Unplated: An Interview with K. Anne Amienne
On ritual spaces and writing as a sensual, joyful act
This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.
For longtime subscribers, you've probably noticed me mention my work as a writing coach. Writing coaching is one of my great joys, and the coaching business I work through, Scholars & Writers, is run by author, scholar, and former podcaster K. Anne Amienne.
Though Anne and I now work together to support other writers, we initially met through our own food writing, over a decade ago.
Anne's approach to writing coaching is one I love: building skills that help us become the writers we want, setting boundaries around our time, and acknowledging our successes along the way.
Working as a coach has been transformative for my writing, and I was eager to include Anne in this series to see how her work with food informs her work with writing clients. In this interview, she shares how food can support our practice as scholars and writers, and how creating a ritual space helps us find enjoyment in sharing our ideas with the world.
JS: Can you please tell me a bit about your background? How did you come to writing (and writing coaching) as a career?
KAA: From a very young age, I liked telling stories and tucked into every writing assignment with gusto. While I was in college, I TA’d a creative non-fiction course at a summer program for “gifted and talented” middle-school students, and then I went on to teach similar courses there as a grad student. But during the academic year, I was also teaching academic essay writing to undergrads, and the training I went through to do that really sharpened my thinking about strong writing in a lot of different ways.
No matter what kind of writing I’m teaching, I love helping others imagine more interesting questions and tell stories through analysis. Scholars & Writers evolved out of that drive as I realised that, at this stage of my life, I most enjoy working with female faculty to help them both undo the trauma that’s built into the academic writing life and develop more intellectually fulfilling projects that rekindle a little fire in their soul and touch a larger readership.
JS: I think one thing we connected over early on was that we both took a somewhat rambling path to get to writing about food. How did you come to write about food, and how do you see your background (for example, your literature PhD) as informing that work?
KAA: This is maybe a longer story than you’re looking for, but here goes. My Ph.D. work was on food and class in early modern English literature, so I had the chance to write on food in a scholarly way on a regular basis. I chose the subject because so much of my life up to that point had been about food. I lived with my grandmother until I was 5 and learned how to cook and run a domestic kitchen by watching her keep her old Midwestern farm ways alive while feeding 5 kids and having a full-time job. Later on it was just me and my mom, who worked long hours while going to school. So, I learned early to keep myself busy and keep us both fed on something other than frozen dinners by cooking and reading food magazines -- even as unattainable as some of those recipes were in a working-class Missouri city in the 1980’s. By high school my mom helped me set up a small baking business to make money for college. So, food was just always there. And it was natural that a writer would want to write about it.
Then in 2004/5 my husband had a grant from a joint venture with Duke University and Apple to bring iPods into the classroom at the same time this brand new medium of podcasting emerged. We worked together to launch one of the earliest food podcasts (Eat Feed) and I quickly fell into developing scripts, creating storylines, and interviewing guests. (Although at the time a lot of them said “a podwhat?”) Because of the podcast an agent reached out to me, and from there came my cookbook, Eat Feed Autumn Winter. That sparked the desire to publish shorter pieces that could be a blend of the practical kitchen background I had as a kid, the lyrical pull I feel as a writer, and the cultural analysis that comes from being an academic. My food and ritual column for The Kitchn was a such a fun gig in that respect and it also fuelled the pieces that I wrote for NPR’s The Salt, too.
JS: One thing I appreciate about your approach to writing coaching is that you ask people to engage with their writing in a variety of ways. Can you tell me a bit about your approach to writing coaching? And what motivated you to craft the Scholars and Writers approach in the way that you have?
KAA: I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees in English literature at the University of Chicago, which, with slogans like “hell does freeze over,” is notoriously, erm … brutal. (My Ph.D. advisor once told me that my writing made it seem like I came to the English language later in life). I promised myself that whenever I had a chance to make things better for other academic writers, I would.
Here’s the obvious: people write in a more productive way when they feel less anxious and more supported and when someone helps them see the “bigness” of what they’re doing. It’s just hard getting a lot of institutional structures to recognize that, but this is what drives a lot of what I do at Scholars & Writers.
JS: Our writing, like our meals, interconnects to our lives well beyond page or plate, and this is reflected in the client questionnaires you send out. How do you incorporate food into these questionnaires? How does tapping into a client's connection with food help strengthen their practice as a writer?
KAA: I ask clients to tell me about food and drinks that give them energy and engage their senses or that they associate with success. Then I use that info to help them create a writing ritual, a time and a place that they retreat into on a regular basis to do the thing that they really want to do. So much of what I do focuses on getting people to associate writing with pleasure and success rather than pain and criticism. Food is a sensual thing that allows a writer to tap into their own joy at a visceral level.
For some people that’s a certain appetizer from the dinner at a job interview they aced, for others it’s a specific kind of tea they drank during all those great memories of talking about their work with best friends in grad school, and for others it’s a special kind of chocolate that just feels really “my comfort, my time.” (Although the price makes them only an occasional part of my own writing ritual, I am very, very motivated by the elegance of Rococo Chocolates and a glass of non-alcoholic champagne. But other days it’s about the brain-sparking sharpness of an awesome pickle on my husband’s homemade bread.)
I work to push away the deprivation-reward models that some writers have grown accustomed to: “okay, as soon as you finish your revisions you get to have lunch” or “once you’ve written 1000 words, then you deserve a nice coffee.” Instead, I say give yourself what you need to do well at the beginning of your writing session. We write with greater concentration and more enjoyment – and thus stick with it longer – when our nervous system isn’t on fire, when we are comfortable, relaxed, and well-fed.
It’s perhaps an overused quote but I think it persists because it still resonates almost a century after Virginia Woolf wrote it to highlight how female academics are usually given less than their male colleagues: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
JS: Your guiding questions for clients seem to tap into a mindful appreciation of food, in that the questionnaire helps them identify and work with positive memories around food. Have you ever explored mindful eating as a writing ritual with clients? If so, how did it go?
KAA: I appreciate the idea of mindful eating, but that’s outside my area of expertise. And if I ever have a client who has a difficult relationship with food, we put anything to do with that subject aside and focus on other sensory experiences that will help support and motivate them.
JS: Anything else you'd like to tell me?
KAA: Write for your most engaged reader . And have something delicious nearby while you do.
You can learn more about Scholars & Writers, and about Anne, at this link.