Featured Member: Alimentum - The Literature of Food
At the risk of inviting countless food-related clichés and puns, this (Thanksgiving) week’s featured member is the journal Alimentum - The Literature of Food. Writer and chef Paulette Licitra serves as the journal’s publisher and editor.
The Chicago Tribune called Alimentum’s offerings “wonderfully thought-provoking snacking, best taken a nibble at a time to prolong the pleasure.” Tuck in and read on…
Paulette, please tell us about your work.
Alimentum - The Literature of Food is the only literary review featuring original fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction all around the theme of food. We publish biannually, winter and summer, and have been around since December 2005. All of the works published are new and original. Each issue features about 32 writers and poets. All work is unsolicited and arrives as submissions during our reading period.
How did Alimentum come to be? What influences you and the other writers?
My background as a writer and a chef was brought together in Alimentum. The journal came about through a hybrid of influences — we want to set ourselves apart as not just food writing, but as literary food writing… so our influences are all the great writers! We say: “It’s not just about what’s on your plate.” The stories, essays, and poems use food as a kind of muse inspiring memory, melancholy, ideas, humor and joy. Our writers include well-known authors (Oliver Sacks and Mark Kurlansky, among them), many award-winning writers and poets, and some never-before-published authors.
left to right: Peter Selgin, Editor; Paulette Licitra, Publisher/Editor; Cortney
Davis, Poetry Editor
What have been your greatest successes to date?
Alimentum won the 2008 New York Book Show’s design award: First Place, Quality Paperback Series. We have been listed for two notable essays in two of the Best American Essays series, and another work will be listed as notable story in next year’s O’Henry Prize stories.
Our “menupoem” project, celebrating National Poetry Month, distributes menupoems to participating restaurants, who slip them into their menus or check covers. The menupoem is the invention of poet/writer Esther Cohen, and is the kind of reading you hope to see on any menu you read: beautiful words filled with whimsy, love, humor, and/or chagrin about the restaurant experience. We post a list of participating restaurants on our website during the month of April, and thereafter we post the menupoem broadside online. In April 2009, we’re collaborating with Weekly Reader and will feature some teen menupoems as well.
How do you use your Fractured Atlas membership?
As the publisher of Alimentum, I’m thrilled to have Fractured Atlas as our fiscal sponsor. It allows us to apply for grants and accept donations without having to set up our own non-profit status. And Fractured Atlas is a GREAT group of people!
Finish this sentence: Art is important because…
…because the world is filled with activities, endeavors, power (& wars) to satisfy enough mercenary tastes for the next few millennia. We need art to ensure a balance, to give voice to the invisible most important parts of life…the parts that feed our soul, that really make us grow, mature and understand ourselves and the world. Art is the language of our heartbeats and it tends to be gentle and quieter than the loud bulldozers of commerce and power…so we need a LOT of it!
How can we learn more about Alimentum?
Our website, alimentumjournal.com, features an online journal with podcasts (poem readings), video (food “performances”) and music (yes, songs about food!), an art gallery, and information about subscriptions, submissions, issues, and more. Our events page lists our readings, book fairs, and workshops and we have a mailing list you can join for announcements. We’re about to set up a visitor forum so people can stop by and tell us some of their own food stories, as well as a page with news and events in connection with our writers.
(editor’s note: “yum!”)
