Cover Photo: An image of Laia Jufresa against a pink background and leaves and mushrooms make a border along the image
Illustration by Eliza Harris for Catapult

Writers Who Eat: Laia Jufresa in Conversation with Bix Gabriel

This is still how I write, and this is also how I cook.

Umami

Umami—

not

I’m in a marriage now going on twelve to thirteen years where I don’t do the cooking, and we’ve lived in eight different places—and it’s always interesting to see how people react to that fact. In some places, it’s like, “Oh, really?” Because still in many places it’s just kind of assumed that the woman is the cook.

I’m not going to write anymore; I’m not going to be a writer anymore

Umami

La Disparition

Bix Gabriel is a writer, teacher of creative writing, editor at The Offing magazine, 2021 Periplus Fellow, co-founder of TakeTwo Services, occasional Tweeter, and seeker of the perfect jalebi.

She has a M.F.A in fiction from Indiana University-Bloomington, and her writing appears in the anthology A Map is Only One Story, on Longleaf Review, Catapult, Guernica, and Electric Literature, among others. Her debut novel, Archives of Amnesia, was a finalist for the 2021 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

She was born in Hyderabad, India, and lives in Queens, NY.