The taglines for the two journals I’m addressing for the end of February are “a journal about what and how we eat and drink” and “voices from the heart of medicine”. What Kitchen Work, The Home Cooking issue, and Pulse have in common is an interest in work about caring. This newsletter takes up some space because I include photos of journal pages.
Kitchen Work is a printed journal of food and the table, the pantry and the wine cellar, gardens and farms and markets, dining rooms and cafeterias and filled with nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and 500-word recipes and bottle notes, based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and edited by Matthew Straus and Drue Mirchand. I have a subscription and am holding the Winter 2024 issue that has a vaguely metallic Provence blue card cover with silver lettering, that contains silky smooth pages. Individual issues are $12 and subscriptions are billed per issue. Excerpts from each issue are linked on their website, but I’ll be referencing the print journal, because I can show you whole poems and a little bit more text.
The editors want stories from big kitchens and small kitchens, about cooking, the business of food and the state of restaurants, about family and friends and strangers. Submissions are gauged for literary quality, focus and intrigue, and not for gastronomic sophistication. Furthermore, there’s a list of categories on the submissions page. In his Editor’s Notebook, the letter that begins the issue, Straus reveals that, by happenstance, this cooking at home volume turned out to be mostly about caring for other human beings. He writes that the issue was a pleasure to assemble, “not only for the sentences and the Mornay sauce, but because of the diversity of voices.” You might guess that the work in this journal employs sensory language, and you’d be correct.
Let’s start with the poems. The issue has five poems by four poets, and most involve a parent child interaction. There are two potato poems, a tomato poem, a bean sprout dish poem, and a poem about a pastry chef in Louis XIV’s reign, poems with the practical and the simile. Kitchen Work likes what I call a narrative instructive poem, where in the storytelling you are taught how something is done. Four poems in this issue employ that approach, and one is the mouth-watering “Pomodoro al Forno” by Gregory Emilio, written in couplets, appropriately (“The oven’s not so different/from the heart”) about a summer day spent caramelizing tomatoes.
But there’s also an interest in the anecdotal narrative poem, such as “Brúitín” by Ba Seoughe, whose surname I’d like to hear pronounced. A conversational approach of a daughter speaking to her mother (“each confined to separate sides of a half-forgotten/Conflict, and kept apart by a biting wild sea”) about her patiently teaching the responsibility of making the mash so that she could carry its weight forward. The poem’s shape on the page is informal and in three parts on two pages.
There seems to be one short story in this issue, though I wouldn’t have known to identify Leigh Biddlecome’s “The Clam Dealer” as one had I not read the editor’s letter. It could as easily be one of the true, food-making stories relayed in the nonfiction, especially since the author is based in Italy. It’s a story of an American searching a little late for traditional foods to feed guests in Naples on New Year’s Eve, and plot dominates, although if gathering could be an element of fiction, this story would fit with its communal clam-search and clam cooking with the bickering Neapolitan guests. The sentence at the end of the first page ends the paragraph on the next page with “the phone with a friend before I can question the particulars of what is happening.”
There are snippets of some of the essays on the homepage for Kitchen Work, giving you a sense of their subject range. I’m sharing the first page of just one because I may have reached the image limit for this newsletter. This one, “Berlin Kitchen” by Emma Maur, is about the housing of all this home cooking, the kitchen, and one that is new and strange to the writer, the room that helped her to “understand the rest of my apartment”. The sentence that is begun at the bottom of the page below ends with “my pumpkin-colored cat saunters in, to find a warm spot on the wooden floor.” And the paragraph completes with “As strawberries melt in a pot and their steam envelops the room, my cat stretches, and encourages me to lay down with him.”
Send Kitchen Work your food stories, poems, and essays. Submissions info is listed here. There’s no specific info on how many poems, unless it is meant to be included in the 3,000 word limit. I’d send up to three, to start, or email the editor and ask.
Pulse is an electronic journal that launched in 2008 from the Department of Family and Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and publishes and distributes, every Friday, a first-person story or poem, together with a visual image or haiku, about health care. Their muse is Rita Charon who established the value of narrative medicine. They welcome submissions by anyone who has a healthcare story to tell: patients, health professionals, students and caregivers. The editors highlight humanity and vulnerability. All the editors have connections to medicine.
Each poem or story includes a pull-quote in a watery image box between the work’s title and the text. One of the poetry editors, Jenna Le, has a poem “Brain Scan” featured, but I’m going to start with “And What Is Beautiful” by Marta Christov, a nephrologist. This lyric about a patient’s joy at his healing wound, manages to describe “raw beauty in disfigurement,” in a closely physical approach, bringing us bedside in his hospital room. “The Waiting Room” by Australian poet Michael Brown is a lyric of poisoning, breaking down, held together in short couplets without punctuation. While the setting is a waiting room, the poet’s observations keep it from feeling as close up as Christov’s poem. We aren’t so much waiting with him and his wife (his bio and poem note reveal) as listening to him lightly detail the elements of doom in that in-between stage. The poems currently featured are largely lyrics, one on tinnitus, but there’s an anecdotal narrative “Neuro Consult No. 2” by medical student Olivia M. Dhaliwal you might read. Pulse is also interested in your haiku.
They want nonfiction and first-person stories; as a result, they each seem like personal anecdotes, and the bios that match the actions in the writing reveal which ones are nonfiction. Just know that you can send fiction to them. These are all pretty harrowing reflections. “Assistant Head Wrapper” by Judith Hannah Weiss is a personal essay about the before and after of herself as a magazine writer who was disabled by a brain injury. She has a sense of humor and a poetic beat to her sentences, slant rhyming the cause of her injury —drunk with a truck.” It’s a piece about being the only—token Jew, hippie, female professional—and her own caregiver. “Black in Medicine” by fourth-year medical student Jade Overton was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest “On Being Different”. (Pulse published the winners, finalists and Honorable Mentions representing a wide range of interpretations relative to the theme.) Overton’s personal essay examines feeling othered by her medical colleagues, challenging stereotypes of black patients, and fighting perceptions of affirmative action, while occasionally experiencing imposter syndrome. It works its way through her experiences as a third year medical student and addresses sexism and the lack of diversity in medicine. I didn’t want to share more amputation after Christov’s poem, but I do recommend “A Time to Die” by Jeff Carnett.
Pulse wants you to sign up for their newsletter before you send work to them, but that’s free. They do not accept simultaneous submissions, and their reporting time is six to eight weeks. If you are writing about a real person, secure their permission before sending in your writing about them, or change their names.
I hope you are inspired to write about the ways we care for others and ourselves, and will send your writing to Kitchen Work and Pulse.