About

Mishele Maron, a former professional chef, writes with humor and raw honesty about the dynamic intersections between identity, emotion, food, and cooking. She also writes about visiting atolls in the South Pacific, and psychics in the Pacific northwest.

When she is not writing or reading, she is making biscotti, walking her dogs through Green Lake park. Thanks to her daughters, she has become an enthusiast of hip hop dance and soccer. She is passionate about the subjects of coffee, exercise and sound mental health.

Her memoir-in-progress, If You Can Cook, You Can Stay, chronicles her decade of working as a chef in the marine industry. It opens in rural Washington state. While sitting in her eleventh grade Western Civics class, listening to her teacher reading the tales of Odysseus aloud, she poses a question to the class.  “Are there any epic tales about women joining ships, and slaying Cyclops?”

Inevitably the answer is no, but the teacher gleefully issues her a challenge, to undertake just such a journey herself, and write about it.

Chapter one opens five years later, in 1992, at the age of twenty-two, Mishele sits atop her backpack in a disheveled heap outside the office of Crewfinders Yacht Placement agency in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She’s trying to summon the courage to walk into the office and ask for a cook’s job aboard one of the large private yachts moored in the nearby marinas. Or any yacht that might give her an opportunity to prove she can cook the gourmet food she grew up thinking about.

While she knows her complicated food history, including adolescent eating disorders, informs her desire to cook, it is aboard the pressure-cooking like living conditions on yachts that she will realize it is the secrets she has kept from herself, in particular the heartbreaks from her childhood, which force her to reconcile the past with the present.

If You Can Cook, You Can Stay, chronicles a woman’s ten-year journey cooking aboard yachts in the masculine-dominated marine industry.

Though her journey does not include a Cyclops, her encounters with the insatiable appetites of her exceedingly wealthy guests, authoritarian captains, the lonely reality of her life as female seafarer, and cankerous chefs does compel her to reflect on her relationship to her own appetite, and self.

From the Spam-and-toast dinners she grew up on in rural Washington State, her mental health struggles as a teenager that had her committed to an eating disorder unit at 19, and eventually, to culinary training France where she learned to laminate croissant dough and roast veal bones— Mishele’s journey with food parallels a journey of psychological healing.

She finished her MFA from Rainier Writer’s Workshop in 2012. She loves animals, long walks, reading, soccer and coffee. She writes and teaches in Seattle, Washington.

You can find her work in The Sun Magazine, Pangyrus, Memoir Magazine, Clackamas Literary Review, Awakenings Review, and other publications.