“We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.”
-Masha Gessen
Kitchen Table Quarterly is a journal preoccupied with history— true history.
Each of us holds the histories of what came before: mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and on and on and on. We are made of our hometowns, our elementary schools, our diagnoses, our religions, our former loves. We are made of the wars our nations fought in and the ones that drove us from our homelands. We are made of the cake we ate hoping to ease heartbreak and the soup that our fathers brought us for comfort when we were sick.
History encompasses all of these things. It is the lives of our parents and our grandparents. It is the strengths and frailties of our traditions or the traumas and joys of our people. History holds the victories of our countries and the ruins of our cities. It is as messy as war and as simple as a morning coffee order.
Kitchen Table Quarterly amplifies work that lays all of this history bare— cultural history, political history, geographical, personal— and explores how they weave together to create the way we live. We are looking for work that spills secrets and wipes the dust off of old memories.
We want honesty. We want an education.
Tell us how you got here. Give us your history.
Why the Kitchen Table?
“If I were to design a monument to the Soviet Union, it would be a kitchen table.”
-Angus Roxburgh, The Guardian
For decades, history behind the Iron Curtain was burned or shredded or hidden in classified files. Whole generations grew up without knowing the stories of how they’d come to call a particular place “home,” or how their great-grandparents had lived and, eventually, died. They didn’t know what things had looked like before they were born, what their cities had been called in the old days, or even what had held their families together, giving them light in darkness. Their grandmothers had simply disappeared. Their villages had just evaporated from maps. All of these things simply weren’t talked about. If anyone happened to ask questions, answers came back simplified, sanitized. So people were left only knowing what they were told, but not what had happened.
“She told me, 'I can't let it out of my hands. But you can come to my kitchen and read it here.’”
-Masha Karp
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people shared their histories in whispers. BBC’s Moscow Correspondent Angus Roxburgh wrote, “In the pervasive atmosphere of fear and suspicion, the only people you could really trust were your closest family and friends.”
And with them, you sat in your kitchen, around the table.