Nourishing Women’s Stories

By Erica Watson / Photography By Maura Brenin, Amanda Tachine & Kim Steutermann | February 01, 2023

Maura's meals for writers.

A Profile of Maura Brenin

I stood in the Storyknife Writers Retreat library, pretending to browse and doubting that I belonged among the writers with whom I’d spend the next month. I turned to see chef Maura Brenin in the doorway with her hand outstretched. “You seem like you’d like some focaccia,” she said with a warm, assured playfulness.

“I would,” I replied without hesitation, despite the huge breakfast I’d eaten in Hope and two days of gorging on road snacks while I drove from Denali to Homer. The warm herbed bread she handed me left me licking olive oil from my fingers and looking forward to my first Storyknife dinner.

Storyknife hosts women writers for two-week or month-long stays in six cabins overlooking Cook Inlet, a few miles out of Homer. Even though 2022 was its second year in full operation, Storyknife emerged from a long lineage of women supporting and nurturing each other. Executive director Erin Hollowell, an accomplished poet and arts administrator, and founder and board president Dana Stabenow, an award-winning novelist, welcome residents with the gift of well-deserved time to rest, create, and be cared for. Brenin’s cooking is a defining element of that care.

Brenin’s story is shaped by chance encounters and serendipities. An element of fate seemed to guide her journey towards cooking professionally. While pursuing an arts degree in Georgia, she arrived in Alaska by way of a stranger’s invitation to work at a Skagway art gallery. She eventually landed in Homer, ending a road trip with a spontaneous cabin purchase. When her first son was born, Brenin turned to cooking to pass the time alone with an infant in a dry cabin, but her attention to slow food preparations proved physically and mentally healing.

She grew up in a macrobiotic household that instilled in her an appreciation for nutrition and simplicity. Maintaining those ideas without the restrictions shapes Brenin’s style. “My food philosophy stems from how I was raised,” she says. “If you have good ingredients, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Food should speak for itself and tell a story. The more locally sourced it is, the better. I can manipulate crappy ingredients to taste good, but it won’t have the energetic output that nutritionally rich, locally grown food does.”

By the time Brenin opened Maura’s Cafe in Homer in 2003, she was known in her neighborhood for her cabin dinner parties. Friends urged her to open a restaurant, but she didn’t really consider it until she was offered a space on Bunnell Avenue, where the cafe would operate for 14 years. The restaurant began as a European-style deli, then, at the request of regulars, she added a lunch menu, and eventually Brenin expanded service to include breakfast and full-service catering. Brenin cultivated her culinary style with seasonal local ingredients, generous use of fresh herbs, and bold, comforting flavors.

At the cafe, Brenin also honed her ability to serve others, and recognized the transformative healing that food can offer. “I started really thinking about how to love through food,” she reflects. “To love someone, you have to truly see them, and consider what they might need. I’d think about my customers that way; often I’d make a soup with a particular customer’s needs in mind. The relationships I developed and fed over the years reinforced my spiritual beliefs about service to others.”

In 2019, Hollowell asked Brenin whom she would suggest as a chef for a new women’s writing residency. Maura’s Cafe had been closed a couple years. Brenin had a second child and had been working as a caterer and camp chef. She answered, “Me.”

“It’s been such a beautiful experience. It encapsulates everything I love about cooking. It’s very intimate, very creative,” she says. She is deeply tuned into the mental and emotional work writers are putting in, and to how each person spends their time at Storyknife. “Some people are physically active every day as part of their creative process, and they need enhanced energy for that. Others choose to be more sedentary with a lot of mental heavy lifting. Every person needs something different.” Brenin finds dietary restrictions, including serious food allergies, a welcome challenge. “It’s exciting, really, to make sure each person feels safe and comforted by the meals they’re eating here.”

Alongside baker Katie Emerick, who worked for years at Maura’s Cafe, Brenin keeps the kitchen stocked with extras like chia and berry puddings, scones, and muffins. Lunches are delivered to residents’ cabins in colorful baskets, containing soups, protein-rich grains and salad bowls, fruit drizzled with local honey. On a day during my stay when I found myself struggling with the blank page and wanting only salt and self-indulgence, a handful of potato chips appeared. (“Those chips made me feel seen,” I joked to my cabin neighbor.) Dinner, served family style, would often quiet our excited conversations as we heaped our plates with local vegetables, meats, and seafood.

Brenin has plans to celebrate the relationships nurtured in the Storyknife kitchen in a cookbook featuring her own creations in collaboration with residents’ writing.

One recipe sure to make it into the cookbook is Brenin’s seafood chowder, which she describes as a “delicious way to honor Alaska seafood.” It’s a brothy, aromatic chowder, which can be made with any kind of fresh fish. “It’s got so many complex layers of flavors, but it’s also incredibly simple to prepare.”

It was one of my favorite meals at Storyknife, served near the end of my residency. It will always remind me of the view across Cook Inlet, Iliamna emerging from post-storm clouds, sunlight streaking the wisps of steam rising from my bowl, and how, after nearly a month of being fed and cared for, I finally believed that yes, I deserve this.