Craig Kinzer: Leading a Dramatic Life

Craig Kinzer’s professional life began quite differently from what he had expected.

The New Trier East graduate’s first job was as a political assistant to anchor Walter Jacobson at WBBM-TV. Craig had recently graduated from Northwestern University. He soon learned that the world of television journalism, particularly when covering politics, can be so demanding that it can run a person right into the ground.  Craig left quickly.

Eventually, Craig decided to go to graduate school at New York University, which had a graduate-level program in theater directing. So he found himself in the best place on earth for a theater lover. He also found that directing was his strength.

A New World Perspective

“Gathering interesting people and creating some sort of shared experience that is outside yourself  is surprising,” Craig said. “And when that is over with or you are in the process of doing it, it makes you look at the world as if you’ve never seen it before in some way or another.”

Craig spent several years in New York as the artistic director of an off-Broadway company, CSC, where he directed several plays. The company was always living on the financial edge so the day came when he knew it was time to move on.

In a stroke of very good luck and timing, a friend told him about an opening at Northwestern University for a tenure-track instructor specializing in directing. It was Craig’s for the asking and he moved back to Chicago to begin what would be a long career as an associate professor at his own alma mater.

I met Craig in the summer of ’70 at Northwestern when we were both theater Cherubs, a nickname lost to the ages of time, in the National High School Institute. It is a five-week immersion program that pulls students from across the country. Once teaching at Northwestern, Craig found himself in charge of the program, and ran it for seven years.

Along the way, Craig got married and now they have two teenage children.

A Change in Direction

But a few years ago, Craig began to feel disconnected from his work. “Here I was, teaching my students how to be out in the world, and I hadn’t been in it in a long time. I don’t believe that theater or the academy are not the real world, it’s just that they are a fairly rare part of it. But I missed being out there."

“I am desperately afraid of being uninteresting,” Craig said. “It’s not an ego thing. It’s just the world is too interesting a place and I have loved being in a place where it unfolds itself. That was theater for a long time and certainly that was teaching for a long time.”

In a complete change of direction, Craig retired from teaching and wrote a cookbook for men entitled “Men Who Cook: Journeys of Discovery in the Kitchen.”  It is about, in the words of his friend and famous chef Charlie Trotter (another New Trier alum), eating as “the only central activity that every human being on the planet indulges in every day.”

Craig said that he began this culinary journey as a young man. “I thought it would be a good way to seduce women. I make a cranberry risotto that would knock you over.”

Today, his passion has developed into a triumverate of joyful change: cooking, sharing and eating. “I was looking at food as a series of occasions for looking at men’s life course development. There is food that’s associated with your childhood, and with adolescence, and your early adulthood, and family and aging and maturity and bounty and hard times and transitions.”