Person on the Page

At a writing workshop I attended several years ago, the facilitator said, “Find your obsession, and write about it.”  I have to admit that I was resistant to the idea.  An obsession is not necessarily a healthy or positive thing, right?  I mean, I thought about my obsessive need to check repeatedly to make sure my keys were in their designated compartment in my purse, to check and re-check the kitchen stove to make sure all of the burners were turned off before I left the house.  Not necessarily a good thing, being obsessed. 

But I thought I understood the facilitator’s idea.  Find the subject about which you will never exhaust your interest, the thing that will always amaze or perplex you. Writing can then be an endless act of exploration, investigation, discovery. A life’s work.

I guess I was also resistant to writing about my obsession because the first subject that came to mind was food. And being obsessed with food is a problem, right?  It’s gluttony—one of the seven deadly sins, right up there with greed and wrath. A food obsession can lead to obesity, or disease, or at least an impulse control disorder. Nevertheless, I confess that I have had a lifelong obsession with food—with eating, with cooking, and more recently with gardening to grow my own vegetables.

The workshop facilitator said that she was obsessed with ruins. She was fascinated by the physical remains of extinct civilizations; she wanted to wander through the rubble of destroyed cities, to view downed towers and toppled walls. Now there’s a worthy obsession.  Something worth writing about. But food?  Food is common to us all.  Necessary to sustain us. What can be said about it that hasn’t already been said?

The other workshop participants had already started writing, diving right in to explore their obsessions. I was sitting there worrying about the idea of being obsessed and about potentially being judged for my possibly unhealthy preoccupation with food. But I’m also somewhat obsessed with achievement, so I forced myself to start.

I thought about my mother. Her yearly late-summer romances with sweet corn. Now, there was an obsession. In our hometown in Western Maryland, everyone knew that Higson’s Farm in nearby Wiley Ford, West Virginia, grew the sweetest, tenderest, most succulent corn. Mother had a pact with Higson. She somehow persuaded him to deliver many dozens of ears of freshly picked Silver Queen sweet corn straight from the field to our door. 

Before he arrived, she prepared her kitchen, turning it into a veritable food processing laboratory. As a child, I was allowed to help shuck the ears, but I was warned that I would have to remove every bit of the silk or I would be banned from the kitchen for my carelessness.  Mother steamed the ears, a dozen at a time, then let them cool before cutting off the kernels and spooning them into containers that were placed immediately into the freezer. Within a few hours, the corn had gone from field to freezer, its incomparable sweetness preserved to grace pot after pot of vegetable soup throughout the winter.

My own food obsession may have begun there, in my mother’s kitchen.  But my father’s business was food, so I may have inherited the fascination from him. He ran a restaurant. Short-order cooking was his daily grind.  Eggs over easy and patty melts.  Food was his work, but it was also his first love. Pepper steak for Saturday dinner and fresh pork side for Sunday breakfast.  Doctors attributed his premature death to his lifelong consumption of foods containing too much saturated fat. Gluttony? Impulse control problem?  A food obsession can be deadly.

As a devotee to personal nonfiction, shouldn’t I be encouraging people to write about their obsessions?  My own exploration of my food obsession at the writing workshop, for instance, uncovered a host of tensions about my own eating habits, my parents and their relationships with food and with me, and the nature of obsessions in general—all of which are great material for personal writing.

My only reservations have been my questions about whether or not obsessions are maladaptive and thereby unhealthy and, if so, whether or not we should cultivate them through our writing. 

Writer Carly Sandifer theorizes that writing about our obsessions is valuable because doing so frees us from our analytical minds to delve into our emotional associations with the things about which we obsess. She views this practice as a catalyst for our writing, claiming, “The beauty of writing about your obsessions is that you will fully engage, feel completely alive, and have energy to write to the end.  The passionate force of your obsessions turns your writing into a transformative act.”

Maybe.

Maybe my current angst over weight gain, my penchant to grow kale in my flowerbeds and lettuce on my deck, my drive to create delectable dishes and then write them into a cookbook that somehow expresses a discovered wisdom about life are great subjects for writing.  Or maybe they just perpetuate my tensions and magnify my uncertainties. 

To obsess or not to obsess in our writing.  I’m torn.

What do you think?