Sumayya Usmani: ‘Allow your writing to be multi-dimensional, bring emotion into it, the sensory details, and the human stories’
BY Katie Smart
13th Apr 2023
Sumayya Usmani is a food writer and intuitive cook. In 2019 she studied on our six-week online Writing a Memoir course. Sumayya went on to win the Scottish Book Trust Next Chapter Award in 2021 for Andaza (the food memoir she started working on whilst studying with us). Andaza is a memoir of food, flavour and freedom in the Pakistani kitchen – it is out now from Murdoch Books.
We spoke to Sumayya about her time on our course, the inspiration behind Andaza, writing from life and her approach to intuitive cooking.
You took our six-week online Writing a Memoir course back in 2019. How did the course impact your approach to writing?
When I took the course, I’d done some reading about how to write a memoir, but I still wasn’t confident enough to go out there and do it on my own. What I was looking for was working with someone who had been through the process, could offer practical guidance in the way to ‘mine memoires and work them into narrative seamlessly. There is huge degree of overwhelm when you begin to write about your life. One’s life is so fragmented and complex that to encapsulate your experiences into a story arc with real people as characters isn’t a simple process.
The memoir-writing course with Cathy Rentzinbrink offered me the guidance I was searching for. It was full of practical knowledge and support that helped me write that first chapter of the book (which now forms chapter twelve in the book!)
The course also opened a world of narrative writing that I found the confidence to pursue. Since then, I have worked one-on-one with mentors as well and won the Scottish Book Trust Next Chapter Award in 2021 for Andaza, as a work in progress at the time.
Your latest book Andaza is a memoir about food, growing up in Pakistan and how the women in your life have inspired you.What initially drew you to write about your life through the lens of food and cooking?
When I moved to Britain about seventeen years ago from Pakistan, I was a little lost. I walked into what was familiar to me which was being a lawyer. I was always a creative soul, so a career based on conformity just didn’t feel right. As I began to search for belonging in a foreign country, I found myself reaching to the pastimes that had always offered me comfort. Writing and cooking both helped me make sense of the world. I’d grown up watching my mother, all my aunts and both grandmothers sharing heritage recipes verbally and by the act of cooking together. My early childhood had been spent sailing on the high seas as my father was a captain on merchant vessels. On long voyages my mother created home for us by cooking on a tiny electric frying pan. She was passionate about ingredients and trying different recipes and as an only child, I soaked in this passion and the comfort it offered me as a child.
Writing was my way of evading loneliness and making sense of my feelings throughout my life. It was natural that I sought this comfort when I moved here and slowly, it started to take over my every thought. Soon I quit law to write my first cookbook Summers Under the Tamarind Tree, and then my second one. While writing, I realised that as much as I liked to share recipes, I loved to share stories and life experiences around food and what it meant to me and the people of my homeland. I also embraced the power and responsibility that women had in my culinary culture – they were the bearers and custodians of culinary heritage and recipes and I felt like I should do the same.
Food offered me not only courage and compassion but also lead me to trust my ability to understand flavour and my emotional connection to it. Writing this way became my way of telling stories and the more I explored this part of myself, the more I found I was able to express the words in my heart and head.
What meal from your childhood do you most enjoying cooking?
There are so many meals I like to cook from my childhood and the process is never as simple as British food! Our meals, even daily meals are always more than just one dish. Every day food is called ghar ka khana (translates to home food), and such meals involve at least three dishes: there is rice, flatbread, a vegetable dish, a meat-based dish or lentil and salad – all eaten together with a fresh chutney or a fermented sun pickle – served family style. My personal favourite meal to cook would be a nurturing chicken pulao that’s a rice dish cooked with a stock made with whole spices and chicken on the bone. The rice is cooked with the chicken and until it absorbs the stock. I usually make an accompaniment of fresh mint raita, a quick fermented carrot and mustard seed salad and my mother’s dry cooked maash daal. This is a type of lentil usually called urid (maash in Urdu). You can watch a BBC Food video of my cooking my chicken pulao recipe here.
You’re a champion of intuitive cooking – could you tell us a bit more about this and how you are able to translate this into writing recipes?
Growing up I never saw anyone writing recipes – all our cooking was done by sharing recipes by cooking them from memory (and vague verbal instructions) and by trusting our senses. As a result, recipes varied from person to person cooking them or the ingredients that were used at the time. Cooking this way is what I like to call the ‘art of sensory cooking’, or andaza. The word andaza in Urdu means estimation and trusting your senses in doing anything, especially cooking.
Andaza (also the title of my memoir) became the backbone for my writing, cooking, and living ethos. Writing recipes traditionally doesn’t come easy to me and through I do write them, it’s never effortless!
I’ve managed to translate intuitive cooking into written recipes by a fluid process of cooking a recipe the way I usually do: picking up the ingredients and spices as they feel in my mind (and intuition – in weight I mean) and then writing it all down – so if it feels like say, ½ teaspoon of turmeric in my head I’ll go with that. Then I later try out the recipe and if it tastes ‘right’ (it almost always does!) then that’s it, recipe is written!
What I love more is bringing recipes to life through dialogue and storytelling, as I have done in my memoir, though you’ll find a traditionally written recipe at the end of each chapter. For me, writing this way is about making cooking accessible to people in a more natural way. Cooking (and writing) is not a rigid process; its explorative, visceral, and sensory and I believe that by combining the art of sensory cooking with a recipe told within a story can offer a more layered experience of food but also about the people, the culture, and the personal stories behind them.
So much of food writing is about evoking the aromas and tastes of different dishes. What advice do you have for aspiring authors on writing about food as a sensory experience?
My best advice would be to embrace the sensory experience of the food you want to write about before you begin to write about it. If it’s a food memory you want to write about, revisit it by cooking the food that reminds you of that time. Our senses are transportive. As you cook that recipe, breathe in each moment, take time to mindfully absorb the ingredients and the process of cooking and what they mean to you – you’re there, you’re living that moment. After you’ve spent some time living the memory physically, note down how you felt, what the smells and sounds evoked. Slowly begin to journal about it, avoid obvious adjectives, rather spend time describing your sensory recollections with depth, layered emotion, avoid clichés, and practice your writing a lot – this is so that you can effortlessly write with you own authentic writer’s voice. It’s about bringing your sensory experience alive to someone who might never have experienced something similar but it’s also about taking readers on a journey to a place or a moment unfamiliar to them but in a way, they are taken on this journey with you. I think this comes from thinking of food writing as sensory creative writing – allow your writing to be multi-dimensional, bring human emotion into it, the sensory details, and the human stories. And above all use the basic rule of showing not telling, this is especially important in compelling narrative food writing.
What does your writing routine look like?
My writing routine is ritualistic and holistic; yet steeped in freedom to express myself the way I feel on each given day.
Generally, I begin early, and I begin most importantly by quietening down everything in my life. I’m an early morning writer – I start the day by burning incense and candles and doing restorative yoga or meditation, then followed by a long shower and journaling for a while without purpose. Music is important to me, I write listening to calming, classical and instrumental music. I find it offers me an ability to tap into my creative mind, also I am highly distractible to I put the phone into another room, turn off WIFI and try to let writing take its own form – it can sometimes mean I can write without getting up for forty-five minutes sometimes it might mean I can’t sit still for more than ten minutes!! I am always kind to myself when I can’t write, and I try my best to work through mindset barriers like self-doubt and imposter syndrome by just walking away and doing something else that enriches my soul – a long walk, music, reading.
I don’t write every day; I spend time doing other creative things such as cooking, going to a museum, shopping for new books, going to meet another writer friend who shares their new book idea maybe. I always look towards anything to inspire, shift and energise my own creativity.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
Narrative writing opened a Pandora’s box of self-discovery. I turned fifty this year and I’ve coming to this career later in life – but I believe it’s a blessing. I know writing is what I want to do for the rest of my life, but I also want to learn more. I’ve just got admission at University of Glasgow to do my MLitt in Creative Writing this September which I’m thrilled to be doing. I believe it’ll help me discover the sort of writer I am meant to evolve into, it’ll give me the opportunity to learn from others, and meet like-minded writers. I love writing creative non-fiction and my next book idea is a braided-style book with memoir, history, folklore, and flavour all intertwined together. I’m not sure I’m ready to write fiction just yet but I have a story brewing in my head and maybe one day it’ll come to live as a novel! It’ll have lots of history, culture, and food tying it all up together.
I love teaching others and inspiring other aspiring authors which is why maybe teaching at university someday might be for me, but for now I mentor writers online through my one-on-one mentoring programmes and monthly membership for writers called Qissa.
Get your hands on a copy of Andaza.
Find out more about Sumayya Usmani: www.sumayyausmani.com.
If you want to learn more about writing from life, join our six-week online Writing a Memoir course.
The books linked in this blog can be found on our Bookshop.org shop front. Curtis Brown Creative receive 10% whenever someone buys from our Bookshop.org page.