She writes about quilting and yoga and architecture and design. She lives in LA, as do a handful of our writers, and originally planned to write us an essay about mindful eating. Cooking rice would be a focus of the essay, she proposed; she would write about what she’d learned from the meditative practice of swirling a pot of rice in water before cooking.More

When Karen, who makes her home in Austin and writes for Entertainment Weekly, first sent us her essay, its focus was almost entirely on her childhood, and how it was darkened by her mother’s mental illness. Hunger — physical and emotional — ruled those days; she was never consistently, satisfyingly fed. Mooching lunch from classmates, lingering at play dates in hopes of a dinner invitation, Karen wrote with a matter-of-factness about those days. She concluded her essay with her father’s simple menu of roast chicken, boiled rice, beets and steamed frozen corn that was heartbreaking in its final instruction: “Serve family style.”More