The madeleine thing

“When I can’t write, I bake,” Julia Cameron wrote in The Artist’s Way, her classic guide to creativity. (This was long before her signature creativity techniques were repackaged as a weight-loss plan.)

When I can’t write, I listen to food-related podcasts. My favorite of these is Good Food, which has the delightfully cheerful Evan Kleiman broadcasting from the delightfully cheerful climes of Los Angeles.

Listening to people talk about food is so far from the gritty business of putting words on the page and torturously rearranging them until they ‘work’ that it helps to brain take a break from all that. So the brain didn’t know quite what to do this week when the show crossed over into talking about writing.

Evan interviewed an LA woman who runs creative writing sessions involving elaborate, gourmet meals prepared by an executive chef. The idea is that the food helps to stimulate creativity. Masculine foods for a session on writing from the male point of view, etc.

Now, I don’t know about all that. But we all know that taste is the likeliest portal to our inner childhood. In an attempt to force the elusive and unpredictable madeleine moment, I brought back from the States various cheap Easter treats that I hadn’t had in years. Of course, you really can’t force these things. Chocolate covered marshmallow bunnies were not divine, they were schowy, schowy – sorry – chewy, chewy. The radioactively pink sugar on a box of Peeps did not taste bright, it tasted chemically bitter.

And what to do with perfectly good (and already perfectly blue) Cotswold Legbar eggs that in a silly moment you’ve dyed unnatural shades of green, purple and red? Devilled eggs, that’s what. And write about… church socials? Maybe. The circle of creativity goes round and round, round and round. Gulp.

Comments

[Cousin]

And what about those Cadbury Eggs and 3ft tall chocolate Easter Bunnies?

[Jonathan]

Hmm, I never liked the Cadbury Cream Eggs. Too sticky.