Writing About Food: Somewhere Between “Theorizing and Imagining” (with Sun Yung Shin, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Roy G. Guzmán)

I discuss the anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family and its motivations with editor Sun Yung Shin and two contributors, V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan and Roy G. Guzmán. Sun Yung was inspired by an article written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who wrote about “narrative plentitude” in response to a world of “narrative scarcity”, and how they conceived of the project as a way to think about the everyday person who might happen to write about food. Following Sun Yung’s call, Sugi and Roy reflect on their own essays, how centering Minnesota is not merely a local perspective, and the collapse of academic and creative writing in what Roy calls “somewhere between theorizing and imagining”.