Thanks for joining me for Sunday Speed Dates. This week I have Judith Newton joining me.
Judith Newton lived the first two years of her life in Death Valley Junction and is passionate about desert landscapes. She grew up in Compton, California, attended Stanford on a scholarship, then attended UC Berkeley where she received her doctorate in Victorian Literature. With the second wave of feminism, she began doing feminist criticism and has continued ever since.
She is now Professor Emerita at UC Davis in Gender, Sexuality, and Gender Studies and is the author and co-editor of five works of nonfiction on British women writers, feminist criticism, women in history, and men’s movements. Her food memoir, Tasting Home, came out in 2013 and won twelve independent press awards. Her first novel, Oink. A Food for Thought Mystery, was published in April 2017 and comes with recipes. She has been a foodie all her life. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay area where she writes, tends her garden, and cooks for family and friend. Her daughter, on whom she dotes, lives much too far away.
Welcome Judith! First, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
My nickname in high school was “Bookworm Judy,” and in many ways that still goes. I became an English professor after graduate school, so I’ve managed to stay in school all my life (until I retired.) I loved reading and writing and teaching (for the most part), and I loved running my program, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at UC Davis. But I’ve always made a point of having as full a personal and domestic life as possible. I love cooking and have worked my way through many a cookbook, beginning with Julia Child. I’ve always had flowers on the table and candles and have dined to music. I have a passion for decorating houses and for twenty years or so have decorated them in Santa Fe style with lots of bright color and folk animals. Having my daughter was the best thing I’ve ever done and I still find immense joy in being a mother to her. I find gardening life affirming and those big, lush, and fragrant David Austen roses are my favorites. I’ve been politically involved since the sixties and have never lost the optimism of that era, though recent events have shaken me. All of this enters into my writing, both my food memoir, Tasting Home, and my first novel, Oink a Food for Thought Mystery.
Wow. It sounds like you have an active and full life! And so creative, too.
Tell us a little about your latest project.
My latest project is Oink. A Food for Thought Mystery, which just came out in April with She Writes Press. The short version of it is “pigs, poisoned cornbread, a feminist network, and a university tainted by corporate values.”
The protagonist of Oink is Emily Addams, foodie professor of women’s studies at Arbor State—university in Northern California— who finds herself an unlikely suspect in the poisoning of a man she barely knows, Professor Peter Elliott of Plant Biology and a hot shot developer of a new genetically modified corn. How did her cornbread, unmistakable for its goat cheese and caramelized onion, end up in his hand as he lay on the smelly muck of the university’s historic hog yard? Emily must figure out how before the police close in on her.
As Emily and her colleagues try to identify who has poisoned Peter, they also struggle to keep a new and corporate-minded administration from defunding the women’s and ethnic studies programs or merging them with English and Sociology where they will quickly disappear.
In the process of solving the mystery, Emily and her network deepen their ties to each other and save their programs, while uncovering some of the dark secrets of a university whose traditionally communal values are being polluted by a wave of profit-fueled ideals.
Oink, in short, is a comic campus novel about the struggle between communal and market forces in academia—and, by implication, across the globe— and it ends with an unanswered question about its villain: Is the greedy, womanizing, and narcissistic Peter Elliott an aberration? Or is he the future? And not just at Arbor State.
Although history seems to have answered that question, at least with respect to the United States, Oink maintains that communities based on mutual care, pleasure, and a thirst for social justice, still have power to improve our private lives and public worlds. In Oink, as in life, one vital form of pleasure is that of sharing food. It is dining together, in part, that brings the community in Oink together. That’s why Oink comes with recipes.
As soon as I read the blurb for Oink I knew it would be one of those stick-with-you books. Between the subject matter and the recipes, I was hooked!
What does your family think of your writing?
Most have never read anything I’ve written because it was academic. My parents and brother are dead now as are most of my other relatives, so there isn’t much family to read. My daughter did read my food memoir, Tasting Home, and she liked it a lot. My husband also likes my work, which is reassuring because he’s the first one who reads it.
It always helps when those closest to us give us the thumbs up and their support.
If you could learn a new hobby or skill, what would it be? Why?
Painting. I think I’ll take it up if I get to the point that I can’t write. It’s visual rather than verbal so it’s a break. Also, I have a strong feeling for color and shape. I picture myself painting outdoors (free from the desk!)
I’m in awe of artists. My stick figures just don’t do the image in my mind justice…
Who is your favorite author and what draws you to their work?
Once I would have said George Eliot. Now I think I would say Dickens. (I taught Victorian literature for many years.) And what I like about Dickens is his moral outrage at the suffering of the poor and at the indifference and materialism of the rich, also the central role he gives to “miracle flowerings of love and energy.” People in Dickens’ novels stumble upon love in the most unlooked for and eccentric ways. He is terrifically funny and witty in conveying his outrage and in sketching characters who convey what is wrong with the social world. But he also gives you those miracle flowerings which make change and happiness seem possible. He influenced my writing of Oink.
I need to read my Dickens again. When I was in school I didn’t understand the nuances and subtleties that run through his writings. Now as an adult, I think I’d have a much better appreciation of his works.
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
I first became a writer because, as an academic, I had to be. I enjoyed the writing, although writing for an academic audience was not easy in my field. You had to be up on the latest theoretical fashions, some of which I thought were nonsense. At one point, the theory that dominated literary criticism was so obnoxious that I brooded for five years about how I should have tried harder to become an actress. Fortunately, the fashion changed. After I retired, I realized that I needed to write from a very different place in myself. So I wrote a food memoir, Tasting Home, then Oink.
Thank goodness you did! Academic writing is so different, and uses such a different part of the creative brain than fiction and writing does.
How do you set your writing goals? Do you aim for a set amount of words/pages per day?
No, I don’t set pages or words. But I do take two days each week to focus on my next project. Right now, because Oink just came out, the rest of my time is spent marketing. It’s unbelievable how much time that takes. Fortunately, some of the marketing involves writing short pieces which I enjoy.
Oh, marketing… the bane of every introverted writer out there. Secretly, I think its can be fun to interact with others in the writing world. :)
Do you have a writing routine, or superstitions that you have to follow to get started in your writing? How about when you write?
I have breakfast and write until late afternoon when I take a walk. Then I make dinner. I used to work after dinner too, but I’ve decided to use that time for reading. It’s a treat not to work all day and all night as I did as an academic!
I’m a great believer in brainstorming and then in outlining. If I get stuck, I change projects for a bit. I have noticed that my oldest habits, like writing with a Ticonderoga pencil (2 ½) on unlined paper can often get me going. I like writing in my reading chair too. Reverting to habits that I employed many, many years ago often makes for a break through. I think these are routines rather than superstitions.
It’s kind of like muscle memory–our subconscious recalls what our mind cannot. Doing things in a familiar place or pattern, not because of nostalgia, but because we remember.
Did you have any goals or intentions in Oink, and how well do you feel you achieved them?
I did have goals, the most primary of which was to keep readers reading through the inclusion of humor. When BookBub listed Oink as one of the funniest books this spring, I was thrilled!
That’s wonderful! Such high praise. Let me tell you, you accomplished the goal you set out for, Oink is a funny, funny book.
Both your books have food as a strong focal point. Are you a foodie yourself?
Yes. Food shaped my whole life. It comforted me as a child, seduced my first husband, kept the marriage afloat, and was the basis for organizing a diverse political community at Davis. My memoir, Tasting Home, says it all. Oink also has many scenes involving cooking and dining with others and it comes with recipes. I’ve been inspired by the books of Janet Flammang, The Taste for Civilization and Table Talk.
Food has such a power to connect people from all walks of life. And it’s so communal, from growing, to cooking, to eating, every step has a way of bringing people closer together.
Are the recipes included in the book your own creations or family recipes?
Some of the recipes in my memoir, Tasting Home, were my mother’s. They are hard to make now since they relied on forms of Crisco that I don’t think exist anymore. The rest were recipes I learned from favorite cookbooks over the decades. In Oink, the recipes are all corn based and come from a wide range of people, from famous chefs like Gary Danko to people with food blogs, some very well-known and some not known much at all. They are recipes from many cultures and are meant to suggest how food connects us over our many differences.
I’m a sucker for a good cornbread. I think the description of Emily’s cornbread was one of the first things that sold me on Oink.
What were the challenges in bringing Oink to life?
I think the greatest challenge was in writing about serious issues in a way that would keep readers reading. I used humor for that, also suspense and some downright silliness.
And they’re all serious issues that are relevant today. To address them in a humorous way is a challenge when it’s so easy to fall into lecturing on them.
What’s your favorite hashtag? Your most used hashtag?
Favorite hashtag: anything having to do with a critique of Trump. Most used hashtag: #Oink.
Nice ones.
Let’s play Either Or…
- Star Wars or Star Trek? I watched Star Trek for a long time, so I think that has to be my favorite.
- Jane Austen or Shakespeare? I love both, but Shakespeare has to come first, even though I wrote an essay on Jane Austen that I’m very proud of.
- Stephen King or Edgar Allen Poe? Definitely Poe
- Pixar animation or hand drawn? I haven’t watched enough to say. I’ll watch more when I have grandchildren.
I’ll admit, number two is a hard one…
Do you have a bucket list? What is the most unusual item on your bucket list?
I actually don’t have a bucket list. But at some point I want to reread Chekhov and Dickens and make time for celebrity biographies and random books that my reading groups keep me too busy to read now.
That’s a bucket list of books! lol
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Love yourself more.
Excellent advice. More people need to do this.
What other projects do you have in the works?
I’m working on the second in the Emily Addams/Food for Thought Series. It’s a novel called Terroir and it’s about winemaking, secrets, exploited labor, and a search for roots. It has some fun with wine culture.
Here is Emily reflecting on the wine tasting in which she has just participated. “There’d been references to ‘rich and oily.’ How could a wine be oily? To ‘smooth but grippy,’ which she didn’t understand at all. And to ‘aggressive notes of spring,’ which she at least liked the idea of. More than once during the tasting, she’d thought fondly of the London prankster who had posted about a wine with ‘agile clam flavors and a suspicion of red kryptonite. Excellent with road kill and chowder.’ How she would have loved to say something like that.”
That’ll be a fun read! I can’t wait to get my hands on that one. :)
You can connect with Judith and her books online at…
Website ~ Facebook ~ Pinterest ~ Twitter ~ Amazon
Thanks again for stopping by, Judith, this was fun!
Thank you, Christina.
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