A story familiar to many is carved up in Omaha native Ella Weber’s “Deli Diaries”—a young woman graduates from college with a pile of student debt and takes on an unsatisfying job behind a deli counter to pay her bills.
“It seems to capture the Zeitgeist of being a millennial very well,” said Jon Gosch, executive editor at Latah Books, which published the novel in September 2023.
The autobiographical-fiction book takes “Della” through one eight-hour shift as she asks herself “Who ham I?” and deals with characters such as cartoonish management, stressed-out and indecisive customers, secret shoppers, and coworkers ranging from creepy to simply strange.
Weber herself earned a Master’s of Fine Arts in printmaking from the University of Kansas and worked at the deli counter of a grocery store for several years in between artist residencies.
All the zany incidents in the book may not have happened in one day, but nonetheless, many of them did indeed happen. After graduating college in 2015, Weber returned to Omaha before working as an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. She thought working at the deli would be a mere transition between student and full-time artist; instead, the deli influenced the art.
“I was in Colorado, surrounded by all these creative people, and the curator said, ‘Honestly, I think you’re more inspired (there) than you were here,’” Weber recounted. She completed that first residency and returned to the deli. She didn’t love it, but it remained a constant in her life, one that depressed her at first.
After a year or two of jumping from the deli counter to artist residency and then back to the deli counter, she gained a new perspective: she could use this mundane job to create art. Weber first worked in visual mediums, taking thousands of videos and selfies with cold cuts and deli paper. The accompanying updates on her social media posts regarding the deli became a collection of stories, often inspired by things people said as Weber offered meat and cheese with an obligatory smile.
By 2018, her deli-inspired visual art was showing in exhibitions ranging from the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. At the same time, she was compiling her collection of stories. The next year, she intentionally began slicing the stories together into a book.
Weber wrote consciously from 2019 to 2021. In her visual and written art, she sees dualities between fiction and reality, between the smile behind the aisle and the customer across the counter just trying to get a slice of meat.
After completing the writing, Weber went from the zany, competitive world of visual art to the zanier, more competitive world of book publishing. She reached out to a traditional agent, who rejected the book, saying it was “too weird,” and suggested she find an independent publisher. She used an online submissions platform and landed the attention of Latah Books in Spokane, Washington.
“The vast majority of (manuscripts) we decline,” said Gosch, noting that they make an offer to about 1% of the authors who submit. “But we just happened to fall in love with Ella’s book. I thought it was one of the funniest books I had read in a long time.”
Although Weber thought writing was difficult, her work was just beginning. She collaborated with a team of editors at Latah, spending about a year to cut down the draft by nearly 10,000 words. With her printmaking degree and interest in visual art, Weber understood the graphic style of book she wanted. The first page after the table of contents features a sentence printed in a circle—a representation of the repetitive “Who ham I?” that Weber (Ella/Della) thought daily in the deli. A variety of fonts, spaces, and other textual details appear throughout the novel.
Even the cover, designed by Weber’s friend and Omaha artist Dan Crane, is influenced by the duality of the modern world and aged meat, featuring a slice of ham in the shape of a mobile phone.
“What was fun about this project was that it was continuously morphing,” Crane shared. “It started out with Ella asking to collaborate on a book cover design, but pretty early on it switched to become a request for a commission of a physical art piece that was to be a ‘Dan Crane Piece of Art that was inspired by Ella Weber Art.’”
Reviews have been glowing. “A stream-of-consciousness tour through a shift that is at once one day and many days, with Della pontificating on life, reality shows, dating, the patriarchy, and everything in between,” trumpeted Kirkus Reviews. Sofi Thanhauser, author of “Worn: A People’s History of Clothing,” wrote: “Weber sees to the depths of America’s depravity and manages to keep on laughing. The thing is to both see it and survive it, and somehow Ella Weber and her fictional alter ego, Della, the Sybil of the supermarket, has done this. Caustic and suave, serious and weightless, ecstatic and dangling over the abyss, ‘The Deli Diaries is the Great American Novel ‘I have been waiting for.”
Another review was equally as enthusiastic and perhaps the most important to Weber: ”Having lived the book daily through proximity with the author and after reading 72 pages, I endorse this book.” The reviewer? “Ella’s dad.”
That perfectionist in Weber, that detail-orientation that enables an artist to see the world—and yes, the deli counter—through different eyes, gave readers a weird, wonderful piece of writing that hams it up and lays it down like a slice of Swiss on rye.
Visit ellaweber.com and latahbooks.com/blank-1/the-deli-diaries for more information.
This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
