Dessert
An Interview
with author Matthew Gavin Frank

Matthew Frank remembers walking through the crowd at the Alba market on the day he found his inspiration for “Dessert.” A  traveler with long hair and a full beard, he didn't blend in very well.  "I'm sure I was stumbling through the market, wearing my non-Italian status on my sleeve."  Frank's rambling ended when a voice called out to him.  It was from a small, round man with "cigar-stub fingers”—the vendor.  "He was this fairy tale anomaly,” recalls Frank, “who had somehow slipped through the cracks with a higher order of instructions:  Make people love figs."  To this day, Frank wonders why the vendor chose him as the lucky person to devour and share the magic.  "Perhaps, in writing about him, I'd find an explanation for his actions, but alas..."

"Dessert" is part of a larger work about food and the art of cooking. "The training of the palate to detect perfection in texture and taste has inspired countless farmers and chefs to create ‘plate-able’ and ‘growable’ art,” says Frank.  This art, in turn, inspires other artists.  “Food is paint and pottery and the written word.”

To capture intangibles like flavor and aroma on page, Frank associates them with some sort of concrete image or action: 

"This celery tastes like an umbrella opening."

"This champagne tastes like Andromeda's dirty sheets."

When readers come to these descriptions, he can only hope that they think, "Oh yeah!" as opposed to "What the hell is he talking about?"

Frank came to creative nonfiction via poetry.  He believes that sometimes a story demands prose and sometimes poetry.  "I feel creative nonfiction most accurately captures reality in writing because it fuses two equally valid realities:  an actual (factual) occurrence with the inner workings of the human mind.  In creative nonfiction we learn about the world, but we also learn about the landscape of a very specific human brain."

As for the magic, Frank senses it in everyday moments.  "The magic does exist.  In a bite of zucchini, a sip of Barolo, the starting of a car, a stain on the ceiling, the closing of the eyes for sleep.  We're surrounded by fodder for inspiration—the trick is to muse on the zucchini farmer, the winemaker, the invention of the automobile, the pleasure of abstraction and the wanderings of the mind." 

And if Frank ever sees the little fruit vendor who handed him the magical fig again, what would he say? Not a word, says Frank.  Instead, “I'd feed him a medium-rare scallop."

—Katie Kurtzman and Rob Markowsk