Shauna Niequist's Blog

Bread & Wine Video 3: The Cooking Club

When Blaine and Bjorn and I began talking about this set of videos that would invite people into the stories and the soul of Bread & Wine, it was obvious that the Cooking Club would be a part of it, because they're so much a part of my life, such a central part of the life that takes place around our table. It would be so odd to create a set of videos, one after another, of me alone in my kitchen, because that's not how I live. 

My prayer for you is that you take the risk to gather up what could become your tribe, that you'll put in the minutes, the days, the texts, the visits, the phone calls, the hours around the table. And then along the way you'll find that time and love has knit you together, has created something much greater than the sum of its parts, much more significant than a group of individuals who like to cook or run or make music or whatever you do when you're together. My hope is that when you gather to do whatever you do, you find yourself shaped and transformed along the way, very much like we have been.

Hymns of The People

Our friends Nathan and Nathan and Becky (that’s right—two Nathans!) just released an album, and basically I think you should download it right this second. It’s fantastic.

Becky is a singer and songwriter and worship leader with Aaron at Willow, and her husband Nathan is the bass player in Aaron’s band--there’s a chapter about him in Bread & Wine called, appropriately enough, “The Bass Player’s Birthday.” And then the second Nathan is an old friend of ours who’s a super-talented musician and producer who grew up in this area and played with Aaron and bass-player-Nathan and Becky, and then recently moved to Seattle.

We adore all three of them, and we adore this album. I love to get a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of how creative things get made, so here’s the story behind it, written by bass-player-Nathan: 

“Hymns of the People started in our living room. We're all inspired by different types of music but we all also agreed that the deep connection to Christian history that hymns offer inspires us. Most people in our generation are missing out on that history, and there's very little inspiring music being made right now that is focused on hymns. So we decided we wanted to be a part of the movement that changed that. 

We split the project into roles. Becky would dive into the old Covenant hymnal that she used to sing out of as a little girl and find hymns that deeply connected to her. She would demo them keeping the integrity of the melody and then send the song to Nate and me. The melody is the backbone to all the hymns we recreated. No matter how we crafted the arrangement, anyone who was familiar with the hymn would be able to sing along. 

We picture a family listening to these hymns where a grandmother would be able to sing the hymn because she has been singing it her entire life while the granddaughter listens because the arrangements and music speak to her. 

Once a handful of hymns were chosen, then Nate and I would work on arranging them. Nate Yaccino was working in Seattle at major recording studios while working on major projects with bands like Soundgarden. After we landed on three hymns Becky and I booked a flight to Seattle. 

We scheduled our trip for 5 days. We spent the first two or three days in Nate's practice studio located above an old fishing dock and worked on the arrangements; Nate on drums or guitar, Becky on guitar or piano, and me on bass. We'd first hash out the tempo of the songs and work out any kinks in the arrangements. We then made a rough recording, typically just acoustic guitar and click track. Then we'd head to record in the studio for two or three days. 

The first phase of hymns (How Firm A Foundation, Come Ye Sinners, and Come Thou Fount) were recorded at Avast Recording Company (known for the recordings of Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses, Death Cab for Cutie, Soundgarden, and the Shins). The second phase (All Things Bright and Beautiful, Doxology, To God Be The Glory) was recorded at Robert Lang Studios (known for the recording of Nirvana, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder, and Warren G :) 

We arrived early and recorded late into the evening, often 12 hour days. Nate Yaccino played a major role in the studio session. He jumped from producer to drummer to electric guitarist. Nate and I would struggle through the often complicated and intricate arrangements and then Becky would step up to the microphone and sing the hymn in just one or two takes. 

Upon completion of the first two phases, we needed album art for the project and we decided to use the talents of one of my high school students. She's an extremely talented 17-year-old with an unbelievable imagination. She spent a weekend listening to the hymns and she came up with the album art that included a narwhal with a mustache and a monocle drinking tea at the bottom of the sea while listening to a phonograph!  

The final product of phase one and phase two are six of the best songs we have ever recorded. They meet the vision of the project in every way possible, deeply connected to tradition while being creative and inspirational.”

I've been listening to this album constantly, and my kids love it, too. Sometimes in the car, Henry asks for "rock & roll," but sometimes he asks for "something gentle." He means this album, and that's the perfect way to describe it. It's beautiful and gentle and deep, the perfect thing to serve as a soundtrack for this snowy season. 

And we're so lucky, because Nathan & Nathan & Becky are giving us a free download of one song, only here. It's one of my favorites. :) Here's a link to buy it on itunes, for more information about the project, here's their site, and if you'd like to follow them on Twitter, here they are. I hope you love it as much as I do. XO--S

Bread & Wine Video 2: Into the Mess

 

Because that’s what we’re really talking about, right? When we talk about why we don’t invite people over for dinner, or why we’re afraid to open our doors and gather people around our tables? We’re afraid that when they see our mess, they won’t love us anymore. Everyone’s mess is different, but everyone has a mess.

Maybe people will see that your marriage is in a rough and prickly season. Or that all is not well with your kids. Maybe people will see that your financial life is strained to the point of breaking, or that you really have no idea how to cook because your family growing up didn’t gather for meals, and maybe that makes you feel self-conscious. Maybe when you look around the house all you see are the things that are undone, mismatched, chipped and worse for wear. I get it. There have been seasons when I’ve felt like our mess is more than I can manage inviting people into.

But this is the deal: the only way through is courage, vulnerability, connection. If you decide to keep your front door closed to keep people from seeing your mess, you’ll end up isolated behind those doors, and that privacy you think you so desperately need will become a prison of its own. People will never see the mess, but they’ll never see the beauty, either—the beauty of being known, seen, accepted, loved. 

So Bread & Wine is about food, but more than that it’s about connection—the connections that are made when we screw up our courage and walk away from our fears, when we open the doors to our homes and our hearts and gather people around our tables.

Bread & Wine Official Trailer

I asked my friends Blaine Hogan and Bjorn Amundsen to help me create a set of videos to tell the story of Bread & Wine. I gave them early manuscripts and a few very vague thoughts, and then really early one morning Monday in January, when it was so cold it made our bones rattle, they came over with cameras and lights and what seemed like a million feet of cable, snaking around and around our house.

My cousin Amanda came over to help with the food prep, my friend Ashley did my hair and makeup, and a friend of Blaine’s named Josh solved any number of technical challenges, the three of them speaking a language I don’t understand at all—volts and speeds and lenses. Blaine asked me before the shoot what I thought I’d wear and I told him I’d be in jeans and one of about fifty navy-and-white striped shirts. Some things never change. 

We shot all day—I made several recipes from the book: Green Well Salad, Nigella’s Flourless Brownies, Sullivan Street Bread, Steak au Poivre with Cognac Pan Sauce. And while I measured and chopped and stirred, Blaine asked me a million questions—about food, about love, about the kitchen, about the table, about why I love to cook and what I hope people feel when they read Bread & Wine. 

In the next several weeks, we’ll post a new video every week, four in total. I’m thrilled with them, and I’m so thankful to work with creative, deeply gifted, imaginative people who I love to spend time with—no small thing.

This is the first one, the official trailer:

 

This is How We Do It

There’s this pervasive and dangerous myth that those of us who write and blog and maybe speak and travel and post photos of our kids doing cute things are somehow doing all those things at the very same time, that we’re somehow able to simultaneously write well and spend quality time with our children and throw charming parties in well-appointed homes, and we’re doing it all by ourselves, that we’re just merrily juggling our laptops and our sweet babies, capturing it all on Instagram, chalking it up to lots and lots of coffee.

This is a damaging myth, because what it says to me, when I slip into believing it, is that everyone else is living photo-worthy lives every single second, seamlessly blending work and play and parenting and vintage hair accessories into a happy blur of online fabulousness. And that makes me feel like I’m falling behind, or like I must be the only one on earth who can’t manage all that.

I can’t manage all that.

I don’t manage all that.

And what I do manage, I don’t manage alone.

There have been some great posts lately about time and writing and the internet, about mothering and help and how we do what we do.

I loved this one from Elizabeth Esther—I loved it for being specific about what she does and doesn’t do. And you know I super-loved this one from Girls Gone Child, because she busts open that myth that just because we’re working in non-traditional jobs, we don’t need semi-traditional help.

And I love it when Hollywood Housewife gets all “Who in their right mind…” about something. This line of hers kills me, in the best possible way: “Not talking about it brings shame to the people who are drowning by trying to create Pinterest lives all on their own.” That’s the heart of it.

If you think I’m a stay-at-home mom who occasionally swings by her laptop and writes a few lines here and there that eventually turn into a book, that’s not true. I’m a working mom with a toddler who goes to a childcare center four days a week and a kindergartner who goes to school five mornings a week. And during that time I write and blog and edit and return emails. I prepare for upcoming speaking events and participate in conference calls with my web designer and the marketing team from my publishing house.

Today I’ll do an interview on a radio show in Hawaii, a call with my agent about upcoming book release details, and have a coffee to talk about an upcoming event. I’ll finish a magazine article, exchange emails with my assistant about this weekend’s travel plans, and write some notes for a message I’m giving at our church in April.

When it’s writing work that I’m doing, I absolutely do it from home and in my jammies, but I also travel about twice a month and speak locally about twice a month. It’s not helpful or accurate for you to picture me playing on the floor with my kids for hours on end while my books magically get written in the cracks of stay-at-home mom living.

This has been a tricky journey for me, and looking back I can see now that in 2012 I didn’t have the childcare I needed to keep up with the writing deadlines and speaking commitments I’d made, let alone any version of rest, self-care, or margin. My life and my parenting especially suffered for it. Last fall I finally said out loud, “this isn’t working.” And now for the first time in a long time, it is. For the first time in a long time, I have enough childcare to actually get done the work I need to and want to get done. And it’s changing my life, in a thousand really positive ways.

There are (at least) four things that make it work for me:

1. My husband. Aaron is my biggest encourager, and he pushes me to write and speak and live up to my calling more than anyone in my life. His job, like mine, is a funny mix of super-flexible and totally not. Both of us have the flexible part of the job, the part that can be done almost anywhere, almost anytime—for me, writing, for him, preparing worship orders & recording songs. And then we have the totally-not-flexible parts: flights to catch, events to speak or lead worship at, respectively.

We spend kind of a shocking amount of time talking about our calendars, making sure that one of us is home when the other is traveling, figuring out which trips we should do together and with the kids, and which ones should be solo get-there-get-home style.

Our schedule has almost no routine—there’s no “normal” week these days. At least one of us is working every weekend, and sometimes our only shot at downtime ends up being, say, Wednesday at eleven am instead of Saturday and Sunday like most people.

That means we have to listen to each other, loop each other in, flex a lot. I say no to things to he can say yes to things. And he says no to things so I can say yes to things. And I’m so thankful for a partner that’s in the dance with me, making up the steps together along the way.

2. Our church’s childcare center. Our church has a little childcare center and preschool for kids of staff members, and it’s absolutely fantastic. The teachers are wonderful, and the space is great, and from the moment I dropped Mac off for the first time at four months old, so that I could duck into a nearby office and write between feedings, it’s been a truly terrific place for him. He just graduated to the toddler room, and there are about 10 kids, and half of them are our best friends’ kids, people we work with, people we’ve known for years. Henry went, too, and now he’s in kindergarten at the public school in our town, and we’re totally happy with that as well.

I don’t think it’s a downgrade for my boys to go to a childcare center. They spend the day with trained, passionate, educated teachers that care about them and engage them in age-appropriate activities. They spend time with other children, learning to play and share and create together. I don’t think it would be better for them to be at home with me full time. I don’t think it would be better for them, and I don’t think it would be better for me.

Aaron and I are in ongoing conversations about the best schedule and childcare plan for our boys. If we sensed that one of them or both of them needed to be home more, or wasn’t thriving at the childcare center, we’d make adjustments. Honestly, right now, there’s not a better scenario that I can even imagine. They’re thriving, and we’re thankful.

3. The nanas and the papas. We live five minutes from my parents and 15 minutes from Aaron’s parents, and they are, four for four, totally engaged, involved, loving grandparents, and we absolutely couldn’t work and especially travel the way we do without them. Our boys look forward to sleeping over at both their homes, and they have little routines and traditions that make it fun.

4. Administrative help. Brannon is one of my oldest, dearest friends, and she works with me between 3-5 hours a week, helping to schedule my travel and event details. Please don't picture an executive assistant, someone in a business suit with a Bluetooth behind a fancy desk.  And please don't picture a personal assistant, running my errands and following me with a water bottle and doing lip gloss touch-ups. Picture my friend, who is off-the-charts gifted administratively, who can arrange more travel and event details in the three hours that her daughter’s at Montessori than I could in forty solid hours of email.

It's about math & sanity & calling. 

My only goal with this post is this: if you’re at home with little kids, and you’re peering into your computer wondering why it’s so hard for you to get as much writing done, or do as much traveling, or do as much entertaining as I do, please don’t ever feel like I’m doing it all, or, heavens, like I’m doing it all alone. Neither are true. There are a lot of things that I’m not doing. And the reason I get to do the things I am doing are because I have a lot of help and support, and I’m thankful for that help every day.

If writing is what you want to do--or more than that, what you feel called to do, get the help you need. Ask for it. Pay for it.

Work is noble, for men & women, for moms & dads. It's not wrong to be passionate about something in addition to your passion for being a great mother. And it's not wrong to get paid for it. And it's not wrong to pay someone to help with your kids so you can do it. And it’s not wrong to pay someone even if you're not making money doing that thing you love. When you do the work you love, you're making something more valuable than money.

So don't do it my way or Rebecca's way or Elizabeth's way or Laura's way. But let an inside glimpse into our ways give you the permission to do it your way, in a way that works for your life, for your family, for your season, for your calling.

Pumpkin-Banana-Anything Muffins

Oh, it’s been ages since I’ve posted a recipe, hasn’t it? I’m back in action these days. My quest for the perfect healthy-but-still-yummy breakfast treat has been long and arduous, taking me from breakfast cookies to make-ahead muesli to all manner of homemade and store-bought bars. What I want, generally, for breakfast is a massive cookie from Gaia in Grand Rapids, and Bread & Wine does have my best estimation of that magical cookie. 

But I can’t really make a case for butter and flour and chocolate first thing in the morning, especially since 2013 is, for me, the year of being all healthy and grown up, and specifically NOT doing things like eating cookies for breakfast every morning, as much as I’d like to.

These muffins are grain-free, dairy-free, sugar-free. No sweetener of any kind, no oil, no flour. If you’re a Paleo person, these are indeed paleo-friendly.

The pumpkin-banana part of the recipe always stays the same, and then you get to decide on a cup of fresh or frozen fruit, and then a cup of dry mix-ins—chocolate chips, dried fruit, nuts. We use frozen blueberries, and I can't wait to try them with fresh peaches in the summer. Instead of conventional flour, I use almond meal--not almond flour. Almond flour costs a fortune, but Trader Joe's sells almond meal, rough and dense and lovely--and affordable!--in the nuts & dried fruits section. If you're going grain-free or gluten-free, almond meal is your new best friend. 

These are extremely virtuous muffins, although if you’d like to add some dark chocolate chips, I would never try to stop you. It adds that perfect bitter, melty nugget every few bites in the middle of all that healthiness. Or you could stay on the straight & narrow and add walnuts and raisins and chopped dates as your dry mix-ins. I've tried them both ways, and while I do love the dark chocolate bits, raisins and dried cherries and walnuts are great, too. 

Here’s the recipe:

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a large bowl, mix together:

3 bananas, the browner the better, mashed

½ can pumpkin puree (about 1 ½ cups)

2 eggs, beaten

Then add:

2 cups almond meal

1 tsp salt

1 ½ tsp baking soda

And mix again. Then add:

1 cup frozen blueberries (or another fresh or frozen fruit)

½ cup walnuts & ½ cup dark chocolate chips 

      (or one cup of whatever dry mix-ins you like—nuts, dried fruit, chocolate chips)

 

Mix well, and then spoon batter into 12 greased muffin cups, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. 

Let cool in the pan, and then eat these healthy lovely muffins with a cup of Irish Breakfast tea or coffee with lots of almond milk, and then feel like one million dollars for having made the healthiest muffins on the planet. 

Bread & Wine Backstory, Part 4

In about six weeks, Bread & Wine will be winging its way through the postal system and arriving on your doorsteps. I kind of can’t believe it. This week I’ll post a little bit every day about the story behind the book—how the initial idea came about, and what I learned about life and about writing along the way. 

Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3...

After the Bittersweet tour ended, I began working on Bread & Wine happily, intensely, feeling like it was a reward, something I was so purely excited to write about. I wrote and wrote and at the end of long writing days I took to the kitchen, making a mess, making the recipes we love over and over so that we could share them with you. I got more writing done in that first month than I ever had on any project. 

And then I got pregnant with Mac after such a long season of loss and longing. Gratitude upon gratitude. And then I got so sick that writing about food was truly a ludicrous idea. For the better part of a year, Bread & Wine was on hold again—this poor book.

As ever, writing is an education. Even though you think you’re the one telling the story, the story is getting told in you, written across your life in a sometimes unwieldy, reckless way. For almost a year, I struggled with terrible sickness. For almost a year I learned the hard way to accept help and grace and kindness—lessons I’ve long needed to learn. 

And then in January of 2012, about a million years after that day in Denver, I began again, writing Bread & Wine again. That year, now that I’m looking back on it, was necessary—certainly it was necessary for me as a mother, to get through a hard pregnancy and for the sweet newborn season that I got to soak up with Mac. But it was necessary for the book, too, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

I needed to learn in even deeper ways what it’s like to be cared for, what it’s like to be at one’s very worst and loved anyway. Essentially, before I could write Bread & Wine, I needed to learn a few more hard lessons about vulnerability, community, and love, so that those things would seep out of the pages at every turn. I hope they do.

The book that you’ll hold soon came to life in between naps and feedings, on flights and in hotel rooms late at night, but more than anything, it came to life around the table. 

My dream is that reading Bread & Wine feels, in the best possible way, like being at a dinner party. Like red wine and goat cheese, like balsamic vinegar, like just one bite of the richest chocolate mousse you’ve ever had. Like figs, like bacon, like boeuf bourguignon. Cozy, warm, rich, full of comfort and nourishment.

Bread & Wine is a book about our table, about home and history and connectedness, a love letter to this season and the faces that have gathered around it for what seems like a lifetime of dinners. 

It’s about trust, prayer, intimacy, letting yourself be needy and slow. About breaking your addiction to productivity the hard way. About showing up at the table tired and ragged and hungry, desperate for grace and nourishment.  About letting people see you scared and helpless, and letting them feed you in your weakness.

At the heart of it, more than anything, this is what I want: when you finish Bread & Wine, I want you to lay down the heavy load of expectations and perfection and comparison, the proving and pushing. And I want you to open your front door—along with it, of course, your life, your heart—and lay yourself open to the deep and transforming connections that are formed around our tables. I want you to shake the prevailing notion that when we share meals around our tables they need to be extravagant and perfect. However humble, however meager or fumbled, food made by hand and with love is always a gift.

I want you to slow down, say no, do less, push less, prove less, and I want you to let the people you love gather around your messy, imperfect, human, lovely table, and eat together. 

Bread & Wine Backstory, Part 3

In about six weeks, Bread & Wine will be winging its way through the postal system and arriving on your doorsteps. I kind of can’t believe it. This week I’ll post a little bit every day about the story behind the book—how the initial idea came about, and what I learned about life and about writing along the way. 

Continued from Part 1 & Part 2... 

As I wrote Bittersweet, I felt so afraid that readers who liked my cheery self would decidedly not love this new project. I was afraid that re-living those dark moments would be even more painful the second time around. And I was afraid, on the deepest level, that I was no longer the kind of person who could hear God’s voice and see his fingerprints.

As is true 99.99% of the time, those fears were proved wrong. I found meaning and hope and very necessary instruction in my own experiences as I relived them through writing about them.  I found God’s presence deeply meaningful, and that the tenderness of his grace healed my cynical heart and began to thaw the ice inside me.

And when it was finished, I found that the readers that had come to mean so much to me after Cold Tangerines became even more dear to me as they shared their own bittersweet stories.  Every conversation, every email, every whisper was a gift. I honored our arrangement with honesty and transparency, and they honored our arrangement a million times over, with kindness and transparency of their own.

Bittersweet was released, and then the fall was a busy book tour. In twelve weeks, I spoke at 44 events in 21 cities. I spoke in bookstores and colleges and churches, living rooms and coffee shops. I spoke at chapels and services early in the morning, and at cozy late night gatherings in peoples’ homes.

And along the way, I had deeply moving conversations with people who had struggled in many of the same ways I had, or who had weathered things much more heartbreaking than I had, and we found ourselves connected in both the bitterness of brokenheartedness and the sweetness of God’s tenderness along the way.

It was extraordinary and exhausting, and when I came home from the last trip, my husband was waiting by our Christmas tree with a bottle of my favorite Champagne, and we toasted the end of a lovely and rich and challenging and beautiful season, the Bittersweet season.

More tomorrow...

Happy Valentine's Day....& remember: you are significant with or without a significant other. XO

Bread & Wine Backstory, Part 2

In about six weeks, Bread & Wine will be winging its way through the postal system and arriving on your doorsteps. I kind of can’t believe it. This week I’ll post a little bit every day about the story behind the book—how the initial idea came about, and what I learned about life and about writing along the way. 

Continued from Part 1...

As I began to write early essays for Bread & Wine all those years ago, I pushed away the little voice inside me that suggested this book about food and faith and family would be a neat escape for me, a trap door out of the difficult season I was living into a make-believe world of parties and herbs and exuberance. 

After Cold Tangerines was published, I entered into the most difficult season I had yet known. On every front, it seemed, things were breaking and cracking apart. Miscarriages and health scares, financial losses, loneliness, uncertainty, fear and faithlessness. 

I believed then and still believe now that both as a writer and as a Christian, I have a responsibility to tell the truth about my life. I felt that I had essentially made a contract with the people who read Cold Tangerines. I had promised them that I would tell the truth in an unvarnished way, and that I would allow God’s motion and beauty to shine through the dust and mess of my own life and story as forthrightly as I could. 

Writing Bread & Wine at that time would have been a slight of hand, a shell game—pay no attention to the blood or the tears or the fear in my eyes…let’s have a dinner party! It would have indulged one of the most broken parts of me, the part that would rather tap dance and pretend things are fine than stop the music and tell you, in plain and deafening silence, that things are not all right. 

I pushed the idea forward as far as I could, like rolling a boulder up an icy hill. I pushed and pushed. I wrote the proposal. I flew to Boston for a writing retreat with a dear friend. We sat across the table from one another and ate the dried fruit she’d set between us in little bowls, and we wrote and wrote. I shaped and sketched and sorted through the vernacular I was creating for this new book, this lovely distraction from the crumbling feeling I felt about my own life. 

If I could offer up this beautiful book, this lovely and bright coin, it would hide the fact that my real life, and more honestly, the person I was becoming, were not what I had written about in Cold Tangerines. I felt the impulse and the necessity to distract my readers away from the fact that I was no longer the courageous, passionate, honest person they met in that first book.

I had become less prayerful, and very angry. I wasn’t celebrating everyday life. I wasn’t the first one on the dance floor or the first one to laugh or the first one to invite people widely and unselfconsciously into her life, perfect or not. I was hanging on by my fingernails, waiting for impact. 

At a certain point, I finally said out loud, first to my husband and then to my agent, that there was a book I needed to write before Bread & Wine, both for me and for the readers I cared so much about. I owed them a story of honesty and growth, not a diversionary tactic. Much of writing life and especially publishing life felt and still feels opaque to me, but this is what I knew about writing a second book: the writing has to be better, and the writer has to be better, too.  

You owe it to your readers—I owe it to my readers--to become a more skilled writer with each book: better phrasing, more precise language, richer imagery. But I also owe it to you to become a deeper, more grounded, more able-hearted person. I have to. That’s part of the contract, in my view. It’s my responsibility to become a voice worth listening to in increasing measure with every page, and certainly with every book. 

It was becoming clear that there was a book that I had to write in order to earn the right to write Bread & Wine.  Before we found the title, we called it simply “the blue book.” I didn’t know much about it, but I knew it would be blue—opposite of Cold Tangerines: orange, exuberant, cheery. It would be blue, in every way--deeper, darker. It would be my confession, my chance to make sense of this smashed up season, my way of sifting through all the things that fell apart in me and around me. 

It was not a book I wanted to write, any more than you’d like to stand alone on a stage and tell a group of people you love and respect all about your deepest failings. But again, we had a contract. I promised to tell the truth and to find meaning in that truth.  I promised that God’s fingerprints were all around us, and I had to find them in my own life. So I began to write Bittersweet.

More tomorrow...

Bread & Wine Backstory, Part 1

In about six weeks, Bread & Wine will be winging its way through the postal system and arriving on your doorsteps. I kind of can’t believe it. This week I’ll post a little bit every day about the story behind the book—how the initial idea came about, and what I learned about life and about writing along the way. 

Part One

Bread & Wine is a book about food—about the time we spend around the table, about what we eat and why and how. But under that, beyond that, it’s about how we connect, how we see and hear and help and carry each other, about what it means to be nourished and fed. It took three tries to finish it, and I’m finally starting to learn something about books, and about life: you cannot control nearly as much as you think you can.

The dream for Bread & Wine was first born in a hotel room outside Denver. I was speaking at a retreat, and it was my birthday, possibly my 32nd, but I can't remember. In between sessions, I went back to my room and forced myself to think through my next writing project.  What I wanted to do was watch about sixteen consecutive hours of CNN and reality tv while reading blogs and trolling Facebook, but I pressed myself into using this rare downtime to peer, as much as anyone can, into my future.  

I thought about the advice given to me before Cold Tangerines. Someone, and I wish I could remember who, told me that you cannot select a topic based on market demand, or what you think will get you on Oprah (this was back when you could get on Oprah), or what will make your professors or parents finally, once-and-for-all proud of you. You have to choose a topic that is so deeply meaningful to you that you can talk about it endlessly, think about it constantly, lose yourself to it for more than a year, and then chatter about it with great passion for at least a year after that. 

I looked around the room. I generally travel with very few clothes and an insane amount of books--which is why the iPad changed my life, but that's a story for another time. I’d brought my Bible, and a few books on spirituality. I’d brought a few memoirs, and I’d brought a stack of cookbooks.

And that’s when Bread & Wine was born as an idea, a filmy concept. I read cookbooks like novels, my fingers skimming the pictures, my mind running on the flavors and the textures. I especially love cookbooks that have a lot of text above the actual recipe—the why or the who or the what to serve it with. I dearly love when the author gives you a tiny glimpse into his or her own personal relationship to a dish or a set of flavors. 

For this reason, of course, Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks never fail to entrance me, and books that whip together narrative and recipe, like Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking, Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life and Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte, struck me as nothing less than epiphanies. 

And so I began to think and pray and make notes, my fingers beginning to wiggle and beat against my keyboard with anticipation. I would write the book I wanted to read, a rumination on faith and food, tradition and the table, hunger and health, community and communion. I was thrilled. 

To be continued tomorrow…