I just spent the morning with Kate Moses on the official publication day of her compelling new memoir, Cakewalk. We filmed our interview in the sunny kitchen, glass door open onto a backyard, three white cats circling and purring.
I read Cakewalk in the days before our meeting, laughing out loud and also sobbing. Yes, sobbing. It’s a wild and delicious ride, replete with recipes. Kate’s sentences are delicacies themselves–rich, abundant, generous and exquisite.
Rooted in a history of generations of Californians, White Russian treasure burning in a San Francisco dump, children tied to trees after the earthquake to keep them safe, Kate’s is the story of the making of a writer–for without waving any banners, this is a key part of the story and one that my writer self thrilled to read.
I don’t envy Kate her harrowing childhood, even with its flights of sugary beauty, and I suppose many writers have a cauldron of a past that boiled us, left us raw, tender and observant. But what a memory–what prose, what images–drives this narrative. What characters people it and what a journey creates the writer who can transform the whole thing into a delicacy.
I’ll be posting my video interview with her soon. Come join us in her kitchen!
I loved this interview. I feel that Kate is ralley in tune with her inner life,and that this comes out in her writing and the way she speaks about her work. I too was taken with the idea of a book, or story as kaleidoscope, and that this could ralley help the structure of my own book- to view it less linearly. I want to read both Wintering and Cake walk now, and before I wasn’t sure. I also felt ralley inspired about her account of how Plath would research everything there was on mushrooms one day, and then the next day sit down and write about them. Seems like a great tool to build detail and richness in our work and to help on the days we feel stuck. I might try that this weekend. Find an element in my novel that could be researched and play with what I find. I found Kate to be refreshingly real and down to earth.Thank you. This interview feature is a wonderful addition to the course! Inspiring.Great film too.