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.
I've been fortunate to have so much interest in this series, that I'm bringing on additional interviews: So instead of one interview a month, I'll send you two! Building on our interview with Anne, I wanted to approach writing from a different perspective, and so I turned to Jennifer Billock. Jennifer is an award-winning writer, bestselling author, and editor of the Kitchen Witch Newsletter. She is currently dreaming of an around-the-world trip with her Boston terrier.
While Jennifer definitely has one of her feet in the world of food writing, the other often finds itself well outside that world, particularly in the worlds of witchcraft and of history. But what I love about Jennifer is that she's able to interconnect all of these different fields and can comfortably write within those intersections (as with her Kitchen Witch newsletter).
Here, we talk about diving into those in-between spaces, and how adopting the perspective of 'and/with' rather than 'either/or' strengthens our perspectives as writers and human beings.
JS: Tell me a bit about your work. How did you come to writing as a profession?
JB: Writing was actually kind of serendipitous for me. I was originally in school for vocal music education. I stayed in that program for a couple years, began student teaching, and realized I absolutely despised everything about being a high school choir director. It was my dream since grade school, so I wasn't quite sure what to do. I'd always been a good writer, so I changed my major to English, then left the college I was at to go to community college while I figured out what I wanted to do. I came to journalism by literally opening a college catalog to a random page, closing my eyes, and pointing. Landing on journalism jived with my interests and love of writing, so I changed my entire life plan and enrolled in journalism school.
Now, I can't imagine ever doing anything else. I excelled in school, working on my undergrad magazine and becoming the editor-in-chief of my grad school magazine. I started freelancing my first year of undergrad j-school, so by the time I got to grad school, my professors already knew who I was. I got an internship with a travel and tourism magazine here in Chicago, and once I graduated with my masters, I quit my corporate communications job that I worked during the days (grad school was nights) and started working for a local newspaper.
From there, I went on to be senior editor at two food magazines, then became editor-in-chief of a furniture business magazine. It was a terrible job, and while I was there, I was building up my freelance client list and eventually forced them to fire me. I went freelance with a goal to write about my loves, food and travel, and have been freelance ever since.
Coincidentally, I did reach back into teaching. I teach online classes - one for general food writing, one for food memoir writing, and one for travel writing. It's easier without having to play the piano, teach students in person, or deal with students disrupting class.
JS: You write about food, but you write on other topics as well. When you aren't writing about food, what are you typically writing about?
JB: If it's not food, it's typically travel or history. Or generally a combination of all of those. I also regularly write about real estate and health, and I do content marketing work as well. I love writing personal essays, too. At one point I had a column with Playboy that was tons of fun, about unique kinks people have.
JS: One thing I appreciate about your work is that you understand the interconnection between the fields/interest areas/etc. we tend to write about. Food and history and witchcraft, for example, all contain elements of each other. How does this interconnection appear within your work?
JB: My work lives in that interconnection. Writing about food is great, and fun, but I think it has much more depth when you explore the history, science, witchcraft, etc. aspects of it. The first thing I do when writing about any food topic is research the history of the topic, and it's led to some really great pieces. I wrote one, for example, about the evolution of the food astronauts eat in space, with quotes from astronauts about their current favorite space food.
For food-related witchcraft stories, it's important for me to research each ingredient - not just for how it was historically used and where it came from, but what it's currently used for.
I don't think you can accurately understand a meal, or ingredient, or farming method, or food ritual, or other food topic, without knowing its origin and what people think about it. There's a level of context you don't get unless you research those things, and that's what I try to convey in my work.
JS: Tell me about Kitchen Witch: How did the idea emerge, and how has it evolved over time?
JB: Before Kitchen Witch, I'd been trying to write about witchcraft for mainstream publications and was having a terrible time with it. It seemed almost too specialized for most editors to accept my pitches. I was also trying to write for witchcraft-focused publications, but was having a terrible time with that as well. They paid a pittance, if they paid anything at all. Further, I'd noticed a distinct lack of diverse voices within the witchcraft writing I had been seeing.
It seemed like everything was from White Wiccan Women, and completely overlooked (or appropriated) the incredibly varied histories and styles of witchcraft and paganism that other cultures practiced. I wanted to hear those stories.
Kitchen Witch evolved from that lack of multiculturalism, the lack of properly paying publications for witches, and the dearth of stories I saw about food-related witchcraft topics. I wanted to provide diverse writers with a way to write about witchcraft and get paid a fair amount for it, and I wanted it to be in line with the trajectory of my career, so food was a natural choice.
It was an abrupt idea for me - I was sitting on my couch early in the pandemic and thought, "Hey... I can accomplish these things with a newsletter." I'd recently heard about Substack, and within 30 minutes, had created my own and put out a call for pitches from diverse writers to talk about food-related witchcraft topics.
When Kitchen Witch first started, I released an issue once a week. It quickly became unsustainable. I had a PPP loan thanks to the pandemic, and used those funds to pay my writers. Everything was out of pocket. I had some paid subscriptions, and that helped, but it wasn't enough to pay all the writers what I thought they deserved.
Now, an issue comes out once a month, with special issues for paid subscribers on certain days like sabbats or witchy events. My writers still get paid the same (and one day, I hope more). I'm also beginning to do workshops that sit at the intersection of food and witchcraft, like my upcoming tyromancy workshop, which explores how to tell fortunes with cheese.
JS: For writers seeking to write at the intersection of multiple areas, like you do, what advice would you give them? How can we become more expansive in our ideas of what it means to "write about food"?
JB: One of the things I love about food is that it is always present. We eat certain things at certain times of the day; we eat differently based on where we are in the world, or our religion, or our morality, or our societal status. Food is political. It can be a gift. It can be a curse. It inspires people and businesses. It's intertwined with every aspect of life. One of the exercises I like to do with my coaching clients (I'm also a writing coach) when they're struggling with how to write about food is to have them list out a bunch of general topics. Think things like dance, computers, ocean science, really anything they're interested in.
Then, look at each topic through the lens of food. How do they come together? Perhaps you could write about the daily diet of a prima ballerina, or what oceanographers eat while they're out on ships for research trips. Maybe you could write about how food is reflected in emojis, or perhaps there's a new restaurant combining food with technology (like those sushi robots). Sometimes that's all it takes - looking at things from a different perspective or researching a topic combined with food, like searching Google for something like "pop art painters and food." Food is everywhere, you just need to tune into it.
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