Ruoyu: Jessika, whether it’s  the “crinkle of pork,” “how boiling water siphons collagen from bone,” or “sweat[ing] onions in butter before adding flour,” I absolutely love the gorgeous detail with which you describe cooking. More than that, however, I love how you set these stories of making food next to parallel stories of family, and the way the two moments always follow each other, stepping in turn. You write, after your narrator faces a particularly unkind moment with their uncle, “I stir in flour, make it the roux it begs to be.” On the surface, in attending to food, it seems easy to know what to follow, what’s right and what should be next, but the story gradually unfolds all the ways in which cooking stumbles into difficulty and grime. Could you speak more as to how you understand this in relation to navigating familial relations, and how your writing seeks to transform these understandings? 

Jessika: It means a lot to have you point out the details here—thank you. Cooking and family often embody a similar dichotomy for me. Growing up in the Deep South, the cook was always the most coveted position in the family. They control when, where, what you eat, which means a lot of the time they also control the social dynamics of the house. And of course, as they get more comfortable, they start adding their own flare to things, food or otherwise. 

With both cooking and family I think it’s easy to slip into autopilot. One second you’re browning butter, the next you’re burning it; instead of chopping peppers you’re chopping off a thumb. Similar things can happen with family. Muscle memory becomes unreliable in the face of things as tenuous as mortality or human connection. In this story, the narrator reckons with this after her uncle’s sudden death.  She cooks to grieve, but also as a way to feign some sense of control. Her ability to understand her family has atrophied, so to speak, but if she feels if she can replicate these family recipes then she can engage in a sort of revisionist history, as if to prove she hasn’t let herself stray so far from home. A lot of the tension in the story lives in her lack of restraint, as the grandmother points out in the very end—even in her efforts to reconnect she can’t help but meddle, deviate from instructions. Whether that’s for better or worse is an open-ended question.

Ruoyu: All these processes of making food (fermenting, thickening, boiling) require the maker to sit with them and to wait. The time is slow. The ingredients gradually grow heavier, move into a denser body. “She blames the altitude and the hard water.” “Yes, I will call more….Yes, I will come stay.” There is something weighing heavy in our own bodies. How can we come to know ourselves and those around us better through cooking? The physical effort, the wait, the history. What is it like to work with something so alive? 

Jessika: I appreciate the connections being drawn here. I do think there is some inherent compassion to feeding people you love (or dislike!), and food can somehow communicate feelings that elude words. I think this is how I experience the ‘alive’ quality of food, not totally dissimilar to writing, where rather than exerting force onto an object I experience it as a more reciprocal exchange. Any work I do, the work reflects back onto me, kind of.

A bit of a sidebar, but I’ve always found it funny and heartwarming and true when speaking with friends from different cultural backgrounds about this particular experience we all share, where, growing up, our parents brought us food after an argument as a means of apology. Or sometimes just to comfort us, whether that’s fruit, toast, ice cream, whatever. I cling to the universality of that, I think; even as someone who’s been writing for a while there are plenty of things I still don’t know how to say. Food doesn’t have the same limitation. It can really hold the full spectrum of emotion. No matter how heavy or nuanced, no matter how much history, it’s all there, communicated by just the clank of silverware, that sort of unquiet silence where everyone is sat together, chewing. To achieve that degree of saturation in such a small moment is something I strive for; it’s probably why I regard chefs and poets with an equal mix of fear and awe. They say so much with so little.

Ruoyu: Could you tell me about one piece of art—this could be anything from other poems to TV show scripts—that has been deeply formative in creating the spaces your work exists in? In what ways does it continue to compel you towards new understandings?

Jessika: It’s so hard for me to narrow to just one. That said, there is one obvious choice. Anyone who knows me or has talked to me about books for even five minutes has probably heard me rave about this particular novel: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. It has remarkably little to do with cooking, but everything to do with connection—romantic, platonic, familial (chosen and given), all of it. It’s also very sexy and very funny, two moons my work tends to orbit (though this piece not so much). I’ve been revisiting it recently as I’m writing my thesis, also a novel, in which a longtime friendship between two queer femmes rapidly disintegrates while they're in the wilderness. Lawlor’s book continuously encourages me to indulge in what the MFA-sphere would characterize as bad writerly behavior, AKA leaning into maximalism, trying to make yourself laugh, leaving every ounce of energy you have on the page. Reading PTTFOAMG, now or in the past, that sense of “wow, they really went there” sticks with me. It’s incredibly motivating and adds a lot of levity to my process. Like, it’s fiction. You can really do whatever the hell you want. You just have to sit down and do it. ✺