The Gift of the Onion

"I give you an onion,

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light…"

—“Valentine,” Carol Ann Duffy

—

Perhaps poet Carol Ann Duffy was right to say it is better to gift your lover an onion than a flower or a satin heart. After all, no one’s perfect. Maybe it’s best we tear off those rose-tinted glasses as soon as possible. 

Of course, the gift of the onion has its advantages. In “Valentine,” Duffy tells us in no uncertain terms that the onion “will blind you with tears” and “make your reflection…a photo of grief.” But doesn’t the onion carry more meaning to its owner than a painful reality check? It’s all a bit dark for such a humble vegetable.

It’s possible that the power of the onion comes from its transformative abilities. At the first slice, it’s acrid, spicy, and does in fact often make one cry. Then…fire. Dump them in a pan with olive oil and salt, and suddenly the whole neighborhood’s got hunger pangs. Slice them thinly and cook them low and slow with a pinch of sugar until they’re a rich brown and sweet: now they’re the perfect topping for any sandwich. You can even cut one up like a chrysanthemum, batter and fry it. Then the onion really does become a rose, so to speak.

Really, what’s amazing about the onion isn’t what it is—it’s what you can do with it.

One thing you can do with an onion, I found out, is give it to someone nearby. Not as a gift but as a task. You can say, for instance, “Dice these, will you?” Or maybe more politely, “Could you please chop these onions?” and then under your breath mutter, “or we may never finish cooking dinner.”

Kitchen grievances aside, handing someone an onion and a knife is an act of trust. It means, simultaneously, “I believe in you,” and also, “don’t screw this up.” 

More poignantly, it means: we’re in this together. 

The gift of the onion is one of belonging: if we cry, we cry together, if we succeed in turning this flaky, aggressive thing into something delicious, we savor it in tandem. And when all is said and done, we sit down to a meal not quite transformed—that’s a bit dramatic—but more confident that we can take a raw material, learn from others, and make it better than it was before.

It would seem that writing, like cooking, is an act you rarely control alone.

***

Quite a few onions (and other vegetables) were passed around, chopped, and sliced at the first writing retreat I organized for Entrelinhas in Minde, Portugal. One of the quirkier ideas we had in the planning stages was to involve cooking in the programming in some way. A system was devised to split meal prep tasks among the participants; some volunteered to be lead cooks. This meant that every meal was carefully—sometimes chaotically—prepared by the writers and staff. In the kitchen, we were all the same. There was no real hierarchy. I showed a young sci-fi writer how to dice cucumbers for a Mediterranean salad. A former chef taught an engineer how to gently place strawberries atop a cake’s layer of fluffy vanilla frosting. 

Somehow, over the course of four days, there were zero cuts or bruises. 

The kitchen of our retreat house in Minde quickly became like a campfire. It was a place of telling stories as much as it was about making food. In between rolling out dough for cinnamon buns, rinsing chickpeas, and slicing baguettes, stories were told about bad roommates, recipes gone wrong, and debates about best albums. More than once, a writer popped in the door to say, “Can I just be here for a while?” 

It seems the real magic happens when our hands are busy. When the mind is focused on something more primal, like cooking or laughing, there’s less room for anxiety to spiral. It was no surprise to me that the writers went from strangers to friends in the span of a weekend, encouraging each other to keep working or being openly supportive when a somatic exercise brought up a lot of emotions. Cooking together is an intimate act. For it to go well, it requires trust, clear communication, empathy, and taking initiative. All skills that are as essential in the kitchen as they are in writing workshops. 

So, while professional chefs would have us believe that preparing a meal is a hard science with exact measurements—seriously, look up cutting boards with rulers used by Michelin-starred chefs to cut, among other things, onions, very precisely—for most of us home cooks, adding ingredients to a pan is akin to taking a leap in the dark. 

Sometimes a little hand-holding is OK.

The same can be said for staring at a blank page. Or worse, the silent faces of an audience, watching you, about to hear you speak.

Or maybe most critically, being a retreat organizer.

***

On the Friday afternoon just before the participants started to arrive in Minde, I was frantically kneading a ball of dough that would eventually become cinnamon buns. Covered in a light dusting of flour up to my elbows, I pushed the hair out of my now sweaty face with the backs of my forearms. It seemed like a good idea to take a break, hands outstretched, palms up, so as not to touch anything with my flour-y fingers, while trying not to completely dissociate from the lack of sleep and low blood sugar. Suddenly, like magic, a cheese bread appeared in my left hand. And—wow—a cup of dark juice in my right. 

“Eat,” he said.

So I did. 

Of all the chances I’d taken in my life, running a writing retreat mostly solo wasn’t even in the top ten craziest. But there I was in the hot kitchen, panicking about not having thread to cut the buns with, and complaining about the heat making the dough impossible to roll.

We all revert back to being beginners if we are brave (or foolish) enough to try something new.

But I did eat. And roll out the buns. One half-batch burnt thanks to our over-zealous oven, but three or four of the writers kept sneaking into the kitchen to grab the “well done” rolls anyway.  

The days and nights passed by without any catastrophes. 

And the writers wrote. New works, edited old ones, and shared bits and pieces here and there. They handed each other (and me) lines of their work like knives—carefully:

Quantas vidas couberem em uma vida? 

(How many lives fit into one life?)

She appears resigned to her invisible status in the world, even embracing it.

I knew this the way you know things about your mother that you cannot yet name.

In the spring, I bask in the heat that no summer can bring. 

Ainda tenho migalhas para juntar. Algumas invento. Outras guardo como verdade.

(I still have crumbs to gather. Some of them I make up. Others I keep like truths.)

She stepped forward and looked into the mirror…

There’s a bravery in the willingness to place something unfinished and imperfect into another person’s hands and trust that they will handle it with care. In the kitchen and in the workshop, we learn to work without guarantees, to adjust and recover as needed, when a file goes corrupt or the oven’s too hot. 

When in trouble, hand your doubts to the nearest friend, like a sous-chef handing her cook an onion. What might seem like a tedious task to you is second-nature to someone else. And yet, this sharing of the burden works both ways—the helper also learns something valuable through this act of service. In community, no one is really alone in the kitchen.

A leap in the dark is always better in good company. 

Lucianna Chixaro Ramos is a Brazilian-born writer and the author of Cells (Burrow Press, 2023), a poetry collection that explores the intersections of language, law, and institutional power. Her focus is now on nonfiction, with her most recent essay, "Fortunes," appearing in Electric Literature. Lucianna holds an MFA from Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas, where she taught a course on the poetics of immigrant communities in the U.S. She is passionate about creating supportive spaces for writers and co-founded the Porto Writers' Workshop and Entrelinhas Retreats.