Just One Thing with Stephanie Isan

Stephanie Isan’s “How to Make Non-Korean Kimchi” is a tender short story about you and your mother-in-law. Here, they share just one thing about the piece: 

The recipe I “use” in my story is loosely adapted from Maangchi’s Easy Kimchi. I actually wrote this piece for a generative workshop during the first semester of my MFA. It was around this time last year, maybe the sixth or seventh week, and I was growing increasingly panicked that the well of creativity/talent/inspiration I'd been lucky enough to draw from all these years had just run dry.

But I’d just made some kimchi earlier that evening, and figured I’d try my hand at a recipe piece.

Kimchi is close to my heart because it’s close to my husband’s. Food was the only language he could truly share with my mother-in-law. She was a brilliant cook, but cooked entirely by intuition--I could never coax a recipe out of her because she never used one. She had a penchant for "healthy" Kiwi-flavored Snapple, wool coats with a mink trim collar, and all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. She didn't use the internet and the only book she ever read was the Bible. She had a beautiful voice. You could always tell hers apart from the rest of the congregation. Deer and gophers would wander through her garden every spring, and she loved pointing them out to us when we visited. 

I wrote this piece for her, and I hope she likes it.