Recipes from My Garden

Flash prose, poetry, and essays inspired by her kitchen, garden, and family memories; Nadja Maril’s chapbook, RECIPES FROM. MY GARDEN is a sensual feast for the soul. Drawing upon her life experiences as an artist’s daughter, antiques dealer, journalist, and author; Maril mines simple objects for meaning and creates a lavish buffet.

＂Suffused with the tastes of cilantro, mint, and cucumber fresh from a garden, the smell of salt air from the ocean’s edge, the familiar scent of coffee and tobacco from a father’s hug, or the simple pleasure of the sounds of clicking insects through a backdoor screen, Nadja Maril’s lovely and sensitive RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN is a feast for the senses and a balm for the spirit. While exploring personal memories that touch on abstract questions of identity and history, Maril also reminds us of the tiny yet profound comforts of earthly existence.＂

--Aaron Hamburger, author of HOTEL CUBA.

＂In RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN, Nadja Maril casts a richly sensual literary spell. From the deft and resonant garden-inspired pieces that find the taste of ’summer’ in basil and celebrate the ’welcoming gaze of sunflowers, ’ to the sharply observed portraits of small yet potent memories- buying a perfect dress with her mother; baking a cake ’too beautiful to be cut’-- Maril mines moral and spiritual meaning from everyday life. The promise Maril makes about a ’chicken and rice’ recipe is true of this whole vibrant chapbook: ’soul nutrition it will provide.’ ＂

--Elizabeth Searle, novelist and scriptwriter (A FourSided Bed; I’ll Show You Mine)

＂RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN celebrates the splendor of traversing a literary life and surviving the time of Covid. Nadja Maril’s first collection of poetic prose, flash memoir, and poetry introduces us to her family, her nurtured garden, and the myriad spaces she navigates to cope with our world. With true artistic excellence, Nadja’s words yearn for an understanding of what troubles us, inviting us into a landscape of riddles, questions and puzzles.＂

--Indigo Moor, author of Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something--

＂ [RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN] is a treasure of small love stories: odes to beloved kitchens, and vegetable gardens, and the simple joys of a blooming sunflower. It is a book of memory and of pleasure that speaks of the love of family across many generations. The passed-down recipes inside the pages are themselves the most generous kind of love letter.＂

--Susan Conley, author of Landslide--

About the Author:

Nadja Maril’s work has appeared in publications that include The Lumiere Review, Lunch Ticket and Spry Literary Journal.

A former journalist, weekly columnist and editor, she is also the author of two reference books, American Lighting 1840-1940 and Antique Lamp Buyer’s Guide. Nadja earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine and is a Contributing Editor for Old Scratch Press

Nadja Maril’s children’s books-Me, Molly Midnight: the Artist’s Cat, and Runaway Molly Midnight: the Artist’s Cat -were collaborative projects with her father, artist Herman Maril, . Nadja is also the author and illustrator of Who is Santa? a book for all ages. You can find her blog at Nadjamaril.com. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland.