It started last winter, my craving bread pudding.

Bread pudding does not take me back. I never had bread pudding as a child. Suddenly bread pudding appeared in my life, appeared on menus at various restaurants and coffee houses about town. I didn’t order it right away, but got around to it eventually, and then it was all I wanted.  I’d make special stops at the bagel shop in Chena Pump Plaza on my way home from work, hoping to find bread pudding.

Last spring, I made one of these special stops, sat down at a table near the window, pleased to have a nice healthy serving. I dug in and felt nothing. I was full. I didn’t need that bread pudding like I thought I did. I was cured.

This fall, I began the semester unable to think about anything except the guy I started to fall in love with last summer. At the end of July his extended family pulled up to my cabin in a large RV. He left my bed, entered that RV, and they hauled him away. I wouldn’t see him again till Christmas. Half-way through September, he broke up with me, told me he didn’t think his feelings were strong enough to sustain a long-distance relationship. Then I thought about him even more. For a week I felt sick, I didn’t want to eat at all.

I don’t feel that way now. I don’t think about him so much. I see that he lacks a certain amount of faith, a certain amount of imagination. Sometimes you’ve just got to let go. I’m back to bread pudding. I found a recipe on the Internet and tried it out. I forgot to add the vanilla, and it got me off bread pudding for a few days, but when I realized my mistake, I went back. I found another recipe that called for whisky sauce. I tried again and made a batch without following anyone else’s directions, just a lot of good ideas. Before putting the pan in the oven, I doused it with whisky. That bread pudding was quite lovely.

If I were musical, I’d write a song about bread pudding. Not a down and out blues song, but not light and flighty either. Something in between. Something solid and satisfying. Maybe a standard like “Blue Skies” or “Summertime”– something soothing and moody all at once.

December 1999

Fairbanks, Alaska

This work served as final project for a photography class I took at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. As a writer thinking about image more intensely than I ever thought about image before, I found myself wanting to reach out for words to impose meaning. Language was/is my medium of composition. The writer and the reader– that’s the dance I know. The photographer and the viewer– well, if I could just tell the viewer in words how to see… And so my last panel had to be all text. The story, the images. So much fun to combine the two.

My second chance to display this photo essay came years later– in 2010– when the Marquette Arts and Culture Center hosted a gallery show called “Shots and Stories.” It won viewers-choice first place.