Making puff pastry on a Sunday afternoon, while piping the pastry onto baking sheets, Jen asked, “Are you prepared for me to be emotionally devastated if these don’t turn out?” This of course is an exaggeration, an exaggeration that is also not that far from the truth as 2020 has asked us to reevaluate the things that take us over the brink. I think I said something along the lines of the encouraging, that of course the puff pastry would turn out.
I often think when Jen cooks that the creative process associated with cooking looks awfully similar to that of writing. The creation of things, needing to get measurements just so, the way that certain things go together (or don’t go together), the way that we try recipes with different ingredients to see what works best. The disappointment that inevitably comes when things don’t work out exactly the way that you’d hoped (especially when you’ve followed the recipe). Now that I think about it: isn’t the story arc a kind of recipe? Following a series of steps, the knowledge of others who actually wrote the road map, we are only creating mediocre resemblances of those who came before us, those who did it first, those who did it best, or at least better. I can’t help but think about the tenuous creating of worlds. What kinds of things go into that creation that either work in the writing, or don’t?
Especially this year, we’ve had to grow comfortable with disappointment. Using these moments of disappointment to feel the feelings and then evaluate what went wrong and then try again. Imperfection makes us stronger. Each failed attempt makes us stronger. So long as we learn from them. Sometimes it is hard to identify the failure, the imperfection, in your own work. Every time I make chili, for example, I always ask Jen, at the end, what it’s missing. The answer is always salt. And I know that the answer will always be salt. But sometimes I need someone to say it, to tell me, because I can’t put my finger on the thing itself.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what writing is like. We often use metaphors to convince ourselves, to make ourselves see that one thing is just like another; if we can understand one thing, then maybe we can understand another. If we can understand that in order to be any good at basketball, we must play and practice and hone our skills and exercise regularly to build muscle. Then we should understand that the only way that we get better at writing is to practice and hone our skills and exercise our minds and fingers daily. The only way to practice, really, is to write. So, to write is an exercise in self-determination, self-motivation.
We are both a kind of arm-chair creator. She cooks and I write, although more people see her cooking than my writing it seems. From our own home, we try out recipes and create worlds that derive directly from someone else’s previous creative work, someone who has made a life doing that kind of work. When Jen cooks, recipes come together, ingredients complement one another, and things that she just makes up as she’s going along taste delicious. On Sunday, the puffs puffed and turned golden and round just like the ones you might see inside the glass case at a bakery. It felt, in the moment, that we’d staved off another kind of disappointment, that we maybe could exist in this kind of limbo for a little longer. There is, of course, no choice but to do that.
Alexandra Sladky 