Jackson Jambalaya

In the late 1990s I was asked by my local newspaper to write a weekly food column. I politely declined citing an overloaded schedule and lack of any known writing skills. They were persistent and kept asking until one day, after the fourth or fifth ask, I gave in and agreed. Once that first column was written and submitted, they may have regretted the ask. The writing was bad. Seriously bad. I don’t have access to those columns I wrote in the early months, but I’ve re-read some that were published in the first year and I cringe every time.

I was almost 40 years old when I started this writing gig. I had shown a proficiency for writing in high school, but after graduation I set my sights on the restaurant business, hit the tunnel-vision button and focused— almost solely— on furthering that career. Restaurants were first and foremost in my life. Before this column it was a labor to write a letter to someone.

But the newspaper didn’t give up. They stuck it out. In time, the writing got a little better. Then other newspapers called. Within a couple of years, I was writing a thousand words a week in over 30 newspapers.

It was a laborious task at first. But eventually, as the writing improved, and the readership response grew more favorable, I began to develop a passion for writing. The problem at that point was that I was in my early forties but— since my writing skills had been mothballed for decades— I was writing at the level of a college freshman who was struggling in Comp I. Around that time I went back to college, finished up the six hours that had gone uncompleted, got a degree, and then kept taking undergraduate, and the graduate-level creative writing courses and workshops at The University of Southern Mississippi.

College is different in one’s forties. I no longer showed up on the first day of class, looked for the prettiest girl in the room and grabbed a desk by her, hopefully in the back of the room. I sat in the front of the class. The desks were smaller than they had been a couple of decades earlier, but I wasn’t distracted, and— as in all my restaurant business classes years earlier— I was engaged and interested.

The graduate-level writing workshops made the biggest difference in my work. I was getting skewered by 22-year old grad students, weekly. It was rough, but it made me a better writer, and I began to make wiser choices. In those days I would begin to turn a phrase that I thought sounded clever and literary (often called little darlings) but would stop myself knowing that those students would rip that line— and the guy who wrote it— to shreds. They were often unrelentless, and I’m a better writer for it.

The writing was better, yet I still hadn’t found my voice. In a review of one of my early books I was described as a “food-humor writer” and my style was labeled as “Lewis Grizzard meets Emeril.” I was flattered and started writing in that vein. The problem was that my writing skills weren’t anywhere in the same ballpark as Lewis Grizzard, and my culinary skills and knowledge couldn’t match Emeril’s even on my best day. The writing and humor were forced. It wasn’t me. It was a written version of what I thought I should be. I don’t consider myself naturally funny or clever, even.

In 2011, I flew my wife, 10-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter to Sweden, bought a Volvo, and spent the next six months in 17 countries and 72 cities on two continents. I continued to write the column every week. Somewhere on that journey, probably in some small European outpost, this Mississippi boy’s writing found its voice.

There is some type of bunker mentality that is developed when traveling at that pace and under long-term conditions. Normal rules don’t apply. The comforts of home are gone. Combine that with wide-eyed wanderlust and a new and historic adventure around every corner and nothing is forced. The words almost write themselves. The directives of my workshop professors the Barthelme brothers began to ring true— “Write what you know.”