The Larder Society
A novel. And not a someday one.
Here's what's easy to do: nod politely at "I'm writing a book," and move on. So let me be specific. I've already written one — a complete manuscript, beginning to end. Then I did the thing only someone serious about the work will do. I cut a character I loved and started the rewrite from scratch, because the story was better without him. Ten chapters of that new draft are finished. The rest is exactly what this residency buys: the time to write it.
The Larder Society follows a woman who uncovers her family's place in a hidden order of keepers — stewards who preserved foodways and cultural knowledge across generations, with roots that run back through the Underground Railroad and the Gullah Geechee low country. It is a novel about food as memory, as inheritance, as the thing people used to keep themselves and each other alive.
A chef writing a novel about food — doesn't that sound like a cliché? It would be, if I were reaching for a subject. I'm not reaching. I spent fifteen years with my hands in it: professional kitchens, luxury dining rooms, the labor and memory and grief and joy that move through a kitchen long before anything reaches a plate. Most food fiction is written by people who researched a world. I lived in one. The question was never whether we need another food novel. It's who else would write this one.
And I'm writing it having stepped back from the line — freelancing to keep the lights on, managing my health on its own unyielding schedule. Those are conditions most people would call a fair reason to set a novel down. I haven't.
That's not a wish. It's a deadline.