In just over two months from now, this website will be fifteen years old. My first post, on August 5, 2008, entitled “Sustenance,” introduced myself this way:

I am a poet and essayist and have been working on a memoir about food and my father, who died sixteen years ago, for almost four years, plus or minus two pregnancies and small children. It’s been slow-going to say the least.

Fifteen years later, and my father has now been gone for thirty-one. I’ve written him into most entries on this site which was first called “All Things Edible, Random and Odd,” and that memoir, about a man I describe in that first post as having loved “all things edible, random and odd,” was re-written countless times, re-shaped this way and that, re-imagined, re-visioned, re-gurgitated, re-vamped and, finally, re-invigorated to become not a memoir (I never really wanted to write a straight memoir, anyway), but an essay collection (a memoir in essays?) called–wait for it—All Things Edible, Random and Odd–and will be published by CLASH Books in November of this year!

It’s been slow-going to say the least.

And for that slowness, I am so grateful. I can’t believe, reading back through the years and my process in these many entries, that I am finally at a place where I can say that truthfully, but I am. I am grateful that the agent didn’t sign me. I am grateful that I put the book away many times. I am grateful for the publishers who passed on it saying it was “lovely but too quiet” or “memoir is impossible to sell without a large platform” or “you can write but it’s clear you’re too close to this subject to be objective.” (That last one stung the most and was also the most correct.)

I am grateful that the old saw, “it only takes one YES,” turned out to be true with CLASH–a publisher that has seen and is excited about my vision for the book– and that it turned out to be true at a time in my life when I am no longer feeling frantic about the project. I am no longer desperate to write a book that will honor or memorialize my father out of some sense of writerly/daughterly obligation. The book is not about (and never was, really, about) my father.

It includes my father. It also includes: my kids, my marriage, my body, my adolescence, my mother’s life, my mother’s death, music and lots of food.

But it’s about me. Which is Memoir 101. Which maybe I forgot a few thousand times over the years.

Keeping this blog, even erratically, over the years, has taught me so much about myself as a writer. I was originally using it as a place to express all the wistful and weary things that surrounded my work, but looking/reading back from this vantage point, I see that it was so much more than a repository or a platform.

It’s a record of, and maybe even an instruction manual for, my growth.

One last word before signing off: I have a really fun promotional project in the works for the book…one that had its beginnings on this very site back in 2012. If you have been reading along for that long (thank you!) you might be able to venture a guess.

I’ll announce it very soon, but here’s a hint: it has something to do with family and friendship and food. 😉