Our Melissa Clark is not a food writer. Our Melissa Clark is a fiction writer and professor, and the author of the novels Swimming Upstream,Slowly and Imperfect. For a long time she wrote for television, penning nearly 2 dozen episodes of Rolie Polie Olie, before going on to create and write the award winning television series, Braceface. She’s known among her friends as Connections Clark, and she blogs regularly about things you should know about. For instance: she’s the reason I met my husband. She’s the reason Max Brooks gave us a story (it’s a happy coincidence that these two childhood friends have their stories nestled together in the book).More
lisa
About lisa
Lisa is the author of the award-winning memoir, A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood, which was an National Book Critics Circle Top-10 Independent Press Pick for 2011. With Caroline, she's the co-founder of Learning to Eat and co-editor of The Cassoulet Saved our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat. She holds an MA in creative writing, a PhD in English and has taught literature and creative writing widely, most recently in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.
Posts by Lisa Harper:
Contributor Spotlight: Max Brooks
One afternoon, I was chatting on the phone with one of my oldest friends, Melissa Clark, the novelist, not the food writer. As we were about to hang up she said, “I’m going over to Max & Michelle’s to go shopping this afternoon.”
“Huh?” She hadn’t said, I need to borrow a cup of sugar or two eggs. I imagined a storehouse stocked with tins of protein powder, a walk-in pantry full of cartons of ramen…Melissa laughed. “In their garden. They have an amazing garden.” I knew that Max and Melissa had been friends from childhood, but I’d never heard anything about a garden. Then I remembered his books.
“Is that a zombie apocalypse thing?”More
Contributor Spotlight: Phyllis Grant
Meet, Phyllis Grant, the former pastry chef and photographer behind the riveting and beautiful blog, Dash and Bella. More
Contributor Spotlight: Keith Blanchard
Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking when I approached Keith Blanchard about a piece for Cassoulet. I knew Keith in college, so, yes, I knew he was a funny guy. (Just take a look at some of his past pieces for HuffingtonPost, like this one, or check out his twitter feed.) I also knew he was smart. And I knew he’d written a novel. So I knew three things; funny, smart, writer. That was a start.More
Contributor Spotlight: Chris Malcomb
Chris Malcomb’s essay, “Red Sauce Days,” came to us in a roundabout way. I had known Chris for a couple of years, and I knew he was a practicing Buddhist. I also knew he was a thoughtful essayist,capable of digging deep into his unconscious and pulling out hard won insight and prescient reflections. I knew he had taught middle school, and in a maximum security prison, and had a unique ability to empathize with his subjects. (His essays have been widely published in journals and magazines.) I had also been reading a little about mindful eating, which wasn’t getting a whole lot of press back in 2008. So I asked him if he’d be interested in pitching us a mindful eating piece for Cassoulet. He hemmed and hawed. “Actually,” he said, “what I’d really like to write about is my family’s restaurant.”More