Image borrowed from Remedy Quarterly

A few months ago I saw a call for submissions for Remedy Quarterly, a cute little food magazine I’ve been meaning to subscribe to for awhile. The magazine is full of people’s experiences and memories of food and the recipes that go along with them. As someone whose memories all seem to revolve around food it seemed like the perfect place to get my feet wet.

You see, I used to write. When I was younger I would write story after story about the fantastical characters in my head. But somewhere along the way I lost all of that and in recent years the most I’ve written is the occasional blog post. So I sent an email with some blog entries as writing samples, expecting to get rejected. Much to my surprise I got a sweet reply from Kelly, who runs Remedy, saying not only could I write for the magazine, they’d also love it if I illustrated my story as well.

The theme for this issue was Heritage and I wrote about one of the strange holiday traditions in my family, Puerto Rican Christmas. It was a ton of work to get it where I wanted it. When I write, it takes much more focus than when I do other things. I need complete silence and it takes me awhile to find the right “flow”. Eventually, I found it and then I wrote, rewrote, consulted friends, read out loud (and recorded it to play back) all to make sure the cadence of the story sounded right and the feeling I was trying to evoke came through.

In the end, I feel good about where the story ended up and I’m excited to work on another writing project again soon. Making something so different than what I normally do was fun and challenging and definitely worth repeating.

If you’re interested in the magazine, there’s a great preview of issue 7 on the Remedy Blog or, if you just want to dive in, you can get your own copy here.