters about food” and wrangling folks in different time zones into a Zoom call where we talked about goals for our newsletters. If you’re a woman in food writing, check it out!
The Good Enough Weekly comes out every Friday, alternating an essay (like today) with Of the Week. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks. More info here. And my zine of adapted Irish fairytales, Desert Pookas, is available for preorder now!
I really enjoyed reading this, Devin. I think about the timing, too, and try to remember that it’s another excuse to not write.
The art of food writing is starting to become under appreciated. We need more newsletters like yours. It is so important to keep writing and highlight these issues.