Feed Me! - When Writers Can Dish, Including Me

It doesn't get any better than this. One of my essays will appear in the same collection as pieces written by two of the excellent faculty mentors I had the pleasure to work with during my MFA program, Ann Hood and Joyce Maynard. (Okay I guess it could be better; it could be my very own book. Still.)

The collection, due out next week, is Feed Me! Writers Dish about Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image, edited by Harriet Brown, from the Ballantine Books imprint of Random House. Besides the work of Hood and Maynard (and little ole me!), the book features the strong voices of Susan O'Doherty, Sari Botton, Diana Abu-Jaber, and many others.

I've got lots to say about the book, its core messages about body acceptance and how American women think about and behave around food, and the powerful and unfortunately large role these issues play in our lives. But I won't go into all that here and now.

For now, I just want to share with you a digital sneak peek of the book, which features three of the essays (not mine, sniff!) and the introduction. [You may need to do the quick, free sign-up when you get to Isuu, to download for easier-on-the-eyes reading; It's worth it – the 47-pages are funny, authentic, raw and real.] While all of the writers have done a superb job, each from their own idiosyncratically unique viewpoint, I especially recommend Caroline Leavitt's "The Grief Diet" which you can read on the advance peek.

There is a reading scheduled in New Paltz, NY, next week, a panel discussion at Syracuse University in February, and possibly others coming up in Manhattan and northern New Jersey.

On this blog, I try to only mention my own publications once and move on, but in this case, please bear with me if I gush periodically at my good fortune, and chronicle some of the book's journey as it sails into the world on January 27. Look for a give-away sometime in February, too.