Happy Publishing Day!

And a super long possibly garbled and chronicled journey of how the fuck I got here...

Today is the day! Although I am the cat at the puppy party, I promise you that despite my RCF (resting cat face) I am super excited! According to the PRH Author Portal, 16,345 copies of Diasporican shipped to retailers. I hope all of those little babies go to a good home.

The book is for sale almost everywhere books are sold. If you don’t want to purchase from a conglomerate (because they actually discount the book and that low key makes it harder for me to reach the point where royalties kick in) then buy from your local bookstore. Does your local bookstore have it in stock?! No idea! You’d have to ask them. If they say “no,” then ask them if they’d carry it! Where is your nearest local bookstore? I don’t know! I don’t live where you live. But, some people put in some extra steps and found out for themselves, from California all the way to Australia! And I love them so much for it.

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Don’t forget to meet me in-person

Some of y’all have been rocking with me since my popup days at the now defunct Doctor’s Lounge in San Francisco. Some of y’all have been rocking with me since the days of having intimate private dinners in my apartment in Alameda. And so many of you are mentioned in the acknowledgement section of my cookbook, so make sure you (buy the damn book) check the section way in the back and look for your name! So much financial and emotional support along the way.

I was still a working artist living in San Francisco when the world saw a huge financial and housing crash in 2008. And I remember the night when I could no longer be working artist. I was doing a show at the Mezzanine. The curator was in high spirits and promised to buy one of my pieces before the night was over. But, that show quickly had the life sucked out of it. In the middle of the show, the curator whizzed right passed me and the physical panic that I saw on his face was something I had never seen. One, because I hadn’t been around people with money before. Two, because everyone I knew already lived in poverty so they had nothing to lose. No one sold anything that night. And I didn’t sell anything again for months.

I went back to Sacramento to reset. Meanwhile, I was staying with an artist friend in his little country casita in the (super) rural part of Auburn where we made beans and bread from scratch. He said, “Why don’t you go to culinary school? You love to cook.” Spent a lot of time at the library borrowing the main location’s stellar inventory of cookbooks and had just gotten my hands on the Bloomsbury edition of Kitchen Confidential. So many people have said how Bourdain inspired them and that’s probably true. Add me to the list. My dumb ass has no issue admitting that I love to read the classics of privileged and problematic white men; Fitzgerald, Thoreau, Cummings, Kerouac, Hemingway, Steinbeck (being one of my fave writers). But, I also revered MFK Fisher and Ruth Reichl at the time because I was devouring their writings in their published works and Gourmet magazine (I was introduced to both of them via a stack of old Gourmet magazines I purchased at the thrift store for $0.10 a piece). I knew what traditional food writing looked like. When I saw how Bourdain wrote about food, it was the first time it clicked for me; someone that wrote about food the way Steinbeck and Hemingway wrote about mayhem and tomfoolery. It wasn’t flowery, but still possessed the romanticism. I was like, “I want to do that!”

Mami and I drove out to CIA Greystone in her 1988 Nissan Sentra and quickly realized I couldn’t afford that shit ever in my fucking lifetime. Spring semester of 2009 I had enrolled in the culinary program at American River College; their celebrity alumni included Guy Fieri.

I have never been an excellent student. I hate school. I love learning. I hate the way most educators build and teach their curriculum like all people learn the same way. But, culinary school was a cakewalk. I did not mind getting there at 7AM and leaving at 10PM most nights. Everything seemed to click for me. Including realizing that there was no way I was going to be a lifer in the industry; making minimum wage and working long hours at the age of 50 ain’t it. I’d shift my focus to food writing; majoring in culinary arts with an emphasis on creative writing.

The only thing I did not enjoy was walking to the bus stop in the dark at 4AM, especially in autumn when “unstable” seems to be magnified, leaving me to be a walking duck to the rando creep that would pull up to the bus stop to ask me, “What’s up with you?” And your brain has a nanosecond to process flight-or-fight and who the fuck is gonna hear you scream in the middle of the barrio in the pitch black? No one else in my program lived on my side of town. On the nights when I had to take my late night baking class, I was allowed to leave 15 minutes early to catch the last bust that connected the school to my side of town. From there I would take that bus to the light rail, grab a beer and a half-off sandwich from the Sacramento Co-op and then sit on the bus bench waiting for the last 68. Which would sometimes pass me up! Leaving me stranded (this is before Uber/Lyft and cabs wouldn’t pick you up unless you were outside a house or bar and they were also like $30) and I would have to walk the 4 miles home, in the dark, through the barrio. The positive side of that? The bus bench where I used to drink a beer and eat my sandwich would be so calm at night. It would be cool and quiet and the perfect decompress after an insane day. AND…that bus bench has been torn out because it’s now the site of a huge homeless encampment.

During school break in 2009, I went to Paris, by myself. I was a self-proclaimed Francophile. My culinary study was also focused on baking. Turns out, I’m not a good baker. What was supposed to be a 7 day trip, turned into a 29 day trip. I met someone while I was there, another artist. That story is for another time.

In 2010, I met the man that would be my husband. The beginnings of our relationship moved quick, and so did our tempers, fueled by alcoholism and his occasional substance abuse. I’ve since become 90% sober; I still drink during Christmas.

In 2011 I fell in love with a SF-based online publication called Broke-Ass Stuart. I was featured as their “broke-ass of the week,” and soon started writing for them as a food truck correspondent. Remember the food truck boom? I went back and forth between San Francisco and Sacramento, a confluence that has been a part of my life since I realized Sacramento was a dust bucket town that suppressed the hopes and dreams of creatives. My practical life was centered in Sacramento and my work life centered in SF. I moved up in the ranks at BAS, resulted in working from the editorial side of things. Which didn’t give me much time to write.

2012, I finished the culinary program, got married and once again permanently set up shop in The Bay. I got my first ever paid feature and it was with Lucky Peach. At the time, LP was the mothership for the counterculture weirdos in the food industry. And we ate that shit up. Professional writing was the first time I had set out to do something and it came to fruition almost immediately. I didn’t have to go down the “blogger” route, although blogs were successful as hell during this time. This is the early stages of Molly Yeh, Woks of Life, Lady and Pups. It hadn’t been long since I decided to become a professional food writer and the fact that Lucky Peach was my first opportunity only solidified, in my mind, that this was the right path. But, I wouldn’t get another chance to write for pay until another 3 years.

Instead I chugged away at BAS, getting comfortable with working with the entertainment industry; working directly with LiveNation, Another Planet, Ticketmaster, DNA Lounge. Personally receiving a cease and desist from FKA Twigs, that was weird. And I think I had gotten too comfortable. While working at BAS, I still pursued food writing.

2015 my brother-in-law, working mostly as a photo retoucher at the time, said, “You should do a cookbook.” We went to Puerto Rico to research. We self-published a ten-page cookbook, full of my grandma’s recipes that I cooked. He took the photos. I’d use this cookbooklet as a teaser attached to a half-assed proposal I’d submit to editors and agents. A month later I’d lose my grandma; the person I attribute my career to. It was also the moment that resulted in the permanent split of our family and I would never see any of them ever again. I was mourning the loss of my grandma, but also mourning the loss of my familial unit.

2016 Determined to leave a piece of my grandma in the world, I removed myself from the political ravings of the people losing their shit and who seemed surprised we had gotten who we had gotten to lead our country into the red. I started writing a long form proposal for what would become Diasporican. Not realizing until much later, that it was a huge part of my grief journey. I used the connections I had acquired while being in a private group that supports writers; the binders. Binders really helped me catapult my writing career. It helped me create my first popup and introduced me to Dakota Kim, who gave me my second paid writing gig when she worked at Paste Magazine. The popup and the article caught the attention of Jonathan Kauffman and Paolo Lucchesi, both at SF Chronicle during that time. And I wasted no time asking them if they’d considering adding me to their roster of columnists.

2017 I became the first Puerto Rican food columnist, by default. It was not planned. I didn’t know at the time. I also didn’t know that I would lose one of my good friends. September 2017 I had finally gotten published by Food & Wine, the day I was sitting in the hospital waiting room while my friend was on life support. We lost him. And soon Hurricane Maria hit and we couldn’t connect with our family for months! Their lines dead and we had no way of knowing if they had made it out alive or not.

eatgordaeat

A post shared by Illyanna Maisonet (@eatgordaeat)

This prompted a plateau of chugging away at BAS and SF Chronicle and I was okay with that.

2018 two years of daily vomiting, rapid weight loss, tingly nerves and rushed heartbeat sent me to the ER thinking I had finally had the heart attack everyone told me my body was going to give me. Low and behold I was diagnosed with a panic/anxiety attack. They sent me home; no resources on how to cope and no medication.

2019 I invested $1,000 to have my proposal edited and restructured by a professional: a former Ten Speed editor. I won an IACP award in the personal essay/memoir category for “Food memories fill the void left by an estranged father,” in my Chronicle column. This is also the year that Paolo Lucchesi left the Chronicle and my column was cancelled soon after his departure. On a return flight from Puerto Rico during December 2019, there were murmurs about this ghostly virus that was hitting people like a ton of bricks. Three months later the world would shut down.

March 2020 is when most of the United States was put on an officially unofficial shut down and I was let go from Broke-Ass Stuart, after 6-years of employment. I was…blindsided. And bitter. It’s taken me years to let go of that bitterness and realize there was just nothing that could be done in the face of the pandemic. The world took such a dramatic turn in the months following…

The world was on fire. Literally. California went through some of the worst wildfires it had seen in a long time. The skies of San Francisco were an ominous and apocalyptic orange. We sat in a thick plume of smoke for three months straight. Air purifier sales skyrocketed. George Floyd had been murdered resulting in absolute fucking fiery mayhem. Tammie and me got blamed for the destruction of a person’s disassemblement (but also lauded for changing the landscape of food media). And it was also the year my proposal finally landed in Lorena Jones’ hands, the SVP at Ten Speed (who would depart mid 2022).

I had submitted my proposal and that cookbooklet to so many people in the industry over the course of five-years that when Lorena finally did reach out to me, she said she remembered seeing that little book years ago! Everyone had seen that damn booklet! Everyone introduced me to their agent, including Jose Andres, and none of them wanted anything to do with me. Even the agents that said they wanted to help BIPOCs during the summer of 2020, never heard from them. Yes, even with several follow ups. Time and time again, other agents and editors would tell me to contact this one specific Puerto Rican editor turned agent (bc she might be the only one TBH) and that agent didn’t want shit to do with me. Everyone’s reasoning; no market for your product, small platform. Except for that one agent that told me, “Don’t bring that anger to the table. No one knows your journey, so it’s not fair to them.”

I negotiated my book deal without an agent. Got the deal I wanted. And then I basically disappeared for two years to work on the book and came back (and came out) to a world and industry that pretended 2020 never happened.

My life has been a series of moments where I happened to slip through the cracks during a transition. All based on luck. Yes, I also work hard…but, BIPOCs need more than just an unyielding work ethic. We also need luck and allied support. I have been fortunate enough to have that support from my followers (because lord knows that the people close to me never stopped telling me to move on from writing and get “a real job.”) and the luck from staying ready so I don’t have to get ready.

So many people have told me, “Can’t you just enjoy the moment? Can’t you just be happy?” And I am! But, I’m also afraid that if I show uninhibited happiness that it’ll somehow be mistranslated into arrogance and give people the ammunition to kick me while I’m down. Or, that the universe will balance it out with something traumatic.

However, I’m thankful to you all. All of the aforementioned chronicled events led up to this moment. And I shall relish it as much as my psyche allows and for as long as my psyche allows.