Rebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement and Daunt Books Publishing, among others, and is an editor at the trailblazing food publication Vittles. Small Fires is her first book.
She will be in conversation with Lyds Leather, a food activist working on community-led food access and provision in Sheffield and 1/4 of the Gut Pleasers. They currently research how the right to food, how it is claimed and practiced, and what that looks like in a Sheffield context. Previously they have worked as a baker, community cook, farmer and food redistribution warehouse manager.
The event will be held at Gut Level, and will raise money for their new premises which will include a community kitchen. Food (soup and bread) will be available for £4 on the night.
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Small Fires is a bracingly original, revelatory debut that explores cooking and the kitchen as sources of pleasure, constraint and revolution, by a rising star in food writingThis joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen.
Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? How might the kitchen, for so long characterized as a site of gendered oppression, be reclaimed as a radical space?
In Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking -- that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books -- as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.
Small Fires shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere.
28th September, 6.30 -9pm
Ticket prices £4 Entry, Free tickets for unwaged, £12 entry plus paperback book.
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