What you'd be funding

The Larder Society

Whispers of the Larder · Book One

A novel. And not a someday one.

Here's what's easy to do: nod politely at "I'm writing a book," and move on. So let me be specific. I've already written one — a complete manuscript, beginning to end. Then I did the thing only someone serious about the work will do. I cut a character I loved and started the rewrite from scratch, because the story was better without him. Ten chapters of that new draft are finished. The rest is exactly what this residency buys: the time to write it.

The Larder Society follows a woman who uncovers her family's place in a hidden order of keepers — stewards who preserved foodways and cultural knowledge across generations, with roots that run back through the Underground Railroad and the Gullah Geechee low country. It is a novel about food as memory, as inheritance, as the thing people used to keep themselves and each other alive.

A chef writing a novel about food — doesn't that sound like a cliché? It would be, if I were reaching for a subject. I'm not reaching. I spent fifteen years with my hands in it: professional kitchens, luxury dining rooms, the labor and memory and grief and joy that move through a kitchen long before anything reaches a plate. Most food fiction is written by people who researched a world. I lived in one. The question was never whether we need another food novel. It's who else would write this one.

And I'm writing it having stepped back from the line — freelancing to keep the lights on, managing my health on its own unyielding schedule. Those are conditions most people would call a fair reason to set a novel down. I haven't.

Manuscript finished · September 2026 Querying literary agents · this fall

That's not a wish. It's a deadline.

First, the plain truth of it

What a residency is — and why I had to build my own

A writer's residency is a simple, almost old-fashioned arrangement: someone gives a writer time, quiet, and a room, and asks for nothing in return but the work. MacDowell. Yaddo. Hedgebrook. Centuries of books have been written inside that one generous idea.

But almost none of those rooms were built for a body like mine. Residencies run on an able-bodied blueprint — communal living, a bathroom down a shared hall, weeks of distance from your medical team, a calendar that assumes your body will cooperate on schedule. Mine doesn't always RSVP. Chronic illness keeps its own hours, and disability is not a thing you can leave at home for a month in the woods.

So I stopped waiting for a residency that would make room for me. I'm making the room.

This is a self-funded, self-directed residency designed around a real life: a clean and quiet place to live, proximity to care, and a stretch of uninterrupted months to finish my novel. No gatekeepers. No application I'd be too sick to attend. Just the oldest deal in art, rebuilt to fit.

Why now, and not someday

The year arranged itself

Three things lined up at once, the way they sometimes do when it's time. The book is close — close enough that finishing it is now a question of time and a quiet place to do it, not whether. My living situation is temporary and ending: by the end of June I need to be somewhere that is mine, with a door that closes and a bed I don't have to fold up in the morning. And in the fall, I'm having brain surgery, which means I need solid ground beneath me — before, and especially after.

I could keep writing in the cracks. I've done it for years — the way Harper Lee did, in the margins of a job, on the nights there was anything left. But the book deserves better than my leftovers, and so, frankly, do I.

I'm not asking to be rescued. I'm asking you to be a patron.

There's a difference, and it matters. A rescue ends. A patronage builds something — a book, a body of work, a precedent for the next sick writer who's told to wait their turn. You're not covering a shortfall. You're commissioning a novel.

Writer-in-Session

Catch me writing in the wild

The residency funds the quiet rooms. But the work also happens out loud, in public, over a flat white going cold. Here's where you'll find me with the laptop open across Phoenix — pull up a chair, say hello, or just know the book is getting written two tables over. I post the week's session on social; come sit in.

Not in Phoenix, or just want to fuel a writing day? Buy the next round.

Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Co.

North Phoenix · Bell Rd

Bringing a deeply rooted, uniquely spiced coffee culture to the valley. Not just a caffeine fix — a sensory experience built around traditional Yemeni brewing.

Sip Coffee & Beer

Arcadia

The Arcadia garage — an old Avis Lube turned industrial, open-air coffee bar, flowing straight into 36 Below, their hidden subterranean cocktail lounge.

Window Coffee Bar

Melrose · Central Phoenix

Sleek, straightforward, and known for local pastries alongside their signature Burnt Cream latte.

A.T. Oasis Coffee & Tea

Arcadia · Thomas Rd

The bedrock location — where Abdul and Aisha built their name on organic Ethiopian beans and a space that feels like a genuine community hub.

Grassrootz Bookstore & Juice Bar

Downtown · Eastlake Park

Phoenix’s only Black-owned bookstore — African-American literature and culture synthesized with a juice bar and a collaborative workspace. A vital cultural anchor.

Provision

Uptown · Missouri & Central

A masterclass in high-low synthesis: the gap between a morning pour-over and an evening craft cocktail bridged without making either an afterthought.

LUX Central

Midtown · N Central Ave

Concrete walls, sprawling tables, the relentless hum of a city waking up. A bustling, unapologetic institution where half of Phoenix goes to get work done.

Better Buzz Coffee

North Central · Glendale Ave

The Southern California import that brings a slightly glossier, high-energy aesthetic to the Glendale Ave corridor.

Moxie Coffee Co.

16th Street

Tucked into the ground floor of The Art apartments. Rare beans and experimental processing — for when you want to geek out over your morning cup. Their slogan? “Uncommon Coffee.” Kindred spirits.

Changing Hands Bookstore

Central Phoenix · Camelback Rd

Arizona’s beloved independent bookstore, reborn inside the old Beef Eaters restaurant. Home to First Draft Book Bar — coffee, wine, and beer among the shelves. Equal parts reading room and writing room.

La Grande Orange

Arcadia · 40th St

An Arcadia institution — coffee bar, bakery, café, and a funky retail grocery under one roof, the lemon-kissing-orange mural out front. Big-city bohemian, neighborhood at heart.

Fà-me Caffe

Midtown · Central Ave

Farm-to-table breakfast and lunch, scratch-made and locally sourced. Unpretentious, pragmatic, and consistently excellent.

Want a partner café? Feature your Phoenix spot here and on my socials in exchange for a standing table. Let's talk.

How to be a patron

Choose your seat at the table

Every tier comes with the thing that matters most — a window into the work itself. Patrons get Field Notes: dispatches from inside the novel as it's written, the part most writers never let you see.

Notes in the Margin

$25 · one time

Your name on the Patron Wall
A hand-numbered Uncommon sticker
The first Field Note dispatch

Join

The Field Note

$75 · one time

Everything in Notes in the Margin
Monthly Field Notes from the residency
An Uncommon print, mailed to you

Join

most chosen

The Standing Reservation

$25 / month

A standing seat at The Long Table — my monthly live write-along, you on your work and me on mine
Ongoing Field Notes, every month
Your name kept lit on the Patron Wall
First access to the Uncommon capsule
A patrons-only thread as the book takes shape

Reserve your seat

The Benefactor

$500+ · one time

Everything above
Your name in the novel's acknowledgments
The Uncommon sweatshirt
A signed first edition when it's published

Join the Patronage

Not into tiers? A donation of any size, on its own terms, lands you on the Patron Wall and in my gratitude. Give what feels right →

The Precedent

The Christmas gift that gave us Mockingbird

Christmas morning, 1956. New York City, snow on the brownstones. Nelle Harper Lee was thirty, broke, and exhausted — writing in whatever hours were left over from selling airline tickets, too short on cash and time to go home to Alabama. She spent the holiday with her closest friends in the city, Michael and Joy Brown, and watched their kids tear into presents while none, it seemed, had her name on them.

Then Joy told her to look at the tree. A few branches up sat an envelope marked Nelle. Inside was a note: a year off from the job, to write whatever she pleased. The Browns had had a good year, and they'd decided to spend part of it on a gamble — a year of her wages, no strings, no expectation she'd ever earn a dollar back. They only asked to be allowed to believe in her.

She quit. She wrote. Four years later: To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Browns' Christmas note to Harper Lee — a year off to write whatever she pleased.

For most of human history, this is simply how art got made — not by the market, but by patrons who put their money behind a person before the world agreed they were worth it. The Medici did it. The Browns did it. I'm reviving the oldest arrangement there is, with one update for our times: the patron is plural. A hundred people who each believe a little are the new Michael and Joy.

A Residency of One's Own