One year of working with the kitchen door open

Reflecting on my favorite essays from The Good Enough Weekly

My desk this morning

On Jan. 6, 2023, I started this newsletter stating my intentions to “work with the garage door open,” as Robin Sloan put it, and be in your inbox every Friday of the coming year. There were around 250 of you then, and there are 541 of you as of writing this. Metrics aren’t why I began writing here, and not every metric is important (as Alicia Kennedy wrote about recently), and there being so many more of us here feels like signs of encouragement: Keep going. Reading, writing, and talking with each other matter. There is more to be explored. So thank you, so much, for being here.

Like my friend Michelle hilariously started her newsletter earlier this week, this email will be brief because I’m sure we’ve all had enough of everything. Partially to indulge myself, and partially to introduce myself a bit to anyone who’s found me randomly mixed into Substack notes or IG or wherever, I’d like to share a few of my favorite things I’ve published here this year and a little behind the scenes of the post.

Repeating myself until I remember

January 13 — I sent this out the day after the anniversary of my brother-in-law’s death. Skylar died of an OD in 2019, and that was a life-shattering day. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that everything I’ve written since then has been in partial dedication to him. And his memory continues to embolden me to say things that may scare me at the moment.

When I only cooked for myself

Feb 3 — Re-reading this short essay I see my beginnings of writing about cooking more directly, and bringing it into conversation with women who complicate and explore the work that happens in the kitchen. If I tallied up all the times I mentioned Rebecca May Johnson and Alicia Kennedy over the course of this year in the newsletter, it would be a lot and that’s because they both have been hugely influential and generous. Go buy Small Fires and No Meat Required if you haven’t already (and consider joining Alicia’s paid tier to get to discuss Small Fires in January and February – I’m so ready.)

To all the kitchens I've loved and left

June 9 — This year I’ve lived in three different houses, and this post I wrote right after moving into the second one. I moved a lot in my childhood and young adulthood, and I took time to remember the kitchens I cooked in from Elko, NV, to Scranton, PA. When I wrote this I was also two weeks away from giving birth and feeling very emotional.

Death is part of the U.S. agrarian utopia

August 4 — I consider this post the second beginning of this newsletter. After taking six weeks “off” after having my baby, I returned to publishing with more clarity about how I wanted to write about food, climate, and social justice issues. This essay is about a man who died in the fields of Yuma, picking vegetables during the heatwave. It’s also about my time volunteering for an organic farm in WA, and hope in the face of outrage.

Ethically grown local flour won’t absolve us from our moral dilemmas

September 29 — One thing about me is that I believe all people have a right to eat food that’s good for them and the environment. As the meme goes, who knew that would be a radical stance? In this post I turn a critical eye at myself and the beautiful (and expensive) flour I bake with. It’s also one of the posts where I include writing about the role of settlers in depleting the soil in Arizona and rejecting Indigenous knowledge (a topic I want to write more about in the coming year.)

Strangeness as opportunity, not threat

November 10 — Let me say it again, the Sonoran desert isn’t a wasteland, hasn’t ever been a wasteland. It is abundant – white settlers just didn’t know it and have passed that lineage of ignorance and xenophobia through history. In late 2020, I was working on an early draft of my novel and started to incorporate wild foods into the story. Tamara Stanger’s pies made with local and foraged ingredients had inspired me to have one of my characters make food with creosote blossoms, juniper berries, and prickly pear. I didn’t know that writing about food in my fiction (which is still sitting in a drawer) would lead me to newsletter writing about food systems, hunger, the environment, and home cooking.

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This is my 51st newsletter of the year, and I will be taking next week off! Despite being slightly attached to my publication streak and the little graphic Substack sends me, I think it’s time for some extra rest. 

Thank you for being here and being so generous with your reading and commenting time. You are appreciated, specifically by me! I hope the rest of the year is exactly what you need. See you on Jan 5.

Devin