Dreams Accompany Nightmares

All that's come up during the January slow down.

The annual January slow down has not been a relief, but in the four years I’ve been running At Heart it never has. What this January has definitively been is the most Lynchian month of my life thus far. Ironic, of course, given David Lynch, creator of my second favorite television show (number 1 is The X-Files up to season 7 iykyk), Twin Peaks: The Return, died this month. Lynch to me was like a cloud, or the dappled light casting shadows on a picnic table under a big shady tree; the feeling one gets when recalling a happy memory; some kind of God. More entity belonging to consciousness than mere human.

Dreams accompany nightmares. This is what January 2025 and Lynch has reminded me. As I watched my home state burn from afar, I also sat with glee as people finally got their cookbook zines in the mail. The same weekend I got news about the continued decline of my grandfather’s health, Panadería sold out at both Criminal Records, Atlanta’s beloved indie music store for over 30 years, and at Archestratus in Brooklyn in less than a week. Trump was sworn in on a Monday; by Tuesday people were making the recipes in my zine. Of course this is just life. The January bakery slow down meant I just had more time than usual to sit with it all. I started meditating again (I picked up my on-and-off again meditation practice “out of nowhere” two days before Lynch died) and was both unsurprised and unprepared for the grief, angst, anger that met me in the quiet.

Chapter 2, “Cooking Up Alternatives: The Creation of Feminist Businesses” in Ingredients for Revolution.

I also spent the month reading Alex Ketchum’s Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses, first finished book of the year. This book was one of the highlights of this wretched but nevertheless wonderful January. It connected me to a history of small business owners who shared a longing to answer the same questions I’ve been asking myself since I started At Heart: What does it look like—down to the details—to run a bakery as a person who, like most other people, has been hurt by the exploitative systems that destroy the planet?

What does it mean to live and work under the boot of capitalism, a climate crisis, ICE threatening, terrifying, detaining migrants workers/migrant people, the cost of food, avian influenza, the erosion of LGBT rights, there being no extra money to set aside for an emergency let alone a business?

Chapter 2 opens with a stunner of a quote from a business proposal from Massachusetts feminist restaurant Bread and Roses, “As feminists, we are naturally opposed to capitalism. Though we cannot work outside the realities of American economic life, we hope as far as possible to operate as an alternative to business institutions as we have known them. Our main goal is not commercial; structurally we see the enterprise as a co-operative venture and one responsive to the needs of our community.” Rather than feeling beholden to and powerless within a capitalist system as a business, feminist restaurant owners showed me it is indeed possible to do lasting good within the economic boundaries of this world.

Page 84; Ingredients for Revolution

Nearly all the feminist restaurants, cafes, coffeehouses written about eventually closed, (“These feminist principles of making food financially accessible to the masses usually led to the restaurants’ demise”), but knowing that At Heart is part of a long lineage of women-run food businesses that embody values that match my own has me ready for the future for my own anti-capitalist business. I want to do my best to do no harm and always take no shit. To rage with and bake for my city. A continued focus on the local and seasonal and a commitment to staying small, even and especially, when the time comes for At Heart to evolve into a public bakery space. Intentional evolution is how I’m moving forward into the future.

I’m rewatching The Return right now and am reminded of the light/dark and good/evil chasm in all of Lynch’s works. There are countless examples of this in Twin Peaks, but the first that comes to mind is Carl Rodd enjoying the beautiful sunlight through the trees on a park bench moments before we watch in horror as Richard Horne mauls a child with his car; the child’s weeping mother in the street comforted only by Carl. We see this dichotomy especially in Laura Palmer herself. Not that Laura–Meals on Wheels worker; tutor and caretaker to Johnny Horne; living a double life–was evil but she had impulses and desires that walked her through its doors. Lynch’s fascination with a perfect, shiny surface underlined by evil is to me an invitation to sit with mystery. Sitting with the questions that seem unanswerable and being empowered to move forward anyway. I think if I am always searching for the answers on how best to run At Heart I’ll miss why the questions mattered to me in the first place.

This January has felt like a concentration of light/dark; good/evil. This is life, and these forces are always a reality. I’m trying to build a sustainable, equitable, good for the environment bakery within the evil of capitalism, among other horrors and distractions. In the quiet of this first month of a new year I’ve been heartbroken and elated; horrified and comforted. This is life.

Zines are popular again, and this is a good segue into the importance of world-building. If nothing else, to have and nurture some imagination for what could be. Of course zines never went anywhere and they certainly aren’t a trend, but an enduring way to engage with and respond to the hurting world we all live in. Zines—all art—give you a format to dream, create, share your ideas for the world you want to live in and in making that world a reality on the page, you bring it to life in a small way. I think imagining the world you want to live in and then doing things in your day-to-day life to make it so is important and hopeful. It is important because it gives us hope. Especially right now, as the world burns and still the sun rises each day, I think it really matters.

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By now everyone who preordered and requested their complimentary copy of Panadería should have received it, unless you’re in Canada or the UK (going forward, At Heart zines will only be available for shipping within the U.S. as I have learned my shipping cost lesson lol). If you have not gotten your copy, please email me. Another note that I’ll be doing a second printing in the coming weeks, and will open preordering soon.

A final note is a reminder that paid subscribers to this newsletter receive a free copy of all At Heart zines as well as the chance to become a paid zine recipe tester. An annual subscription is $30 and helps me fund the production of cookbook zines. I’ll be writing more about this as well as more on some exciting bakery news in the next Bakery Letter. Thank you for all of your support.