70. Writing in the Margins, Then & Now

Writing in the margins was born from constraints.

When I finished graduate school in the early part of 2007, I shifted from working part-time to working full-time.

And I've talked about this period of my life on the show before, and there's also a chapter in Wild Words that's anchored around this story called The Season of Discontent.

So I won't spend a too long here, but as you might imagine, it was a time of real upheaval and transition both personally and creatively.

So prior to this, I'd been working part-time while I was in school, but this was the first time I was completely outside of any academic environment since basically starting kindergarten.

It meant my daily schedule was very different going from being in an office only a handful of hours a day and having more flexibility than I was used to, to spending that entire day at my desk.

And naturally, my writing life suffered in part because for a long time, I didn't have any language around creative seasons.

So I thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn't writing as much as I used to.

It wasn't until after I became a mother, so many, many years later, that this seasonal framework truly solidified itself and I could look back with great compassion to my younger self and realize, no, there was nothing wrong with you for being too tired to write at the end of a work day.

But instead, you were in a particular creative season.

that required reframing and new ways of working and a lot of tenderness during this transition.

So this particular season of discontent for me lasted roughly two years, if I'm being honest, and what pulled me out of it was a food blog.

My very first one, which actually predates Eat This Poem, and it was called Cooking After Five.

It is no longer available on the internet.

And I named it that because I was literally that was the time that I was cooking after five o'clock and it became a place where I could explore a new type of writing, indulge in my interest in photography and also cook, which was both a necessity and something I also happened to find very enjoyable and often relaxing after work.

So fast forward four years, I still didn't have the language for what writing in the margins actually was, but I was starting to do it intuitively.

At this point, I had moved.

I was living in Los Angeles, building a career in philanthropy at the time, and I My first food blog wasn't inspiring me anymore.

So I started a new one.

I started Eat This Poem, which I eventually developed into a cookbook.

And This season, writing my first book was when writing in the margins truly took hold, where I was naming it and actively planning around it.

So I was commuting and working full time, but I had this window of opportunity I didn't want to waste.

So I figured out how to make it useful.

I used my lunch breaks to write a lot.

I also used my commute to think about recipes and stories for the headnotes.