Kitchen #7: The Truman Show

Like tiny insects
on the palm of history
A Domino Effect
In a cloud of mystery

Kitchen #6: Not Not Gnocchin’ on Heaven’s Door

“Everything I am I owe to pasta.”     —Sophia Loren   240 East 300 North, Provo, Utah (or thereabouts)  Overture Making gnocchi for the first time is like learning Braille. Or as I imagine it might be for a blind person to learn Braille.  Both foreign concepts. Both have everything to do with fingers. Both about

Kitchen #5: White on Rice

200 North,  300 East, Provo, Utah (or thereabouts) I like rice. Rice is great if you’re hungry and want 2000 of something. –Mitch Hedberg  For part of my sophomore year at BYU, I was the only “white” girl in a rented house full of Latinas. My best friend and housemate, Amy, was half Ojibwai, and although

Kitchen #4: Doll Parts

 All rights reserved by mawphoto.com 1900 University Street, #4, Provo, Utah, 1985 … toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators. — Roland Barthes, Mythologies There is something existential about a kitchen shared by four 19-year-old virgins. We are toys made out of ourselves. The building, born

Kitchen #3: Cereal Polygamy

Helaman Hall, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah … and the moon comes up as the moon (All its images are in the dump) and you see As a man (not like an image of a man), You see the moon rise in the empty sky. Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump” The Bowl: Deep,

Kitchen #2: Memory’s Core

(photo courtesy of Viewliner Ltd.) 10 Depot Street, Manti, Utah My grandmother could remove the peel from an apple in one piece. Over and over, her thumb and forefinger would push the blade to the perfect position, taking away what wasn’t the pie. This story is an apple peeled, skin broken. I was eight when

Kitchen #1: Fridgid-Airelines

5923 Drumheller, Spokane, Washington The handle of our pink dishwasher has a long silver bar that spins around and around like a steering wheel, just at eye-level. A row of square silver buttons to the right promises flight and control. It hums and clanks, and gives off the comforting aroma of Cascade. I scoot a

Why Kitchens?

People say that a kitchen is the heart of the home. But I think it is also the head. Sure, the warmth of the oven, the smells of good things bubbling and baking, the tug of good memories of conversations around a table are an umbilical cord to the past. Here nurturing happens. But in