Recipes.

Using geometrical concepts to strengthen the structure of a work

This party’s over, my sister says her patient said. Then my sister lifts her chin and says, Where is the fresh mozzarella? This was right before she died. The patient, not my sister.

In a warm kitchen, yeast froths and comes to life

Illustration by Anna Hall At exactly 5:50 p.m., your mother-in-law will anxiously announce, “Someone needs to go get the crabs right now!” When you first met her, shortly after meeting her son, you called her by her first name, an accidental faux pas for which you reluctantly apologized.

Life after brain injury

A design professor from Denmark once drew for me a picture of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. “Here,” he said. “This is what it looks like”: Aha, I thought, as we discussed parallels in the writing process. Although I may start an essay with a notion of where I am headed, inevitably I veer away as I get new ideas or encounter dead ends.