Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.

Love and prayer are intimately related.

Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.

The obsession with food filled my childhood - that's what happens when your parents are from a place or time where people really might starve. In America, my Jordanian father spent decades cooking professionally and pursuing his dream of a restaurant, and it was one of the central ways that he explained himself to his American children. Even though he's a passionate talker, he has a hell of a time with listening. His cooking gave him a way of having a conversation - which was a really interesting thing for a writer to look at.

I honestly never intended food to occupy so much of my creative work. Food-writing often seems about to plummet straight into sentimentality. I think food can be dangerous to write about because if you don't manage to mediate it somehow, it can be the worst sort of greeting card.

The question of identity has always been a murky issue in my own life and my writing bounces that right back. My father was adamant that my sisters and I were "Arab," and even though our house was in Syracuse, it was filled with the food, language, music, and overbearing relatives of Jordan. Unlike my gorgeous sisters, though, I inherited my mother's lighter complexion - it really is amazing what a difference a little bit of pigment can make on a person's experience!

As a literary device, sugar and pastry carried so many nuances - the sweetness of the past, the danger of overeating and addiction, the political and environmental devastation of plantations - it was just what a book needed.