The following piece was published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Quinobequin Review:
I think of the Charles River as a friend. Like a friend, I can mirror it in ways unbeknownst to me. Like a friend, I lose sense of time when we are together. When I’m rowing on the river, I feel as though I am in flight. The oars are wings. The water is my wind. The amount of light in the sky is time. And I am alive in my boat.
Growing up, I counted down the days to the Head of the Charles. My parents raced annually with their college crews. When that third weekend in October arrived, I would dress in fall colors and stand on one of the docks alongside the water, waiting for a parent to come soaring past.
I can remember one particular race. Peering from the edge of the dock, I saw my father round the corner of the river in the distance. His pace quickened as he departed from the flock of boats around him. There was no time for a breath. Rowers in adjacent shells glanced over, and he emerged from the flock in swift steps. I clapped and cheered alongside his college rowing friends, our voices rising in unison and launching into the air like cannons. He soared past us. The finish line loomed and blurred in the distance. With pure focus, the ref’s white flag shot in the air and I knew he had won gold.
We gathered to embrace him after the race with his gold medal in hand. His smile shone, and right then I knew I had to try out rowing.
Hidden in the Los Angeles Arts District sits a humble, charcoal-touched building. Once an abandoned warehouse, its multi-paneled windows reflect the past—days when industrial workers would sweat for prolonged hours beneath a ticking clock. Adjacent to one window hangs a glowing sign that writes: Factory Kitchen.
Rumored to serve Los Angeles’s finest Italian cuisine, The Factory Kitchen opened its doors in late 2013. Notable Italian chefs Angelo Auriana and Matteo Ferdinandi founded the restaurant with a desire to share the exquisite recipes they grew up eating. Yet, unlike award-winning Italian eatery Bestia that resides just a block away, The Factory Kitchen is not boastful nor lavish. Rather, its atmosphere is modest, its presentation casual. According to the hostess, the area once operated as a fish-smoking facility. The space stored thousands of dried fish, which were dutifully sliced and smoked by factory workers. This history remains alive and well.
The building’s industrial aesthetic survives in the speckled concrete flooring and the cracked cement walls layered with peeling paint. The small wooden tables are unadorned, cloth-less. Wait staff dress in humble striped aprons. The menu’s items are scrawled in a tight list of Garamond font. The kitchen, open and bare to its audience, lacks fanciful meat-curing closets and polished marble. The effect? Pure authenticity, which subtly prods the visitor to focus solely on the plate in front of them, to embrace each atom of the substance.
The Factory Kitchen does not need to over-perform to win its audience. It does that through flavor.
The trattoria offers a wide range of meats, pastas, and greens rooted in Northern Italian tradition—and all at a nominal price. The food is presented on clean, white tableware. Each dish is composed, each ingredient intently selected.
For starters, the prosciutto, a 24-month aged parma atop a lightly fried sage dough pouf, brings one to the Italian coast. Slice into the bread and it de-poufs into a crisp cracker. Layer the prosciutto, arugula, and cheese and it sings when tongue-touched.
The scottona, a thinly sliced slow-roasted beef appetizer, embeds hundreds of years of Italian practice in its preparation. The meat is characterized by thin veins of fat in its muscles, called “marbling,” which melt when cooked and makes for tender, succulent bites. It’s genius. Paired with mixed kale, gruyere shavings, and a light mustard drizzle, the plate combines salty flavor with a distinct kick.
As for the pasta, words don’t suffice. The mandilli di seta, which translates to “silk handkerchief,” is a product of utmost quality and precision. The pasta arrives in delicate layers congregated into a singular heap. Interwoven with an almond and basil pesto, the flavor is that of ambrosia—delicate in texture, powerful in taste.
The casonzei, a heartier pasta dish, is a specialty of Auriana’s hometown of Bergamo. Stuffed with slow cooked veal, sausage, and pork, each shell is simmered in light butter and served with fresh sage. It goes gloriously with the pear haps. This airy gin cocktail is infused with pear juice—so crisp the pears could have been picked the day prior.
The menu does not stop at antipasti and pasta, however. Auriana and Ferdinandi serve six entrées from the land and sea. In the case of number count, it may appear that the entrées are less refined than the pasta, focaccia, and antipasti. But each are delicately crafted, nearly perfected. The porchetta is a roasted pork belly, crunchy and infused with aromatic herbs that balance its hearty taste. As for fish, the snapper fillet, or the dentise, is soft in texture. The skin remains intact, a Tuscan tendency that unites the juice and flavor. Add a side of broccoli di cicco, a plate of sautéed long-stem broccoli, to fuse piquant garlic oil with each bite.
Oh, and then there’s dessert. Visitors must not pay the check until they taste the cannoli. As advised in The Godfather, “leave the gun—take the cannoli.” In crafting his own interpretation of the Sicilian-classic, Auriana perfected the cannoli’s light and crispy shell. Complete with soft, whipped ricotta filling, the dessert arrives anointed with sweet orange marmalade and a sprinkle of pistachios. The chocolate-filled bigné, which drips with blueberry wine sauce, is yet another masterpiece. Slice into the puff and remnants of the chocolate and chantilly cream ooze onto the plate. Each dessert is an expression of Italian tradition—a manifestation of passion.
At The Factory Kitchen, authenticity is at play in both the ambiance and flavor. Mangia tutti.
As I sat down with students during study hall at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, I listened and read through the minds, hearts, and imaginations of burgeoning writers — each carrying a unique voice, a distinctive dream. I asked them about their goals and what they hoped to learn from my publishing workshop. “How to withstand rejection,” one told me. “How to get your work noticed,” another described. “How to market my work to audiences,” another outlined. As I listened, I took careful notes. I wanted my workshop to provide encouragement to each student to continue to read and write. I wasn’t there to teach what I knew; I was there to listen and teach the students what they wanted to learn.
From that meeting with the students, I edited my publishing toolkit — a 90-page collection of resources including literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and publishing houses that seek work from incarcerated writers. In it, I describe how to navigate the complexity of the publishing process; from writing a bio and cover letter to withstanding rejection to understanding copyright, the toolkit explains all aspects of how to get a written piece out into the world. Through teaching students about the publishing process, the toolkit aims to empower incarcerated writers to tell their stories, encouraging them to live far and wide.
I also led my workshop at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center. The students participated with enthusiasm, listening with attentiveness and partaking in the writing exercises peppered throughout with curiosity and depth. Reading and writing garners students with critical thinking skills; further, students have agency over their words and notebook pages. For brief moments during the workshop, I saw the students finding the courage to present themselves unbarred, sharing honest stories and critical analysis. “I write to express what goes on inside,” one student vocalized during an exercise. “To articulate my inner world, but also to articulate this inner world — of navigating and living within the prison-industrial complex.”
In engaging with the stories of the students, and the ever-evolving path of the Prison Education Project, I wrote a new chapter of my life — one in which I found a passion for teaching and advancing socio-economic opportunity in an environment alongside others who are excited about the work. Creative writing can be used as a tool towards agency and abolition, of imagining a life beyond bars and of re-imagining a nation without bars. A mentor at my undergraduate university once reminded me: “education is liberation.” It wasn’t until my experience with the Prison Education Project that I viscerally understood what they meant.
