All Things Edible, Random, and Odd: Barrelhousing with Sheila Squillante
Sheila Squillante’s essay collection, All Things Edible, Random, and Odd, forthcoming from Clash Books, is equal parts memoir, celebration of her late father and the love of food that he passed on to his daughter, and exploration of the way these things continue influence her family’s life. Dinty Moore called the book “an intimate, redolent story of loss, love, and growing into one’s own imperfect heart. Sheila Squillante’s wonderful memoir offers ladles of aromatic broth from the complex soup of family, marriage, and childbearing. Plus recipes! An amazing book." We sat down around the virtual dinner table to talk about the book, the difference between writing memoir and essays, poetry and painting, and uncoolness, the Eighties, and of course Patrick Swayze.
DH: I always start these interviews the same way: since a lot of our readers are also writers, can you talk a bit about the book’s path to publication?
This book began as a memoir that was intended to look at my relationship to my father, who died when I was in college, through the lens of food–meals we shared or things he introduced me to. He was an adventurous eater and otherwise not a great communicator, so food became our shared language. I first tried to go the agented route, and while I got lots of compliments about the quality of my writing and the premise, it ultimately proved “too quiet” to be saleable, particularly without a huge platform. (I am not famous, Dave. Not sure if you know that already, but there it is.) So I turned to the small press world and found a publisher with CLASH Books who didn’t care that I am quiet and un-famous.
DH: This may be a dumb question, but since I don’t really write nonfiction, I’m curious: do you think the book would have been substantially different if you had gotten the green light on a memoir? Would it be structured differently, and do you think you would have approached the writing differently?
The original structure I envisioned would have had a throughline that was the last year of my father’s life (which was remarkably difficult for us as father and daughter for lots of reasons) interspersed with essays that flashed back to explore the rest of our relationship. It would probably still have felt episodic the way this version does. (Side note: I wonder if I should be calling this a “version” at all. It’s really a totally different book. Is it a memoir? Not exactly. CLASH is calling it an essay collection. Memoir-in-essays feels even closer to me. Anyway.) I was never really interested in writing a straightforward “novelesque” memoir that told one story from point A to point B. I always envisioned it as something much more fragmented accounting for the many years I had lived without him, the fallibility of memory and the added difficulty that he was like a big question mark walking around my life. He was, for me, easy to love but hard to know. So I tried to give the agents what they wanted but in the end I think I’m just too much of a poet! Lol. As much as I love crafting the more traditional memoir pieces in here (this happened and here’s why it mattered to me, why you should care about it), I equally love the pieces that are playing with form. Recipe-essays. Lists.Charts. Lots of lyric language and fracture and play.
DH: That’s one of my favorite parts of the book, the way it balances more traditional essays with the recipes, lists, charts, the way the Crying essay actually has some home science and data associated with it. Can you talk a little more about that? I’ve always found that when I’m working on a project where there’s something in common with all of the stories – for me these are fiction projects, always – it kind of pushes me to explore some other forms and structures, maybe to feel like the work isn’t too samey, or maybe it’s my trying to do something different in the same lane. Was there something about the subject matter and the way they were written that maybe pushed you toward some of those more experimental pieces? Realizing I asked you the same question twice but also inserted some of my own bullshit in the middle of it, so I guess this is really more of a question comment question…
Well, you remember how the recipe essays happened, right? I think we were having lunch at Wegmans and I was whining about Finishing My Memoir, and you suggested I cook some of the meals that I was writing about and then write about the cooking in real time. That was a brilliant suggestion–thank you!-- and gave that early version of the book its first nudge towards a more playful form. Parts of the Crying essay worked in a similar way in that I was writing it in response to music while I was listening to it. I really enjoyed the immediacy of that process. It felt like a different kind of exploration than the more reflective, more traditional essays.
DH: Since you wrote these essays over a long period of time, I’m curious whether fitting these essays together was something you worried about, or something you had to work on in the editing process, once you had a final manuscript. Were there times when you thought something like, oh early 2000s Sheila, bless your heart but that’s not how we write anymore (this is me projecting based on reading some of my earlier work recently, of course)?
I definitely worried about fitting the essays together–was it going to be too scattered? Cover too much ground?--, but not so much about the continuity of voice. Weirdly, I seem to still sound much like the Sheila of 2003, which is the date of the oldest piece in the book.
DH: Speaking of the time range of the pieces, how did you go about ordering them? Was it like putting together a mixtape, or is there a kind of foundational structure to the way the essays are presented?
Mostly mixtape. The opening essay is definitely one of the earliest I wrote, and the closing essay is the most recent. But in between my kids go from toddlers to school age to infants back to school age. CLASH reshuffled my original order, which I no longer even remember!
DH: I still miss making mixtapes! Also, one of the final names in consideration for Barrelhouse was Mixtape (shout out to Mike Ingram, shout out to the early 2000s and “file sharing” services and the way my legs used to move when I told them to run…). One throughline here is your children. I think we follow them from literally a weird feeling in your body one Thanksgiving (if I’m remembering correctly) to a visit to the local Hindu temple, which is I *think* when they are oldest in the book (or at least Rudy is old enough to feel out of place and uncomfortable). How did you navigate the idea that you were writing about them and sharing your own very personal, private feelings throughout their lives? You do mention in the book that this is all with their permission, so I don’t want anybody to think I’m calling you out on anything. Maybe one reason I don’t write much/any nonfiction is that I’m afraid to walk that line, deciding what should stay private, and my own sometimes ugly or contradictory or messy feelings, so I’m curious how you managed to walk that line and what, if any, rules or foundation you put in place for how you were going to do that.
Yeah, why don’t our legs work right anymore? Sigh.
Definitely always loved a good mixtape. I still have one, somewhere, that was given to me by someone I was desperately in love with in college. Very sweet artifact from another lifetime. Another sigh.
I actually made a playlist for the book on Amazon Music!
Okay, the question about my kids. The book actually documents my son from weird feeling to age 16. The last essay talks about my mom’s funeral in 2021, though in fairness Rudy’s not really in that one. It’s much more about Josie. But yeah, it’s basically their whole lives on display, which is something I’ve definitely had to think through many times over the years as I wrote and published individual essays. When they were little, it felt less like I was intruding on or exposing them, though of course there are writers and people who would make a very different argument about such things. And I might even agree with them now, but the horse is already out of the barn, right? So as they got older, I would sometimes tell them I was writing about them and ask if they wanted to know more about that. They rarely did. When the book got taken, I briefed them on the storylines in which they appear and told them I’d welcome their input and would respect their privacy if they wanted it. If they had asked, I likely would have either revised heavily or pulled offending essays.
DH: That’s a great playlist! I appreciate that, like the essays in the book, your playlist doesn't really shy away from the 80s and the possibly less historically/empirically cool aspects of your life. Like Styx and Asia and Air Supply. Since you are the main character in these essays, how difficult is it to write honestly about what may be some difficult or awkward times?
Thanks for appreciating my dorky playlist! I am definitely “less empirically cool,” and the great thing is that I no longer care! I was just talking to Paul today about this very thing after a Richard Marx song came on and we both started singing it and for a minute didn’t remember who it was, and then we were both like, ohhh, it’s Richard Marx! Of course! This is terrible! We love it! (67% of the people reading this have no idea who Richard Marx is, I realize. But we know, Dave. We know.)
Anyway, it’s kind of the same thing–at this age I have enough distance from Richard Marx and most of the awkward stuff of my younger life that I mostly look back with compassion for the person I was then. I don’t mind coming across a little “cringe” as the/my kids say.
DH: Uncoolness forever! I love that idea of looking back at the person you were with compassion and it seems like kind of a not-very-writery way to approach things in some ways. I think a lot of us are writers because we’re always kind of silently low simmering on every dumb thing we’ve said or done or every shitty weird resentment we’ve experienced. This is another question that’s more of a comment about me, isn’t it? Anyway, transition: you’re also a poet and recently you’ve become a very accomplished painter. I’m interested in how you feel about these very different ways of expressing yourself. What can you do in poetry or painting that’s different than what you can do in the kind of writing we see in All Things Edible?
Oh believe me, I am definitely low simmering! But that’s kind of what writing creative nonfiction, and memoir more specifically, is for. For me, anyway. I just ended a ten-year relationship with my therapist (because she is retiring, not because I am beyond needing therapy!), and she was reflecting with me about this very thing, noting that I have always done a lot of my self-work via writing. It’s definitely a mode of expression I understand. Same with poetry. But painting is something different. I am still finding my way in this medium and not sure yet how to talk about my process. I guess I can see a connection with what I can do in these abstract paintings and what’s been possible for me in poetry–particularly in my less narrative poems like the ones in my first book–but connecting to my prose feels flimsier. In poetry and in painting there is so much left to suggestion, hiding inside whitespace or ellipses or behind a wash of Zinc White. Some of that happens, too, in the more fragmented pieces in All Things Edible, but so many of those pieces are about working through the haze of memory and emotion so I can offer something like knowledge, with sharper edges, in a confident voice.
DH: I think the idea that poetry and painting can do some of the same things – as you said, “hiding inside whitespace or ellipses or behind a wash of Zinc White” – is really interesting. I do think I see something similar happening in your Round Baby poems as your painting. Maybe it’s, as you said, the idea of suggestion. Can you talk a little more about that?
Oh, totally. Round Baby is all about mystery and suggestion! I mean, what is she? How is she doing that? Where did she go in the end? I was definitely not looking to confidently voice anything directly in that book. The whole premise is that being a teenager, particularly during the Cold War, means living inside of fear of the atomic unknown.
DH: You’re a Barrelhouse person and you know how we always end these interviews: what’s your favorite Patrick Swayze movie?
You know, the last time I answered this question I said The Outsiders and fanned myself over biceps inside a simple white tee-shirt. This time I’m going to say To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, because I don’t want a world without the camp, heart and beauty of drag queens in it. Thanks for everything, Patrick Swayze. And Barrelhouse, too. xo
SHEILA SQUILLANTE is the author of the poetry collections, Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from Brick House Books, and Beautiful Nerve, as well as four chapbooks of poetry: Dear Sunder, In This Dream of My Father, Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry and A Woman Traces the Shoreline.
Her debut essay collection, All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food, will be published by CLASH Books in November, 2023.
She is also co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page.
She directs and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University. She is Executive Editor of The Fourth River, Chatham’s journal of nature and place-based writing, and Editor-at-Large for Barrelhouse Magazine.
During the pandemic, she became obsessed with three things: plants, perfume and painting. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with two dogs, a bird, two teenagers and a philosopher.