Learning Hospitality: Guest Interview No. 1 with Shauna Niequist

Homemade Goodness

Last week, I announced the beginning of an every-Thursday series called Learning Hospitality. The series comes with a weekly challenge for readers–asking you to intentionally invest in the community that gathers in the space of your homes.

Starting today, for the first four weeks, the first round of challenges will center around trying new recipes. (And not to worry, you can join in any week.)

Introducing Shauna Niequist

I can think of no one better to kick off this first round then than Shauna Niequist, the gracious and talented wordsmith behind the recently released book, Bread and Wine (as well as two previous books, Cold Tangerines and Bittersweet). Shauna writes about the beautiful and broken moments of everyday life–friendship, family, faith, food, marriage, love, babies, books, celebration, heartache, and all the other things that shape us, delight us, and reveal to us the heart of God. You can find more about her and her writings here at her blog.

Below is my interview with Shauna. I’m pleased to share her work with you. And to top it off, a couple randomly selected participants from this round of Learning Hospitality will also win a hardback copy of Bread and Wine.

Sarah: Your books aren’t cookbooks and they aren’t solely about preparing food, but all of them do have food mentioned in the title or pictured on the cover.  What is it that leads you back to this sort of imagery each time you write?

Shauna: I’m a food person–I love to eat, I love to cook, I love to grocery shop and visit farmers markets and read about food. And my goal as a writer is to nourish people through words and stories. It’s all connected, and to use food as a central theme in my writing is only natural to me.

Sarah: Well it definitely works for you! Sometimes I think we look at other women and imagine their hospitality or cooking experiences are completely problem and stress free. That they’ve never burned the dinner rolls, so to speak. What about you? Have there been skills you had to work at and learn along the way?

Shauna: I didn’t learn to cook when I was growing up. My mom encouraged me to read, to write, to travel, to find my passions and develop my skills in all sorts of areas. She wanted me to be capable in all sorts of areas, especially because she wasn’t given nearly as many options when she was growing up. I’m so incredibly thankful for this. Frankly, I think part of the reason I love to cook is because I was raised to believe that I could do and be and pursue anything I wanted. Instead of feeling forced into the kitchen by my gender, I feel like I chose to wander into it, and to learn the skills on my own terms, led by my own passions, not by expectation or obligation.

What that means, though, is that I’ve had probably more than my share of disasters, because I learned a little late and largely on my own. I almost served an ice-cold ham to my in-laws at Easter dinner one year, and I very regularly overcook rice. I inadvertently made a margarita pie with a catastrophic amount of tequila, and I learned the hard way quite recently that bread dough does indeed need to be in a warm place to rise, after one poor ball of dough shrunk to a sad little lump and I had to scramble for another option for brunch guests. But the time we spend trying (and making mistakes) in the kitchen is never wasted–that’s the only way to learn, and each disaster teaches us a fundamental lesson along the way.

Sarah: Thanks for sharing that. I think a lot of women will be relieved to hear that failed attempts come with the territory. Certainly, a lot of women are visionaries who lead non-profits or companies to do great things in this world now. But still quite a few women see their families as the center of their gift to the world. Do you think more women are gravitating back to the home? What spiritual significance do you attach to that role?

Shauna: Oh, this is a fascinating question. Of course, I’d never tell another woman where the center of her gift to the world might be–I think what’s so amazing about how God made us is that we’re so entirely different from one another, in beautiful ways. And I do think that we might have different centers for different seasons. Depending on the season, I work somewhere between part time and full time, and I travel twice or three times a month. Center, for me, is a moving target these days.

But when I’m home, I’m in the kitchen, generally, not because I believe I must be, or even because my kids and husband need me to be–they’d be fine with the simplest, quickest of meals. But when I’m home, and when the laptop closes, I’m in my kitchen because it’s where I want to be. I find it to be the perfect antidote to speaking and writing and traveling–all things that require your brain and mental energy in such specific ways. The kitchen is where I make a mess, where I think with my fingers and my nose instead of my brain. It’s where I’m my private self, where I sing off-key and play on the floor with the boys, where I repair from the wear and tear of airports and stages. It heals me and grounds me, and it gives me what I need to go back out again into the world of makeup and microphones. For me it’s about the back-and-forth of it, one needing the other, one, quite literally, feeding the other.