Finding your creative voice from deep within

Or how internal work and spiritual practice helped me find my voice and power in my seemingly humble life experience and education, leading me to write my heartfelt cookbook, Pomegranates & Artichokes

Prologue:

During my first, brief round of my Substack publication last year, I started a series of about the process of making my cookbook, Pomegranates & Artichokes. I intended to share my own experience in a series of a few posts, each covering one specific topic; How to write a cookbook proposal, how to choose the recipes, how to decide on art direction, photography style and the choice of props.

How to Write a Cookbook Proposal

I only got to write about the first of these installments before giving up on it all. I had written another story, the genesis story of Pomegranates & Artichokes. While the proposal article is all about pragmatism, this is the part about finding your creative voice, finding your why, trusting your guts and reaching deep, deep inside and work with whatever you find there, however uncomfortable that may be. The “work” may not be an artwork, or immediately an artwork. It may be therapy, or shadow work, or a lot of meditation and the sort of thing I’m not really qualified to write about, but going inside will, one way or another, serve you and your creative journey.

I first wrote this piece for Faire Magazine over a year ago. This story, and the poetry at its heart, are very dear to me. I learned a precious lesson here, and I hope there’s something of inspiration here for you as well.

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Backstage photo of shooting the promotional video for Pomegranates & Artichokes, April 2023, shot on film film by Shabnam Ferdowsi

If left to my own devices, I am more attached to scientifically proven facts, rather than “whimsical” things like meditation. However, during my time on this earth I have learned that many of life's altering moments occur when something bypasses conscious thought, and even skips the heart and arrives in the shape of many dancing butterflies into your belly. We call it “gut feeling”, intuition, magic, or something supernatural. 

This story is one of those moments. And it doesn’t quite start with this poem, but it has a lot to do with it. 

My debut cookbook, Pomegranates & Artichokes, recipes and memories of a journey from Iran to Italy opens with this quote: 

“I am from there, I am from here, 
but I am neither there nor here. 
I have two names which meet and part . . . 
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten
which is the language of my dreams.”

It’s part of a long poem by the late poet Mahmud Darwish, about his conversation with Edward Said on identity and exile. 

And long before this book existed, before the proposal, before the submissions and before the contract, I knew that, the day my book will be published, it will open with this verse. How did I know it? Because I had already done it. 

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I started Lab Noon, my food and photography blog in 2014, after months of research and insecurely stringing a few bits of HTML together. Back then it was nowhere as easy as it is now to set up a blog and make it look nice. I was in my last year of master’s degree in Graphic design & photography at Rome’s historical fine art academy. I had been in that school for a long time, since I had first moved to Rome in 2007. I had literally just graduated in Graphic Design in Iran, when I came to Rome to continue in that field. My first years at the academy were turbulent. Not only the school itself was sort of in disarray about the program of our course, I kept harbouring my old creative trouble; I couldn’t find my own artistic language, my creative medium. I felt like I had many things to express, but I just couldn’t find a visual way to say them, and to say them well

Early times in Rome, circa 2008

And it wasn’t that I wasn't good, I was! I understood everything at art school perfectly. My rigid logic made me excel at understanding composition and creating a perfect frame. The problem was how to fill it. I was good at drawing, but drawing alone is not a finished work. I aspired to be an illustrator, but I couldn’t find a style or technique that didn’t bore me, or frustrate me or that I could turn into something decent. 

Back in university in Iran, I had had many photography classes too, and it was the sort of thing people these days would kill to have access to at art schools. All on film, developed by us. This might be shocking to those who have come to know me as a passionate photographer, but back then (twenty years ago, Jesus I’m old), for the life of me I couldn’t see the point of photography. 

In the years to come I learned I just needed time. I had majored in mathematics at high school and although I had taken many drawing and painting lessons, my environment was extremely science-oriented. So I simply needed more time to be surrounded by art and creativity and test different waters and eventually, my voice would have come to me, or rather, I would’ve found my creative voice that had always been inside me.

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I didn’t find my visual voice during the years of my (second) BA in Rome’s fine arts academy. I dragged those years mostly to have exams to pass to renew my student fund and permesso di soggiorno (residency permit). But by the end of my course of studies the truth of my reality had finally hit me, something in the first few years in Italy I hadn’t quite grasped: I was an immigrant, and that is a sort of realisation that forever changes a life.

In a quite dramatic turn of events, on one of my first nights back in Iran after my first two years in Italy, I came upon Milan Kundera’s Ignorance. A novel that someone had gifted me before leaving Iran, about two Check immigrants who go back “home” after 20 years. It had stayed in my library until I came back for it, now an immigrant myself. 

“...Nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else." — Milan Kundera, Ignorance.

some works and scenes from my graduation in 2011

The topic got hold of my soul. I started gathering bits and pieces, and not entirely sure what I wanted to make, I started a project for my final thesis about Tehran and Rome, and I called it The Tale of Two Cities.

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A couple of years later, finally arrived that glorious moment when I knew I had found  my own visual and creative voice. Incredibly enough, it was photography, of food and lifestyle. I made this discovery not because I was now at a master’s degree in graphic design and photography, but because I had been on a diet. A strict, unhealthy and obsessive diet while having a gastric balloon in my stomach (A story for another time). Searching for “light” recipes that would also seem edible to humans, for the first time I came upon food blogs, and a then-very fresh Instagram with avant-garde aesthetics. I remember upon seeing the work of some of the best food bloggers of those years I thought “I can do this”! I knew how to make a composition, I had studied lights and shadows for too long both in drawing sessions and art history, and I knew how to use a camera. So I took it in my hands, and it would all come to me easily, effortlessly. Not that I didn’t try to improve, to challenge myself, but the camera would feel as one with my hand and my eyes and my belly. I had at last, found my creative voice. 

The desire to write a cookbook was born with the blog itself. For my master’s degree thesis I made a cookbook prototype and I did everything; The recipes and photography of course, but also the layout design and every little detail. (Little fun fact, years later, when I had just started pitching my cookbook proposal around I met the editor of one of the biggest publishing houses of illustrated books in London who knew me because of this prototype shared on Bahance. She loved the proposal too, but it didn’t work in the end).

For a couple of years I harboured under the false impression that if I just kept blogging, kept publishing my work here and there, an agent or a publisher would eventually come to me with a publication opportunity. This almost didn’t happen, and I decided to take matters into my own hands and write a cookbook proposal. It was a pragmatic and practical process. But what to write a proposal about?

I remember I had decided to dedicate the whole Christmas holidays to this, and every idea seemed feeble to me. Then I did something that by then I had just learned was good for me, but to this day I don’t do it as often as I should.

I sat down in front of an altar. I went inward in a meditative state, and I started to chant a mantra. Piece by piece I tried to let go of those ideas I didn’t care about and I tried to reach within. I don’t think it even took me a couple of days. Then, during one of these meditations I heard my own voice telling me “but it’s all already here inside you, you have already done this”. And it hit me: 

“So carry your homeland wherever you go, and be
a narcissist if need be/ 
The outside world is exile, 
exile is the world inside. 
And what are you between the two?” 

— Mahmud Darwish, Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading

There it was: the duality of immigrant life, my “tale of two cities”, the food of both lands, free of nostalgia that does not awaken memories, free of One Thousand of One Nights, free of the nasty clichés about the Middle East and free of Dolce Vita. Just recipes and memories of a journey from Iran to Italy; Pomegranates & Artichokes. 

I know it was somewhere in me, and yet I couldn't evoke it. It seemed that like some old witchcraft, I needed to know its name to summon it to me. It was mine, but I had to recognize it first to summon it, like a demon, except that it wasn’t a demon, it was my calling, my drive, my book. 

Then I started writing the proposal and more than 3 years later, I signed the contract. During these years I was approached by a couple of publishers, offering me books I had no desire to write because I knew I wanted to write precisely this book. 

When you have an anchor that hooks your stomach to something beyond, you move with no fear. If you do get to do this project, all you need to do is to come back home to yourself when things get hard, and when you feel lost. You have all the answers inside. You reach inward and bring out the light. 

“This is how it feels to lead the faithful creative life: You try and try and try, and nothing works. But you keep trying, and you keep seeking, and then sometimes, in the least expected place and time, it finally happens.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

Dream book parties of P&A: in London at Books for Cooks, in Rome at the Hoxton