This inability to envision myself doing something wasn't necessarily related to my lack of confidence and/or the voice inside my head that always tells me that I'm fooling myself, that I'm undeserving, that I'll never be good enough (something I dealt with a bit here in my own food story) but had more to do, I think, with the sense of there being too many moving pieces--pieces I couldn't envision myself knowing how to put together. I knew articles. I could think articles. But a book is like an article times 5 or 6 or 7. For me, the struggle was not only imagining what these pieces would be, but how they'd actually all fit together.
A couple weeks ago, I was looking at a short video from SWR featuring Ellen Cushman talking about how you know when you have a book project, specifically, a "good" book project. As I watched the video, I thought about how I'd respond to the question and I knew I'd say simply--"I know when I have a book project when I can actually envision myself writing one." As to the question of when I know I have a good book project? When I first begin worrying about finding someone who will agree to finish my book for me if I should die before it's done.
Two days ago, I took the (super-scary for me) first step of soliciting volunteers to be interviewed for a book project that I can finally/actually envision myself writing. Though I've been reading about, thinking about, and sometimes writing about cookbooks and domestic advice manuals for a couple of years now, it wasn't until I came across this line from the 1932 edition of Ida Bailey Allen's Modern Cook Book--"by her kitchen shall she be known"--that I began seeing the potential for this reading, thinking, and sometimes writing to actually become a book.
I remember coming across this line about a year ago and thinking, "hmmm. that would be a great book or chapter title or even an epigraph." But it was also at that moment that I first began accepting what I suspected to be true--that if I were to do a book focused on cooking/baking practices, I could not, in good conscience, do so without talking to people (not just women, but anyone who would talk to me) about their kitchens, about what they know and how they are known.
I remember vividly looking again at those words on the page--"by her kitchen shall she be known"--and wishing I hadn't run across them, that I hadn't just admitted to myself that in order to envision myself writing this book, I'd have to do more than to consider, analyze, and quote from cookbooks, advice manuals, and other the print-based texts I'd been collecting. This is not to say that great books can't come from the analysis of print-based texts, it just meant that I could not write one like that--not after admitting to myself that I also wanted to learn more about people's kitchens and processes of knowing and being known.
And this, in turn, meant that before I could do anything in terms of working toward the book I could finally begin to envision myself putting together (one that treats these print-based prescriptive texts in relation to or in dialogue with these accounts of lived experience), I'd need to find the time and patience to do IRB training, to fill out the paperwork, to wait for approval, etc.
And after all the patience and waiting and learning associated with the IRB-approval process (this is the point I'm at now), the worrying part begins: worrying that no one will want to participate, worrying that I'm just waaay to shy and awkward to talk to people (even about something I'm deeply interested in), worrying that technology will fail during the interview and I'll not have a record of it, only what I can remember. . .and on. and on. and on. Working with my cookbooks, by contrast, feels more orderly, safer. The prospect of doing interviews has always placed me way outside of my orderly little comfort zone.
And while it's far too early to know what, exactly, the book will be, do, say, or mean--what I learn during the interviews and how I'm able to put these stories together will help determine those things--I finally feel like the book will definitely (at some point) be. I mean, I think I can finally see it?
