Liz Von Klemperer and I met back in 2014 when we were interns at PEN America. Four years later, we’re roommates in Brooklyn, trying to make our way as writers.
Liz decided she wanted to cook us breakfast for our interview. We had bacon, eggs and home fries. I chipped in with the cooking, because I’m nosy that way, and we discussed the best ways to cook home fries—steaming them to get them soft on the inside, then frying them so they’re crispy on the outside—before getting into it.
Felicity: What is your writing routine, if you have one?
Liz: I try to write for an hour a day. It doesn’t really matter where. I can’t really write in our apartment for some reason—it depends on the conditions. I just try to do it for an hour and it doesn’t really matter where, but it has to happen.
Felicity: It’s like something that you check off your list.
Liz: Yeah, and if it doesn’t happen I get kind of sweaty and itchy.
Felicity: So you don’t have any rituals that you do to get into it?
Liz: I usually have a couple beverages. You have your tea, you have your juice, you have your water, maybe a little snack on the side. But, yeah, that’s about it. It can happen in a café or a library or sometimes the apartment.
Felicity: So, you said tea, juice, snacks. What kind of teas and juices and snacks?
Liz: So, definitely, Chai Roiboos by Yogi Tea.
Felicity: Who sponsored this interview!*
*Note: Yogi Tea did not sponsor this interview
Liz: Just gonna put out there it’s a really great tea. It’s gotten me through some tough times. So I really like that. Or just like any old water bottle, maybe spritz some lemon in there. If I’m feeling really vigorous, I’ll drink like half a cup of coffee, which usually turns me into a little bit of a mess, but I do that. I made Golden Milk recently. That was pretty nuts.
Felicity: What’s Golden Milk?
Liz: You put Tumeric and Coconut Milk and a little bit of coconut oil and maple syrup. So I did that, but it was kind of a lot of effort, so I don’t know if I’ll do that again.
Felicity: Do you have any particular snacks you like to go to when you’re reading or writing?
Liz: Well, I usually do the eating before I write, so I can get more into it. I usually try to eat a meal. Also when I go to the library they don’t let you have food in there so if I do eat something it has to be really discrete. So, although I really like Doritos or Cheetos, it doesn’t really make sense to do that in the library because it’s so loud. If I want to discretely eat something it has to be a bag of nuts or like an apple or something.
Felicity: What’s your favorite cheap meal?
Liz: A good frozen burrito is easy. And you can just shove it in your face and then it keeps you pretty good for a couple of hours.
Felicity: What food do you think is the most fun to write about?
Liz: Writing about meat is fun because it’s gross. So you get to play with how grotesque it inherently is, and then how delicious it is.
Felicity: It’s a fun dichotomy.
Liz: The only way I can write about pleasure is also writing about how kind of repulsive it is at the same time. Sex is the same way. Sexual pleasure can also be awkward. There’s a lot of fluids. Which is similar to the process of cooking meat. You’re like so into it and it’s sustaining and delicious but also you have to just sort of not think about certain things in order to enjoy it.
Felicity: What is your favorite writing that has to do with food?
Liz: The beginning of Mila Jaroniec’s Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover. The first scene starts off in a kitchen and it’s a New York City apartment kitchen, so it’s really small and it’s very dirty, and there’s flies buzzing around, and this girl goes into the kitchen to get vodka out of the freezer but she has to go past all these flies. I mean it’s not really food, but it’s about the after effects of food, and what happens when you don’t manage it properly. Things will overtake you. It’s the absence of food because there isn’t any food there. And then she opens the fridge and I think all that’s in the fridge is one moldy lemon, and the vodka. But the whole chaos of the kitchen is because of the mismanagement of food.
Felicity: That’s very Inquisitive Eater-ey. What would your ideal meal be, finances put aside?
Liz: I’d start with mini quiches that have been baked until crispy. I’m also all about fancy steak. Nothing too complicated, a little thing of mashed potatoes and then some fried onions on top the mashed potatoes to give it a little crunch.
Felicity: Like an American steakhouse.
Liz: Maybe this is just what I want right now. And then some sort of buttery green food, like broccoli rabe.
Felicity: Do you have a dessert?
Liz: You know what’s really good? A crepe cake. Simply because it’s so absurd and hard to make, because it’s like fifty individual crepes on top of each other, and then in between all the crepes is a little layer of cream. My sister made it once for me for my birthday and it took her all day. It’s just a really absurd way to make a cake.
Felicity: Yeah, it must take a lot of devotion to make it.
Liz: Yeah and then when you bite into it’s really fluffy. Once I had one that was matcha flavored.
Felicity: It’s like the deliciousness of a crepe without being like, “Oh it’s just a really thin small thing,” like, “No, we’re going to make it decadent.”
Liz: Yeah, it’s so pointless. There’s no reason to make it that way.
Felicity: If you had to live off one food for the rest of your life what would it be?
Liz: It would be some kind of casserole because casseroles are one food that is actually a bunch of other foods but smushed together. I’d choose a chicken, rice, broccoli casserole. Those are good, just to be able to, you know, sustain yourself.
Felicity: Who is your favorite author and what food would you associate with them?
Liz: I love Jeanette Winterson. She’s so cool and weird because every one of her books is so different. Sexing the Cherry is inspired by fairytales. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a tragic and classic coming out fictional memoir. Written on the Body is lyrical and sexy and playful. I associate her writing with this Vice TV Series with this celebrity chef Action Bronson. They basically just cook glorified stoner food. He’ll make a sandwich with pulled pork and then he’ll put maple syrup on it and then he’ll roast a marshmallow and put it on top and then sprinkle it with bacon bits and it’s really confusing but looks really good. If you look at Jeanette Winterson’s work as a whole you can’t really piece it together but then you read all of it and you’re like, “That’s really delicious.” But it doesn’t mean you can figure it out.
Felicity: What do you think is the most writerly food or drink?
Liz: The drink that I hear the most about when I’m reading books is coffee. Writers have such a romantic relationship with coffee and I don’t really like coffee. Bad things usually happen when I drink coffee. I always feel a little sad about that, because when I was younger I’d read On The Road and Kerouac is always stopping at a rest stop and having a cup of coffee. Or I read Imogen Binnie’s Nevada recently and she’s always on the road drinking shitty gas station coffee. That’s part of how punk she is. They’re using this substance to fuel themselves, and sometimes they’re using it as a crutch. I guess any substance can be a crutch. For me that crutch is, again, this chai rooibos herbal tea. The function of coffee is to wake someone up, but I have the opposite problem. I have a lot of pent up energy that’s knotted inside of me so in order to relieve that I have to drink some herbal tea with maybe a little bit of ginger in it.
Felicity: What is a food that you’ve read about, you can also do a movie or some art form, that you wish you could actually experience?
Liz: In a lot of cartoons, including Rugrats, they eat popcorn, and the popcorn looks so fluffy. The people who are designing it don’t draw each individual kernel of popcorn. They just draw it as this delicious fluffy lump. And then the character just puts their hand in and takes it but, again, it’s not made up into little kernels, it’s a lump. And to me it just seemed like such a supreme way of eating popcorn but it’s impossible to replicate, because popcorn isn’t like that. They weren’t trying to make the food look accurate but in doing that they made it look better than what it actually is.
Felicity: In that cartoon, Oliver & Company, there’s a part where the little girl is making food for Oliver, the cat. It looks like cookie dough but fluffy. You don’t know how she does it. She mixes it up and it almost looks like peanut butter but randomly fluffy, it has this perfect texture to it. But it’s not clear what it actually is, like what she’s feeding the cat. And it looks so delicious! My sister and I have been striving for that perfect texture our whole lives. When we’re eating certain things we’re like, “This is almost like the Oliver & Company cat food.”
For food associations in this installment, I decided to do breakfast foods and books. Rather than associating by aesthetic, Liz associated food with books by the way they made her feel, which was fun. “That’s mainly my relationship with food,” Liz said. “Whenever I eat something I’m mainly thinking about what’s going to happen afterwards.”
Sugary cereal – Nevada by Imogen Binnie, “The narrator’s voice is so colloquial and fun. It feels someone talking to you, like someone’s just confiding in you about something. I feel this way about Cool For You or Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. It’s tasty and approachable.”
Bacon – Hunger by Roxanne Gay, “The smell of crispy bacon takes over everything when you’re cooking it. It takes over the smell of the whole room. It makes everything smoky. It gets in your clothes. Hunger is a book where, after you read it, you can’t get it off of you. Bacon is delicious and so is Roxanne Gay’s writing. When you’re reading that book you compulsively want to keep going and then by the time you’re done with it, it’s stuck to you and you need to go outside or take a shower. Not in a bad way. It just takes hold of you. It colors how you see the world outside of yourself for a long time.”
Grapefruit – What Happens When a Man Falls From the Sky by Leslie Necca Arima, “Most of her subject matter is about girlhood, adolescence, or marriage, but a lot of the subtext of it is about integration and immigration. Grapefruits always take me by surprise. They shock your mouth. In the title story, for example, it is one woman’s job to remove bad memories from people’s brains. In the end, she realizes that all the memories she’s taken have been stored inside her. They overtake her, and ultimately kill her. So initially you think ‘Ok this is an alternate society with bureaucracy in place to control the otherworldly,’ but in reality there’s uncertainty bubbling under the surface. The plot twist comes up and bites you, which to me is what a grapefruit is. You can’t smell it when it’s in its skin, and then you peel it open and it squirts in your face.”
Morning cocktail – Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper, “Morning cocktails mess you up for the rest of the day. Similarly, Marbled Swarm is over the top graphic and upsetting. It’s about incest, rape, disemboweling, pretty much every upsetting thing you could ever think of. If you drink too many cocktails at breakfast, you’re going to feel pretty sick for the rest of the day. After I read that book I felt sick for the rest of the day. Your body rejects the substance because it’s toxic. Some people find value in it, though. Some people find value in day drinking, which is fine, but it isn’t for me.”
Toast – The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, “I love toast. I love toast so much. Toast is my go-to. Go-to if I’m having a good day, go-to if I’m having a bad day, doesn’t matter what’s happening. I’m always down for a piece of toast, which is how I feel about Maggie Nelson and The Argonauts. It’s just comforting. You can just open it up and get a little chunk and it’ll be reliably tasty. I think it’s partially because I’ve just read it so many times. Like the first time I read it, it felt like a weird dish I’d never had before but now it’s like a nice warm piece of toast. Because sometimes you feel like no one understands you, and then you just go home, put the toast in the toaster. Part of me always wants to find a writer who I feel like has lived through some of the things I’ve lived through. She understands me like toast.”
Liz von Klemperer is a Brooklyn based writer and succulent fosterer. Her reviews have appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Lambda Literary, and beyond. Find more at lizvk.com.
Felicity is a Second Year Creative Writing MFA Candidate at The New School. She is also the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. Along with The Inquisitive Eater and The New School Creative Writing Blog, her writing has been published with Barbershop Books, Healthy Materials Lab, and Enchantress Magazine, where she was also an editor. Felicity enjoys writing in all forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic
Featured image via Pxhere.
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