Episode 581
with Ross Gay, Iliana Regan, and Baroque Betty with Mood Area 52
Poet and essayist Ross Gay (Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude) dissects privilege, pain, and skateboarding, all themes from newest book Inciting Joy; Michelin-starred chef Iliana Regan outlines her journey from farmer's markets to foraging with a new model of fine dining; and singer-songwriter Baroque Betty, accompanied by Mood Area 52, performs the title track of her new album Sobering Up. Plus, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello share our listeners' perfect weekends.
Ross Gay
Writer
Ross Gay is the New York Times best-selling author of The Book of Delights: Essays and four books of poetry. His poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; while his other renown collection of poems Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. His newest book, Inciting Joy, an electrifying collection of essays about joy and sorrow, is out October 2022 from Algonquin Books. Alongside writing, he is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University. Website • Twitter
Iliana Regan
Chef & Writer
From foraging on the family farm to running her own Michelin-starred restaurant, chef and writer Iliana Regan is unstoppable. Already a National Book Award nominee from her first memoir, Burn the Place, Iliana Regan's newest memoir, Fieldwork, investigates her heritage as a forager and how her complex gender identity informs her acclaimed work as a chef and her profound experience of the natural world. She runs the Milkweed Inn bed and breakfast in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and in addition to working as the chef and owner of Milkweed Inn, she earned an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Instagram • Twitter
Baroque Betty
Singer-songwriter
Commentators who like to keep things neatly slotted into place have struggled with defining the musical stylings of Baroque Betty, precisely because she defies simple categorization. Though the string-laden melodies occasionally anchor her in the territories of folk, bluegrass, or minimalist rock, she's more at home as a wanderer, as a musician crafting sound from the cracks in-between. It’s from these quirky, deeper, sometimes darker places that Baroque Betty’s voice reaches up, takes you by the hand, and sweeps you along on an entrancing musical journey. Baroque Betty has built a dedicated fan base as well as winning much admiration amongst prominent peers, including one of the leading figures in modern-day bluegrass – Woody Platt. The lead singer of Steep Canyon Rangers describes Betty's sound as "striking" and "spectacular." Website • Instagram • Listen
Mood Area 52
Indie Rock Band
Accompanying Baroque Betty are the sensational, local superstars Mood Area 52! They're a Eugene-based creative collective and band that writes and performs major and minor original songs, plays classic film soundtracks, accompanies other artists, and has been supporting the local arts scene through sweat equity since 1998. Current active members include Michael Roderick, Amy Danziger, Billy Barnett, Don Elkington, Julia Frantz, Corwin Bolt, Dan Schmid, and Kee Zublin. Website • Instagram • YouTube
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Luke Burbank: Hey Elena!
Elena Passarello: Hey, Luke. How's it going?
Luke Burbank: It's going pretty well. Are you ready to play a little "Station Location Identification Examination"?
Elena Passarello: I sure am.
Luke Burbank: This is where I quiz Elena. About a place in the country where Live Wire is on the radio. She's got to try to guess where I'm talking about. This, I'm just going to manage everyone's expectations. Let's just say it is a wonderful but slightly boutique location in America. Okay?
Elena Passarello: Okay.
Luke Burbank: Don't put too much pressure on yourself. All right? Okay. This city gets its name from the Choctaw language. It's derived from the word meaning Red Rock. And speaking of rock, rock legend Little Richard lived here at the time of his passing. This is where Little Richard was living.
Elena Passarello: Now, I know he's from Georgia originally, but...
Luke Burbank: This is, this is not I'll give you a hint. It's not in the state of Georgia, which leaves you 49 other possibilities. (Hmm.) This city's Cascade Hollow Distillery is located along America's whiskey trail, and George Dickel whiskey is produced in this place.
Elena Passarello: Oh I do believe you're talking about Tullahoma, Tennessee.
Luke Burbank: Oh, my gosh.
Elena Passarello: You had me at George Dickle, man.
Luke Burbank: The whiskey here. I don't think I'd ever seen the name Tullahoma, Tennessee. That's where we're on WTML Radio. My goodness. That is really impressive. All right. Shout out to everyone tuning in in Tullahoma, Tennessee, on WTML. All right. Should we get to the show?
Elena Passarello: Yes. Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. Take it away.
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's LIVE WIRE! This week, poet and essayist Ross Gay.
Ross Gay: The sort of notion of privilege like, oh, you're privileged because you have a place to garden or you're privileged because you have breathable air is evidence actually of dis-privilege. You know, it's evidence of a brutality.
Elena Passarello: And chef and writer Iliana Regan.
Iliana Regan: Chefs are storming through kitchens and they're mad at their employees and they're, you know, like, oh, this thing needs to be this way. It's like, what's the point?
Elena Passarello: With music from Baroque Betty with Mood Area 52 and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer Elena Passarello and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thanks to everyone tuning in all across the country. We have an absolutely wonderful show in store for you this week. We asked the Live Wire listeners a question. We asked, Describe your perfect weekend. One of the people that we're interviewing this week. Ilaina Regan, runs this place in the woods of Michigan called the Milkweed Inn. And it is like the most perfect, woodsy weekend you could ever imagine. So we're going to hear the listener response to that question, what their perfect weekend might be coming up first, though, it's time for the best news we heard all week. (Best, Best News.) This is our little reminder at the top of the show that there is good news happening out there in the world. Elena, what's the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Well, speaking of Tennessee and other great places across this country that have Waffle Houses, I have some Waffle House Best News. This is a Waffle House in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Hunter family shows up for breakfast at least once every weekend. And they always request to sit in this section of a server there named Devonte Gardner. Devonte knows everybody's order, including eight year old Kayzen, and gets a high five every time he comes in. And then Devonte knows that he wants hash browns with cheese, which in Waffle House parlance is covered. Anyway, one day Kayzen was in that Waffle House with his grandfather and he heard Mr. Gardner asking around on leads on a very cheap car because it turns out he lives far away now from the Waffle House and has to walk several miles.
Luke Burbank: This was Mr. Gardner, their typical server there at the Waffle House.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. Devonte Gardner. Yeah. The apartment where he lived with his family, with his wife and two daughters was uninhabitable because of a black mold problem. They had to move to a motel and he was walking several miles from that motel to the Waffle House to go to work and make everybody smile like he normally does. So eight year old Kayzen goes home and tells his mom. His mom and her husband actually had a black mold issue that made them have to leave a place where they used to live. So she totally empathized. And so she told Kayzen it would be okay if they started a GoFundMe. So Kayzen starts the GoFundMe asking for $5,000 to get Mr. Devonte Gardner a new car, but then a local news station picks it up. And now $50,000 has been raised for this amazing Waffle House server.
Luke Burbank: Wow. So I guess he's got a Tesla now.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, well, I think he's going to get a car plus a year's rent. It's going to take a little pressure off. And that's.
Luke Burbank: Awesome.
Elena Passarello: The gratitude in this story is just so amazing. It's the thing that makes me feel the best, Devonte Gardner says. I am thankful that I have a job that I enjoy, but it's really hard to save enough to improve my family stations. But we are slowly working our way back. I love working at Waffle House because I have the opportunity to make people feel good every day. And when Kayzen was asked about his act of generosity, he said, Sometimes people just need a little help, which is very cute and totally true!
Luke Burbank: What a lesson to learn as a young kid. Absolutely. Speaking of food, the best news I saw this week involves pizza, where the sport of pizza acrobatics, also known sometimes as pizza freestyle or for those not very much in the know pizza tossing is finally getting its due. A great profile in the Washington Post of a guy named Tony Gemignani who has been competing in pizza acrobatics for like almost 35 years now. He started off when he was 17. He was working at his brother's pizzeria in Castro Valley, California, and he just noticed that he could kind of like do cool stuff with the pizza dough, like he could throw it like a little higher. You know, how like the sort of movie version of somebody making pizzas.
Elena Passarello: Like cocktail but for.
Luke Burbank: People. Right. Exactly. Well, he was just like, really good at it and he was throwing it higher and higher. And so then he started just kind of like seeing what the limits of what he could actually do was. And he got really good at it. Part of how he got good was he would sew these kind of like circular things that were like a pizza dough and then practice with them all day long when he wasn't at the pizzeria and he got super good at it to the point where he's won like something like, well, he's won a total of 13 world championships in various parts of the pizza competitive space, Elena. (Okay) So he's got seven of them are for pizza acrobatics. He's also won several Guinness world records, including largest pizza base spun in 2 minutes. By the way, that was 33.2 inches if you're scoring at home. Now, the reason that I find this so fascinating is because, you know, I've actually watched the like world championships of this happening in Las Vegas. I attended something called the International Pizza Expo and Conference once in Las Vegas, and I saw him there doing this. It is incredible. They're like on a stage. There's like pyrotechnics, there's loud music, they're spinning the pies. It's like actually very physical and takes a lot of practice and physicality. Anyway, Tony is now kind of transitioning into being sort of the elder state's person of the pizza acrobatics world. But what's cool is he's now because he's like on YouTube and all these videos are out. He's getting young people into it, including women and other people who maybe, you know, wouldn't have traditionally been included in the pizzeria pizza acrobatics world. So I can just say. Having seen Tony in person, the guy is amazing and I'm glad he's finally getting his due. Pizza, acrobatics, being treated as the sport that it is, Elena.
Elena Passarello: Sport of the future.
Luke Burbank: That's right.
Elena Passarello: Right up there with pickleball.
Luke Burbank: The most delicious sport that I know about. That's the best news that I heard all week. All right. Let's get our first guest on over to the show is The New York Times bestselling author of "The Book of Delights." He's also got four books of poetry out. The Boston Globe calls his latest book, "Inciting Joy," a raucous affair with dancing, fabulous covers of all your favorite songs, tons of food, a backyard full of folks and all their sorrows too. Book Riot calls it essential reading. This is our friend Ross Gay, recorded at Town Hall in Seattle. Take a listen. Ross, welcome back to the show.
Ross Gay: Thanks. Good to be here.
Luke Burbank: It's really nice to see you. The last time I think that we talked to you, we were talking about your previous book, "The Book of Delights," where you really kind of did a practice of finding something to be delighted about every single day and writing about it. And now you've you've got this book "Inciting Joy." Did your previous book kind of feed naturally into this latest book?
Ross Gay: You know, probably because it did, as did the book before "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude," partly because people would be, you know, I'd have conversations with people about joy on account of those two books, which I was thinking about somewhat, but I wasn't thinking about it as a sort of long and maybe like lifelong sort of inquiry, you know. But after having enough conversations, it for sure felt like, Oh, I could talk about this and think about this for a long time.
Elena Passarello: Did you have something that you wanted to do with this book, which is about joy, that didn't maybe happen with the previous book, which was about delight or the one before it, which was about gratitude.
Ross Gay: I think one thing I wanted to like, spit out, I wanted to write longer pieces. You know, that was one thing for sure. I also felt like there's a couple impulses for writing the book. I mean, many. But one of them is that in some of those conversations, people would say things like, But how can you write about joy at a time like this? And. My my sort of immediately response sort of in my head anyway, is like, that's a stupid question. But I get it. I get it.
Luke Burbank: The noted joyful person Ross Gay's checked in. Yeah. Hey. Yeah.
Ross Gay: But I get it. And then so, you know. So then I had to write this introduction where I sort of raise the question. I articulate that in a different way.
Luke Burbank: Actually, I was wondering, could you read from from the book a little bit? Actually, that part, because I found it to be a really interesting interrogation of this idea that I think you say something like it's a sort of a dangerous fantasy you write to think that joy means without pain. Yeah. And and I was wondering, you kind of read the part of the book that sort of fleshes that idea out a little bit. Right. Right.
Ross Gay: But what happens if Joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain or suffering or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak is what if floureces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, What if joy needs sorrow or what Zadie Smith, in her essay Joy calls the intolerable for its existence. If it sounds like I'm advocating for sorrow, nope. Besides sorrow, unlike joy, apparently doesn't need an advocate given as to quote the visionary blind man. Pozzo, in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, we're born "astride a grave," i.e. we and everyone and everything we love will one day, maybe today, die. I think sorrow is going to be just fine. Like Gwendolyn Brooks says about death, one of sorrow chauffeurs. It's, quote, just down the street. His most obliging neighbor can meet you at any moment. End quote. Or as the Jackson Five saying, not in the voice of sorrow, but kind of. I'll be there. But what I am advocating and adamantly so is that rather than quarantining ourselves or running from sorrow rather than warring with sorrow, we lay down our swords and invite sorrow in. I'm suggesting we make sorrow some tea from the lemon balm in the garden. We let sorrow wash up and take some of our clothes. We give our dads slippers that we've hung on to for 15 years for just this occasion. And we drape our murdered body scarf still smelling of Nag Champa over sorrow's shoulders to warm them up some. We would set some wood in the fire. As we're refilling their tea, we notice sorrow is drinking from a mug given to us by someone we've hurt.
Luke Burbank: That's Ross Gay reading from "Inciting Joy." This is Live Wire from PRX. We are talking to writer and poet Ross Gay about his new book, "Inciting Joy." When we get back, we're going to talk to us about something that he and I were both very obsessed with as kids, and that would be skateboarding. So stick around for that. Back with more Live Wire in just a moment. All right. Welcome back to Live Wire. Coming to you this week from Town Hall. We're talking to Ross Gay about his incredible latest book, Inciting Joy. One of the things that you write about in this book is this question of privilege, because to say gardening, which is something that you love incites joy for you, naturally raises the question, what about people who don't have access to a garden? Or what about people don't have access to the things that can incite joy for us. And you talk about in a really interesting way. Can you kind of explain that?
Ross Gay: Yeah, I sort of you know, I've been thinking a lot about this. The term privilege is is almost a sort of I mean, there's many things. One thing is that just saying privilege almost feels too. It seems like some people think to say that as an action, you know, and and that ultimately what privilege this sort of notion of privilege like oh, you're privileged because you have a place to garden or you're privileged because you have, you know, breathable air or you're privileged because you can drink the water that comes out of your tap or you're privileged because you're not getting beat up by a cop or you're privileged because on and on and on and on. Which obscures the fact that to have all of those things happen to you is evidence actually of dis-privilege. You know, it's evidence of a brutality. And furthermore, it's evidence of a brutality that is that is action. So privilege is a way, you know, to say privilege often as a way to actually obscure this thing, privilege that sort of almost makes it natural. You know, it's just privilege. That's the way it is. I'm privileged. Bummer. When in fact it's like, no, you know, the reason there's blood in the water is because people let there be lead in the water.
Elena Passarello: Right. That's not a privilege.
Ross Gay: No, it's not a privilege. It's it's not a privilege not to be poisoned. Right. You know. Right. It's a dis privilege to be poisoned.
Luke Burbank: I believe you describe it as violence in the book. In other words, the people who are not having the privilege of a garden in a way to not have access to, like, again, breathable air, drinkable water. That's the violence, right? Right. That everyone should be able to have a garden and drink the water.
Ross Gay: Yeah. Yeah. If you want to have a garden or you want to be able to get into a garden, you should be able to get to a garden if you want to have a be able to have. And I say in the book, like a relationship with a tree, you know, you want to be able to, like, smell flowers. You want to be able to harvest. You want to be able to, you know, pitch in to do all of the sort of processes that that affords one. You know, the gifts that that sort of, you know, gives you that that just ought to be life. Mm hmm. The absence of that or or the withholding of that, because it's a withholding is is brutality.
Luke Burbank: You write about two things in this book that were the complete kind of cornerstones of my life as a kid, which were pickup basketball and skateboarding, which is part of why I enjoyed this book so much. I was wondering if you could read a little bit from the chapter. It's it's share your bucket. It's the fifth incitement and it's about skateboarding. Could you could you read from that? Because you brought up something that I had never really thought about, but it was totally my lived experience with me and my buddies and swap and stuff on our boards and, oh, you got those new O'Jays and the kind of communal nature of being into skateboarding.
Ross Gay: Yes. Share your bucket. Skateboarding, the fifth incitement. Perhaps somewhat telling is that when Stephanie and I were counseled by our couples therapists to spend some time imagining a safe place before entering a difficult conversation, I didn't choose a mountain stream or a forest or a glade or a meadow or a beach. I chose, along with a basketball court, a curb at the IGA at Pine Watson Shopping Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, where one weekend night after hours, my buddy Jay and I, when we were in our late teens, dragged one of the shopping carts to the curb, tipped it over. Then pushing on our skateboards beneath the flickering lights beneath the Plaza's overhang toward the cart at the end of the curb, in one sometimes seamless motion, we would get our feet right, bend just a touch and ollie over the cart into the dark. Or tired of that, we wrestled the cart or tried to ollie it long ways. Maybe we stood the cart up on its wheels and tried going over it that way. All of these attempts, some noticing this now from some light into dark, which is a nice metaphysical metaphor for our inquiry into joy. Skating on a John Lazaro hand-me-down given to me by my friend Mike with Rat Bones, which wheels Jay gave me earlier that day, inside of which are some very smooth bearings that Adam gave to him. Ollie-ing into the mystery. The metaphysical metaphor being that submission to mystery is a possible source of joy. Noted. Also, of course, is that I am skating with a beloved pal ollie-ing, into the dark under the watchful gaze of someone doing the same. That seems relevant too. We are studying each other, beholding each other, flying into the dark. It is to that feeling which, if I were to locate it, is in my chest and it is the feeling of groundedness that I go before a tough chat. Footnote: Worth noting too how often we fall skating, though also worth noting, you see how I wrote it a few sentences ago is that skateboarding, at least between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties, was one of the many places the gift economy was in radical action. By which I mean, in practice, it was just the case that whatever you had extra in skateboarding with its many components: decks, wheels, bearings, trucks, bushings, riser pads, rails, ripped grip bolts, etc., made for extra, you pass along. Most of us had a bucket of some sort where when someone needed something, we dug around to find it. I never once heard anyone express it as an ethics: sharing, redistribution, commonwealthing. Though if you tried to keep your extra to yourself, if you spoke to no one of your bucket and then it got out, you had one. And gleaming like gold in that extra Independent track, Independent is a brand name, a truck is the thing that holds the wheels on, was the kingpin. The kingpin is the thing that holds the truck together. One of us needed to skate that day. The reaction would be an ethical one. Yo, that's **** up man. Also worth noting is that Skateboarding's reemergence, at least in the U.S., is almost perfectly concurrent with a new Gilded Age, a grotesque accumulation in celebration of wealth, deregulation, the dismantling of the welfare state, mass incarceration, NAFTA, taking the solar panels off the roof of the White House, privatization of everything, further enclosure of the commons, and the unabashed, unapologetic mongering sanctification of hoarding; of the Horde. It is probably for this reason the aforementioned ethics, I'm saying, that if you were ever inclined to go down a YouTube rabbit hole watching Mark Gonzalez, the Sun Ra of skateboarding, or possibly even the Dizzy Gillespie of skateboarding, the Andy Kaufman of skateboarding, you would find that in fully one third of his abundant footage from when he was a skinny California kid in the mid eighties all the way to his present day, full figured, middle aged technical goofballery he is encountering, negotiating with cajoling, resisting or running from the so-called law: owners or cops bought and rented. Usually because he is skating somewhere he should not be, which is most everywhere, probably because there's a perfect rail or a sweet bit of transition to a gap or a set of stairs calling him. Dude's been at it for decades. He's made it. He's a grown ass man. Why doesn't he just buy his own skate park? He should know better, but he never learns. One reason Gonz is among the trillion beating hearts of skateboarding. And in this he is in no way singular or the best. Gonzo is just one of a trillion apostles of the form is because he used of Farook's the scalable world, which includes benches, picnic tables, walls, handrails, flights of steps, curves, fire hydrants, ledges, parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, loading docks, loading ramps, bus stops, parking garages, schoolyards, drainage ditches, streets, alleys, walls, i.e. the built environment, whether new or in disrepair. In other words, the only limitation to what might be skated or made public or common or shared is the imagination.
Luke Burbank: That's Ross Gay reading from "Inciting Joy" here on Live Wire. As a as a as a kid who grew up really, really wanting my parents to dedicate our entire backyard in Seattle to a half pipe, which never happened. It would have been the entirety of the backyard. I was so jealous of people who had either like a ramp or access to a skate park or whatever. But you write in this book that you're kind of glad that you didn't grow up where there were skate parks everywhere.
Ross Gay: Yeah, and it's funny, so many things. It's funny to get to an age where I'm like, Oh man, I'm so glad we didn't have that then, you know? And, and among them, I talk about water, you know, I mean, we had water, but we didn't have bottled water. And it was amazing. And we, you know, we we didn't have cell phones is amazing. We could get lost and be alone. It was incredible. Oh, my God, Children, you don't know what you're missing. But the other thing. Yeah, like that, that sort of experience of like walking around the world as I still do. I'm 48 years old and like, every once in a while I skateboard. I putter around, but I always walk around and I look at the city, the built environment. I'm like, Oh, you could skate that, you know, there's oh, that's to be skated, you know, again and again. And which the way that I think of it is kind of like you're being trained to sort of witness or being trained to sort of observe how everything is something else, you know. So you're being trained in metaphor in a way, Yeah. Which to me feels like a profound sort of actually survival skill, you know. Oh, you could use this for that, you know.
Luke Burbank: That's Ross Gay here on Live where everyone in the new book is "Inciting Joy." Ross, thank you so much. That was Ross Gay right here on Live Wire, recorded at Town Hall in Seattle. His latest book, "Inciting Joy," is available now. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines offers the most nonstop from the West Coast, including destinations like Hawaii, Palm Springs and San Francisco, and as a member of the OneWorld alliance. Alaska Airlines can connect you to more than 1000 destinations worldwide with their global partners. Learn more at Alaska Air dot com. This is live wire as we do each week. We asked a live wire listeners a question. We wanted to know what their perfect weekend might be like. Elena has been collecting up those answers. What do you see?
Elena Passarello: Well, I read these little too quickly, and when I saw Dee's, I got really excited because while Dee actually wrote a Catan tournament, which I believe is some kind of board game.
Luke Burbank: Okay, like Settlers of Catan, I believe that's a like a board game that's very involved that people get really into.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. Yeah. So that is what Dee would include in Dee's Perfect weekend, but I misread it as a caftan tournament, which I would totally attend. And...
Luke Burbank: You know, I started early in the show talking about the, you know, pizza acrobatics championship, I would say caftan, the settlers of caftan would be an only slightly more niche sport and you would be the reigning world champion. I don't know anyone who owns more caftans than you.
Elena Passarello: I bought three caftans the week of my 40th birthday. Like I was just trying to, like, manifest my Golden Girls future.
Luke Burbank: It's working. Absolutely. Yeah. What's another perfect weekend for one of our listeners?
Elena Passarello: Here's a blast from the past from Heather. Heather's Perfect weekend. GTL Baby gym tan and laundry. (Whoa.) Are you familiar with the GTL sect?
Luke Burbank: Oh, I very much am. You know, that would be a Jersey Shore reference, I believe. Right. That was how they used to do.
Elena Passarello: I wonder if they ever opened like, you know, they have like a Ken Taco hut, like a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell. Somebody should have made a place where you could do your laundry, get tanned and work out all in the same fused space.
Luke Burbank: I mean, there would be a convenience to that, certainly. Okay, one more before we move on.
Elena Passarello: I love Erin's perfect weekend, which is watching a true crime documentary on Friday and then being too afraid to leave my house for the rest of the weekend.
Luke Burbank: Yes, I have definitely experienced that myself.
Elena Passarello: Anytime anyone says that I light up a room, I'm always terrified that I'm going to be on the next Forensic Files, because that is the big ....
Luke Burbank: You need to watch out.
Elena Passarello: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: All right. Thank you to everyone who sent in their response to our question this week. We've got one for next week's show, which we will reveal in just a few moments. In the meantime, our next guest's life started on a small farm in Indiana before she made her way to Chicago, where she ran her own Michelin starred restaurant. These days, you can find her in the remote woods of Michigan, where she runs the Milkweed Inn. The most amazing weekend experience that you will never get a reservation for. It's booked out for like years. Her latest book is the really incredible "Fieldwork: A Foragers Guide." Take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Iliana Regan right here on Live Wire. Hi, Iliana.
Iliana Regan: Hey.
Luke Burbank: Welcome to the show.
Iliana Regan: Thanks for having me.
Luke Burbank: You write in in this book that you had like an awakening in 1984, which would have made you like five years old.
Iliana Regan: Yeah. I mean, yes.
Luke Burbank: Around there.
Iliana Regan: Ish. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: 1984. When what happened? You went foraging with your family and something like clicked.
Iliana Regan: Oh, I think I was already doing that prior to 1984. But I think what that was like when me as the writer here now could actually think about, well, when was it that I could remember, like enough to, you know, kind of channel these stories and be able to talk about them and write about them. And so I focus on that year, 1984, because that's when I could really pull that information.
Luke Burbank: By the way, backstage, you were like, very proud. You're like, I have my reading glasses with me.
Iliana Regan: Yeah, but then I didn't bring the little cleaner. Yeah. So wait.
Luke Burbank: Well, have a clear. Well, go ahead and get get your readers.
Iliana Regan: I know you're going to ask me to read something. Yeah. Trying to. I sort of did this when I was just back there farting around. This is. I should have had this done, like, that's the chef part of me talking like, why the hell did you not have your readers ready?
Luke Burbank: Well, speaking of, of being a chef. You didn't go to culinary school, right? But you write in this book about you growing up in a family of people that could cook. Do you feel like cooking is hereditary? Is something you can inherit?
Iliana Regan: Oh, I don't know if it's hereditary or able to inherit, but I think that there is something to intuition. And if you grow up maybe in an environment where you're surrounded by people who are cooking or foraging in that sort of way, that maybe some of that could get implanted into you. And I'm currently learning about recipes that my family has that almost I feel like I learned through osmosis, through my mom or somehow through like my DNA, like, or my ancestors, like I talk about in this book whispering to me. And of course, like, sure, maybe that's just multiple personalities or something. I feel like there is some sort of channeling that's going on, so.
Luke Burbank: I want to make sure that I have your your kind of journey with with food correct. So from the book, you as a teenager, you were busing tables at an Italian restaurant and then you make your way into the kitchen and you end up working at Alinea, which is like one of the greatest restaurants in the world in Chicago.
Iliana Regan: Yeah, I mean, not anymore.
Luke Burbank: Right. You. Well, okay. When you were there, wow, shots fired. I think, I don't think we're on in Chicago. So say whatever you want. Yeah. And then you you you walked away for Alinea to make your own ranch dressing and sold at a farmer's market. And then it's. And then. And then eventually start your own restaurant, which won a michelin star every single year that you were running it. And then you, more or less, gave that restaurant to some of your employees. (Yeah.) And then went to the woods of Michigan.
Iliana Regan: Yeah. I mean, for the most part, that's the gist. Yeah. You got the ranch dressing, yeah. I mean.
Luke Burbank: That never happened?!
Iliana Regan: Okay, so there there is a part in my other book, "Burn the Place," where if at this Italian restaurant, if you take this bread, that's like from Toronto and you know, the Toronto bakeries and you put it in the oven and then you dip it in like the Kraft dressing that probably came in a vat, and then you put like, I don't know, some sort of manufactured parmesan cheese on it. I mean, it's fantastic. So it's like you can have an epiphany having ranch dressing. And I think that was a little bit in my last book.
Luke Burbank: I had read somewhere, I think.
Iliana Regan: I made pierogies at a farmer's market. Not the ranch.
Luke Burbank: Somewhere. We have to we've got to get someone to take down an article where it talks about you making homemade ranch dressing because.
Iliana Regan: I mean, I've made homemade ranch dressing...
Luke Burbank: I just loved that for your bio so much. I guess I wanted it to be true. Now, by the way, we're talking to Iliana Regan about her book, "Fieldwork: A Foragers Memoir" here on Live Wire Radio. One of the things that you said in the book is that you really like cooking, but you don't like being a chef.
Iliana Regan: Well, I mean, okay, here's the thing. There's essentially I'm in the business of entertainment, right? In a way that as a chef and having a restaurant, I'm performing and I don't want to get into all the moral dilemmas that I have with that, not only like environmentally, but also just physically, mentally, whatever. We don't have time for that in this fifteen minutes.What I can say....
Luke Burbank: Appreciate you producing the show on the fly. Good looking out.
Iliana Regan: I think that as chefs, sometimes people are taking themselves too seriously and they're causing a whole lot of other like young people who are interested in food and interested in creation, artistically or whatever, a lot of strife. I think that everything's getting taken too seriously. Has been for a long time. It's not brain surgery, it's entertainment. So I love actually being a chef and I love entertaining people and I love cooking for others. But I think some of that pressure and some of those ideas around it where chefs are storming through kitchens and they're mad and they're mad at their employees and they're, you know, like, Oh, this thing needs to be this way is just so it's like, what's the point? (Hmm.) You know? (Yeah.) So. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: So now. So now if I understand it right, if you yell at an employee, it's your wife.
Iliana Regan: Absolutely. She pisses me off.
Luke Burbank: Because you and your wife now run the Milkweed Inn in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is a sort of phenomenon unto itself because it's this incredibly beautiful location with what sounds like an amazing time for a very, very small number of people during the summer months. You pick them up at the truck stop.
Iliana Regan: Yeah. Well, the reason why I wanted to do that was to kind of go back to my roots, because when I started out, I was like, okay, long story short, I don't want to do all this working through kitchens with all these tyrannical chefs. I'm going to do my own thing. So pierogis at the farmers market, not ranch dressing.
Luke Burbank: All right, But agree to disagree. I'm hearing different things.
Iliana Regan: I mean, this the inspiration comes from somewhere. Now I'm going to make some ranch dressing.
Luke Burbank: Please do.
Iliana Regan: Pierogies, someday. But anyways, so I have this little, like, underground thing at my house where I serve ten people on Fridays and ten people on Saturday.
Luke Burbank: This is when you're living in Chicago, right?
Iliana Regan: And then it forms into a restaurant, which was my goal. And then eventually I'm like, I don't want a restaurant anymore. I don't want to have employees. I don't want to do this whole thing. But it was so much more sustainable just doing it small, being able to actually go out and forage myself or grow the things myself. I mean, it's a lot of hard work and it's just so much of a headache in a different way than it is of doing books or payroll or all those things. But at least I know that at Milkweed, to get through one service, I'm not using like 500 gallons of water a day or I don't have the electricity going on all day. And some of the natural resources that we use in just one day in this entertainment business is a lot in just one restaurant in one city that serves 25 people. I have these dilemmas, like when I was at the airport this morning, I was thinking like, what if just one airport in this country, like, just didn't have any meat anymore? You know, like, just just one, I'm sure pissed a lot of people off.
Luke Burbank: That wouldn't go over well to Buffalo Wild Wings.
Iliana Regan: Right. But just like, you know what I mean? So, like, I'm sitting here getting at the airport, getting ready to come here, and I'm just like. Well. Why am I having these thoughts? But at the same time, it's good thoughts in this is frustrating. And I'm like, I just need to go back to bed. But you know, Yeah, but that's the whole thing. Anyways, you, you're reading this book. If you do get my book that there's a lot of things that keep me up at night, so you won't be surprised about that.
Luke Burbank: Actually, can we hear a little bit from the book Fieldwork, because it is a Foragers memoir and you do talk a lot about all of these amazing things that that you foraged, particularly mushrooms. So could you read a little bit about that?
Iliana Regan: Yeah. This is from chapter 15 called Ephemeral Sexual Organ. It's it's not that sexy. All right. So we're going to kind of start in a couple of paragraphs. And mushrooms are sexy, some are multi gendered, others are male, and some are female, some reproduce together and some are asexual, able to reproduce on their own. Mushrooms are more like animals than plants, but I don't know exactly how. I'm not a mycologist. I'm not a botanist or an anthropologist. I'm just a person who prefers mushrooms to people and trees to tall buildings. A person who spends many hours alone thinking too much about what I'm thinking. I do study some of what I write about. I have tried to understand how mushrooms reproduced, and the best explanation I've heard was told to me by my friend Rebecca, who is a mycologist. The fruiting body is the ephemeral sexual organ of the mushroom. The rest of the organism resides underground as mycelium, the part that we see just fruits to fulfill a reproductive function. She told me this and I wondered if this was why mushrooms tasted so good. In any case, mushrooms are fascinating. People, hunt them, dream about them, fall in love with them. Some people even have festivals to celebrate different seasons and species of them. And out of the many wildly beautiful organisms in the forests, mushrooms, one more often than not, stop you in your tracks for a closer look. On August 17th, 1979, sometime in the late morning I fruited. Okay, so. I shouldn't have put my actual birth date in there. Not because I'm afraid of how old you guys know that I am because it's not that old. So I'm sorry. I apologize to anybody older than me in the audience. But just don't go looking for my mom's maiden name and things like that, okay?
Luke Burbank: Okay.
Iliana Regan: Okay, So on August 1st, 1979, sometime in the late morning I fruited I was swaddled against mom's chest by the time Dad got to the hospital, he was dusty from Grandpa's farm. He'd been out on the tractor in grandpa's field, sculpting a new patch of land for next season's corn when he got the call that mom was in labor. He had two sheepshead mushrooms bundled in paper napkins. He stood in the hospital room doorway. The mushroom swaddled against his chest. He stepped into the room and with his free arm, he reached out for me. Mom turned, shielding me from his reach. She told him to wash himself off first. He set down the mushrooms on the tray table at her bedside. After he washed up, he held me for a couple of minutes, passing me back to Mom, he said "Found two sheepshead" and nodded to where he had set them. "Come real early this year. Been some good rain, though," he said, scratching his cheek. "I never found him this early before." Mom didn't respond right away. She was exhausted, but awake enough to tell him to move the mushrooms from her tray table. The sun rose over the window. A distant church bell confirmed it was noon. The window was open and a fan churned where it was propped against the screen. A couple of bees pulled by the fan, bumped against the screen. The air of the room 3E was warm and thick and smelled of fresh baby and starched hospital sheets. Dad sat in the chair beside the bed. In mom's arm, I was 7 pounds and a few ounces against her breast. My sisters would arrive soon, but we're late as well. Dad asked what was taking them so long. Mom didn't answer, figuring whatever it was they were up to no good. Dad pressed the shiny pads of his calloused palms together and hung his hands down between his knees like he was praying to the floor.
Luke Burbank: Iliana Regan, reading from her book "Fieldwork" here on Live Wire. That was Iliana Regan, recorded in front of a live audience at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon. Iliana's book, "Fieldwork: A Foragers Guide," is available now also, if you'd like to hear more from that conversation, please check out the Live Wire podcast, where we, as you remember, Elena, our Elena. We had other Iliana play around of metal or mushroom or she had to decide.
Elena Passarello: That's right.
Luke Burbank: We were describing a famous metal band name or an actual mushroom species.
Elena Passarello: Harder than you think.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, it thrashed most hard, so. Check out the Live Wire podcast for that. This is Live Wire Radio from PRX. We've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we are going to hear some delightful music from singer songwriter Baroque Betty, accompanied by Mood Area 52. Sounds mysterious. Stick around. Find out what we're talking about here on Live Wire. This is Live Wire. Before we get to our musical guest, a little preview of next week's show. We're going to be talking to food writer Cecily Wong about her book, "Gastro Obscura," which features fascinating food stories from all over the world, including psychedelic honey that was used as a weapon. We're also going to check in with Grammy Award nominee Andrew Bird about how he balances being kind of a painfully shy person with also being a very public figure and how he used whistling as a security blanket when he was acting in the TV show Fargo. And he's going to play a song from his latest album as well. So that is the plan for next week. Do tune in for that. In the meantime, Elena, what are we asking the listeners for that episode?
Elena Passarello: We want to know what is a yum for you? That is a yuck for most other people.
Luke Burbank: So something that somebody really likes, but a lot of other people have been like, Why do you like that kind of thing?
Elena Passarello: Exactly. I can't wait to hear these yummy yuks.
Luke Burbank: All right. If you have an answer to that question, something that's a yum for you that a lot of other people say is a yuck. You can submit it via Twitter or Facebook or over at Live Wire Radio. Pretty much everywhere. Sometimes checking your email, let's be honest, can be a little stressful, but we want to change that over here at Live Wire. We want to make checking your email more joyful with our weekly newsletter, which is only good news. That's all we do over here at the Live Wire newsletter. We got sneak peeks and deep dives on upcoming events, details on where you can join us live. New episode drops. And even more than that, getting this drop of joy is super easy too. Head over to Live Wire Radio dot org and you click keep in touch. It takes like 30 seconds 25 if you're speedy. So help us help you have a little more fun in your inbox with the latest from the Live Wire newsletter. This is Live Wire from PRX. Our musical guest this week hails from Eugene, Oregon, and has built a dedicated following of both fans and musicians, including Woody Platt from the Steep Canyon Rangers, who describes her sound as striking and spectacular. Take a listen to this. It's Baroque Betty, accompanied by Mood Area 52, recorded live at the Hult Center in Eugene, Oregon. What song are we going to hear?
Baroque Betty: This is the title track to my album. It's called Sobering Up. Drive through fire and brimstone on an engine. It's broken too, just praying I'll get there, to see how old the last dead birds wrapped around my little finger. I've always been good at hanging on in a catastrophe. You've always been good at fessing your apathy on this carousel. Rusted and sputtering out. But I'm dreaming. I was always dreaming. Like a bulletproof fool.Like the obvious couldn't be true. I'm still dreaming. Please don't wake me from dreaming. I'm just running on fumes. And I'm sobering up, the longer I look at you. I would walk worlds to you broken glass and eggshells by a busted hotel room with the housekeeping knocking just to borrow some time that it hadn't already been stolen. I'd always been good at pretending you love me. You've always been good at making me crazy enough to think that you've always been walking the line. But I'm dreaming, I was always dreaming. Like a bulletproof fool. Like the obvious couldn't be true. I'm still dreaming, please don't wake me from dreaming. I'm just running on fumes. And I'm sobering up the longer I look at you.
Luke Burbank: That was Baroque Betty accompanied by Mood Area 52 right here on Live Wire. Her album, Sobering Up is available now. All right. That's going to do it for this episode of the show. A huge thanks to our guests, Ross Gay, Iliana Regan and Baroque Betty, along with Mood Area 52. Live Wire is brought to you by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our executive director. Our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our assistant editor is Trey Hester. Our marketing manager is Paige Thomas. Our production fellow is Tanvi Kumar, and Yasamin Mehdian is our intern. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Sam Tucker, Ayal Alves and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. Molly Pettit is our technical director and our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the James F and Marion L Miller Foundation Live Wire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Miriam Feuerle of Portland, Oregon, and Michael Smith of Everett, Washington. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to Live Wire Radio dot org. I'm Luke Burbank, for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
