Diner Week – All Artwork by Viv Le

In the latest entry in our A+ Editor’s Notes series, I’m taking you into the kitchen of Diner Week to see how the sausage (or bacon or ham or vegan breakfast patty) was made.

I’m not sure what prompted it, but on Friday, June 10 2022, just after noon Eastern time, Autostraddle’s Director of Operations Laneia Jones popped into the main social channel of our Slack with a prompt:

So, Diner Week didn’t exactly start with diners. But Laneia opened up something with this simple request. People started sharing the places they’ve eaten at, sharing little pieces of themselves. We talked about salad bars for a long time. You might be thinking to yourself: How much is there to possibly say about salad bars? A lot. I probably could have planned Salad Bar Week and had a dozen different emotions-packed essays about fucking salad bars.

(For the record, Steak & Sea is definitely how I identify.)

Eventually, hometown grill/grille/buffet led us to hometown diners. Of course it did. We walked about chain diners, mountain diners, one-of-a-kind rural diners, the diners we wished we could hop in a car and go to right the fuck now but couldn’t because we lived in areas surging with Covid cases, but maybe we could get takeout, yeah, doesn’t that sound nice?

I threw the idea of Diner Week out as a joke (which, to be fair, is how most of my editorial ideas begin). It was met with great enthusiasm.

I started scheming.

Almost exactly a year ago, before I became a full-time editor here at Autostraddle, I curated a series of micro essays as a guest editor. The series was called Dinner Party, and I tapped four writers I admire to write about any food dish of their choice in 750 words or less. I love to read writing on food — because it’s never just about food, is it? Food touches so many things: place, bodies, relationships. Later, after I did go full-time here, I did a package of essays on time zones. While I loved helming Autostraddle’s Pride package a few months after that, Dinner Party and Time Zones Week and Diner Week are the editorial projects that best exemplify the kind of creative work I want to do and support here. There’s nothing obviously queer about dinner parties, time zones, diners. And yet, isn’t there?

Sometimes writers come to me saying they have an essay they want to pitch but can’t figure out the queer angle. I always reply with something along the lines of this: well, you’re queer and you care about it, right?

For Time Zones Week, I solicited work from writers on Autostraddle’s team and outside of it. For Diner Week, I knew I wanted to keep things in-house. We recently hired 14 new writers, and I wanted to give them a chance to contribute to a themed editorial package a little more abstract than the Pride package. By this point, I’d worked with all of these writers in some capacity but not on more creative-nonfiction-leaning essays. I saw this as an opportunity not only to work on a project I was excited about but to deepen my editor-writer relationships with some of our newbies as well as any veteran team writers who wanted to participate. I have a very hands-on approach to editing, and I often individually tailor the editing experience to fit the hopes, dreams, needs, and experience of whatever writer I’m working with. It makes for a special but intense relationship and process sometimes, but it’s worth it to me to go deep in revision and really help the writer get to where they wanna go.

I posted a call for pitches from our team. In it, I pointed them in the direction of some other food nonfiction I felt fit the scope of the series: my own Wild Cravings series, the Half Recipes series at Catapult, To All The Coffeeshops I’ve Called Home, Why I Take All My First Dates to Olive Garden, A Reemergence So Fragile a Restaurant Closure Can Undo Me, and To All the Pirate Bars Ayye’ve Loved Before. I thought maybe I’d get five or six pitches, and that was more than enough to fashion a themed week out of.

I got 12 pitches.

I got 12 pitches that excited, delighted, and surprised me. I got 12 pitches I knew immediately I’d take. My new challenge became figuring out how to pack 12 excellent sprawling essays into a single week, which is why we ran two pieces a day for most of Diner Week.

Shortly after the call went out, Nicole asked if I’d ever seen the Denny’s tumblr. I’m someone who has written extensively about the second life I lived on tumblr for most of my teens and early twenties, but I missed this particular internet moment somehow. If you don’t know, the official Denny’s tumblr is full of truly bizarre and occasionally disturbing gifs and images I’d describe as “diner surrealism.” The images recontextualize diner imagery in unexpected and intentionally incongruous ways like, for example, this image of a “masked” potato or this gif of fried eggs blinking like eyes. When I met with our Art Director Viv to talk visuals for Diner Week, I put forth the Denny’s tumblr as a mood board. They took it and fucking ran to the moon with it, transforming “diner surrealism” into something that feels distinctly them. The art Viv created is retro, strange, and immersive. Like, well, a diner.

Diners seem effortless, don’t they? When you’re the customer, they’re easy places to go to without the fuss of a reservation or much of a plan at all. You know what you’re getting. But to work at a diner is a different experience, of course. And I was so thrilled when Autostraddle’s A+ and Fundraising Director Nicole pitched an essay about their experience as a line cook in a touristy riverside joint. And when Yashwina made the workers at her go-to diner an indelible part of the story. When others wrote with affection for the servers who called them honey when refilling their coffees.

Nothing was casual or thoughtless about the making of Diner Week. Writers put so much intention and meaning behind every dish they described, every booth they slid into, every observation they made about the timelessness and comfort of diners that could have run the risk of coming off as cliche but didn’t, because these 12 writers wrote with specificity, heart, and flavor. Like coursing a meal, I was intentional about the order of these essays, the ways some were paired.

And I didn’t go into things with this plan per se, but I ended up having a very method actor approach to the editing process. I went with Yashwina to Stepping Stone twice on back-to-back weekends during a trip to Portland, got to see just how loved she is and how much love she gives there for myself. After a few failed attempts, I also finally got to go to Flanigan’s with Stef and their girlfriend. We had to wait literally an hour, which is wild for a South Florida seafood grill chain if you ask me! But was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m now the proud owner of a shamrock green Flanigan’s take-home cup, and I experienced an important Florida first when our pitcher of light beer was delivered to our booth with an accompanying knotted plastic bag of ice. I didn’t understand until Stef plopped it in the pitcher after pouring our first cups. It’s to keep it cold. Duh.

The details of all of these diners are amazing, aren’t they? Doesn’t a bag of ice plopped in a pitcher of beer say so much in and of itself about place? I’ve only been to a couple of the diners written about this week, but I still feel like all the writers invited me into someplace and some time in their lives, and for that, I’m lucky. Katie made me see New Jersey through her eyes, and Lily made me feel seen, and Darcy made me time travel, and Ro made me nostalgic for my past life in Chicago, and Sa’iyda made me call my grandma, and Dani made me think about the friends who saw me through so much, and Nicole taught me what Loganberry tastes like, and I met Stef at Flanigan’s for real, and A.Tony unlocked my own memories of Silver Diner, and Niko made it so I’ll never look at pineapple the same way again, and shea made my mouth water for prime rib, and Yash showed me a new way to order a bloody mary extra spicy the way I like it.

None of this would have been possible without our A+ members. Hell, I wouldn’t even have this job without you, our members who support us in all of our wildest, weirdest pursuits. Thank you for being here, and I hope you get to have your favorite meal at your favorite diner sometime soon.

If I’m being honest, I wish Diner Week had never ended. I want Diner Week to be 24/7 the way my favorite diner used to be.

But while Diner Week might be over, diners are forever.

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