Episode 675
Ross Gay, Lane Regan, and Baroque Betty with Mood Area 52
Poet and essayist Ross Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude) dissects privilege, pain, and skateboarding, all themes from his newest book Inciting Joy; Michelin Star chef Lane Regan outlines their journey from farmer's markets to foraging, while creating a new dining experience in the wilds of Michigan; and singer-songwriter Baroque Betty, accompanied by Mood Area 52, performs the title track off her album Sobering Up.
Ross Gay
Poet and Author
Ross Gay is a New York Times bestselling 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 poetry collection 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. 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 currently teaches at Indiana University.
Lane Regan
Chef and Writer
From foraging on the family farm to running their own Michelin-starred restaurant, chef and writer Lane Regan is unstoppable. Already a National Book Award nominee from their first memoir, Burn the Place, their newest memoir, Fieldwork, investigates their heritage as a forager and how their complex gender identity informs their acclaimed work as a chef as well as profound experience of the natural world. Lane 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, they earned an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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."
Mood Area 52
Indie Rock Band
Accompanying Baroque Betty are the sensational, local superstars Mood Area 52. They are 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. At the time of this recording, the active members were Michael Roderick, Amy Danziger, Billy Barnett, Don Elkington, Julia Frantz, Corwin Bolt, Dan Schmid, and Kee Zublin.
Show Notes
Station Location Identification Examination
This week’s shoutout goes to WTML-FM, of Tullahoma, TN.
Live Wire Listener Question
Describe your perfect weekend.
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Luke Burbank: This episode of Live Wire was originally recorded in March of 2023. We hope you enjoy it. Now let's get to the show.
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire! You 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 Lane Regan.
Lane Regan: Chefs are storming through kitchens and they're mad at their employees and they are like, ah, 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: Thank you so much, Elena Passarello, thanks to everybody for tuning in from all over the United States. We've got a wonderful show in store for you this week. Of course, we asked the Live Wire listeners a question. We asked them to describe their perfect weekend. And one of the people that we're interviewing this week, Lane Regan, runs this place in the woods of Michigan. It's called the Milkweed Inn, and it's pretty much the most perfect woodsy weekend that you could ever imagine. So we're going to hear. Our listener responses to that question coming up. What does their perfect weekend look like? First though, we got to kick things off with the best news we heard all week. 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, 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 the section of a server there named Devonte Gardner. Devante knows everybody's order, including eight-year-old Kazen. Kazen 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 Kazen 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 Kazen 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 Kazen it would be okay if they started a GoFundMe. So Kazen 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...
Luke Burbank: That's 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's 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 Kazen was asked about his act of generosity, he said, sometimes people just need a little help, which is very cute.
Luke Burbank: Good 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 Geminani, 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, like the sort of movie version of somebody making pizzas. [Elena: Like cocktails, but for pizza.] 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 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. So he's got seven of them are for pizza. Acrobatics. He's also won several Guinness World Records, including the largest pizza base spun in two minutes. By the way, that was 33.2 inches, if you're scoring at home. Now, the reason that I found this so fascinating is because do you know I've actually watched the 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 states 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 may be. 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 acrobatic's being treated as the sport that it is Elena.
Elena Passarello: Sport of the future. [Luke: That's right.] Right 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. He's a 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 got this book, Inciting Joy. Did your previous kind of feed naturally into this latest book?
Ross Gay: You know, probably because it did, as did the book before it, 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 now? 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 spin out, I wanted to write longer pieces. 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 sort of immediate 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 has checked in.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, great, yeah.
Ross Gay: But I get it. And then so then I had to write this introduction where I sort of raised 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. [Ross: Yeah.] And and I was one of you kind of read the the part of the book that sort of fleshes that idea out a little bit.
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 effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what 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. Besides, sorrow, unlike joy, apparently, doesn't need an advocate. Given as, to quote the visionary blind man Pazzo in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, we're born, quote, a stride, a grave. I.e., we and everyone and everything we love will one day, maybe today, I think Sara's gonna be just fine.
Ross Gay: Like Gwendolyn Brooks says about death, one of Sorrow's chauffeurs, it's quote, just down the street is most obliging neighbor, can meet you at any moment. As the Jackson 5 sing, 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 sorrow to our dad's slippers that we've hung onto for 15 years for just this occasion. And we drape our murdered buddy's scarf, still smelling of Nag Champa. Over Sorrow's shoulders to warm them up some. We wedged 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 gonna talk to Ross 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. Alright, 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 the people who have access to the things can incite joy for us? And you talk about it in a really interesting way. Can you kind of explain that?
Ross Gay: Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this. The term privilege is almost as sort of, I mean, there's many things. One thing is that just saying privilege almost feels, it seems like some people think to say that as an action. And that ultimately what privilege, 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, or you are 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 are privileged because on and on and and on, which obscures the fact that to have all of those things happen to you is evidence actually of dis-privilege, it's evidence of a brutality. And furthermore, it's the evidence of a brutality that is action. So, privilege is a way, to say privilege often is a ways to actually obscure this thing. Privilege just sort of almost makes it natural. It's just privilege, that's just the way it is. I'm privileged. When in fact it's like, no, you know, the reason there's lead in the water is because people let there be lead in the water. [Elena: Right. That's not a privilege.] No, it's not. It's not it's a privilege not to be poisoned. [Elena: 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, it's in a way to not have access to like, again, breathable air, drinkable water. That's the violence, right? Everyone should be able to have a garden and drink the water.
Ross Gay: If you want to have a garden or you want to be able to get into a garden, you should be able get into garden. If you wanna be able have, I say in the book, like a relationship with a tree. You wanna be like able to smell flowers. You wanna able to harvest. You wanna to be a able to pitch in to do all of this sort of processes that affords one, the gifts that that sort of gives you. That just ought to be life. The absence of that or the withholding of that, because it's a withholding, 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 Share Your Bucket, it's the fifth incitement, and it's about skateboarding. 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 swapping stuff on our boards and oh, you got those new OJs and the kind of communal nature of being into skateboarding?
Ross Gay: 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 Langhorn, Pennsylvania, We're 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 plazas 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 rail slid 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, I'm noticing this now, from some light into dark, which is a nice metaphysical metaphor for our inquiry into joy. Skating on a John Lucero 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, ollieing into the mystery. The metaphysical metaphor being that submission to mystery is a possible source of joy. Also, of course, is that I am skating with a beloved pal, ollieing 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 darkness. It is to that feeling, which if I were to locate it, is in my chest and it is the feeling of groundlessness that I go before a tough chat. 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-80s and mid-90s, 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 and skateboarding with its many components, decks, wheels, bearings, trucks, bushings, riser pads, rails, rip 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, commonwealth. 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 truck, Independent to brand name. A truck is the thing that holds the wheels on. Was the kingpin, the king pin's the thing that holds a 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 US, is almost perfectly concurrent with a new gilded age, a grotesque accumulation and 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 hoard. 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 skateboard, the Andy Kaufman of skateboard. You would find that in fully one third of his abundant footage, from when he was a skinny California kid in the mid-80s, 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 Gans is among the trillion-beating hearts of skateboarding, and in this he is in no way singular or the best, Gans, is just one of a trillion apostles of the form, is because he used to frooks the skatable 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 commoned, or shared, is the imagination.
Luke Burbank: That's Ross Gay, greeting from inciting joy here on Live Wire. 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 among them, I talk about water, you now? I mean, we had water, but we didn't have bottled water and it was amazing. And we, you, know, we didn't have cell phones. It was 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 sort of experience of like walking around the world. As I still do, I'm 48 years old, and every once in a while, I'll skateboard, I'll putter around. But I always walk around and I look at the city, the built environment, and I'm like, ooh, you could skate that. Oh, that's to be skated, again and again. And which the way that I think of it, 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. So you're trained in metaphor in a way, which to me feels like a profound sort of actually survival skill. You know, oh, you could use this for that.
Luke Burbank: That's Ross Gay here on Live Wire, everyone. 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 by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at powells.com. Hey there, it's Luke. Did you know that Live Wire is also available as a podcast? Of course it is. Everything's a podcast now and our podcast features the same engaging conversations, live music, original comedy, and all the stuff that you love about the Live Wire radio show. But now you can listen to when you want to, where you want to go over to livewireradio.org to download the podcast or get it anywhere you get that kind of stuff. This is Live Wire as we do each week. We asked the 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: I read these a little too quickly, and when I saw Dee's, I got really excited because, well, Dee actually wrote a Catan tournament, which I believe is some kind of board game.
Luke Burbank: Like Settlers of Catan, I believe that's 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 win.
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 girl's future.
Luke Burbank: It's working, absolutely. [Elena: Thank you.] 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. [Heather: Whoa!] Are you familiar with the GTL?
Luke Burbank: 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 Kentaco Hut, like a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell. Somebody should have made a place where you could do your laundry, get tan, 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 Aaron'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 thing...
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 show which will reveal in just a few moments our next guest life started on a small farm in indiana before they made their way to chicago where they ended up running their own michelin-starred restaurant now these days you can find them in the very remote woods of Michigan where they run the milkweed in which is an amazing weekend experience that i've got to be honest with you and I speak from experience. Uh, it's very hard to get a reservation for, uh, their latest book is the incredible fieldwork, a foragers guide. Take a listen to this conversation with Lane Regan, who at the time that we talked to them went by Elena Reed. This is Live Wire. Hi, Elena. Hey. Welcome to the show.
Lane Regan: Thanks for having me.
Luke Burbank: You write in this book that you had like an awakening in 1984 which would have made you well, like five years old?
Lane Regan: Yeah, I mean, yes. Around there. Ish, yeah.
Luke Burbank: 1984 when what happened you went foraging with your family and something like clicked?
Lane Regan: I think I was already doing that prior to 1984, but I think that was like when me as the writer here now could actually think about, well, when was it that I could remember enough to 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. Thanks.
Luke Burbank: By the way, backstage, you were like very proud. You're like, I have my reading glasses with me.
Lane Regan: Yeah, but then I didn't bring the little... [Luke: cleaner?] So, wait, what is...
Luke Burbank: Why don't you go ahead and get your readers ready?
Lane Regan: I know you're going to ask me to read, so I'm going to try and... I should have did this when I was just back there farting around. I should have had this done. 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 do 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.
Lane Regan: Well, 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 talked 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 kind of journey with food correct. So from the book, you, as a teenager, you were bussing tables at an Italian restaurant, and then you make your way into the kitchen and you end up working at Alenia, which is one of the greatest restaurants in the world in Chicago.
Lane Regan: Yeah, I mean not anymore.
Luke Burbank: Right. Well, OK. When you were there. Wow, shots fired.
Luke Burbank: I don't think we're on in Chicago, so say whatever you want. And then you walked away from Millennia to make your own ranch dressing and sell it at a farmer's market. 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 and then went to the woods of Michigan.
Lane Regan: Yeah, I mean, for the most part, that's the gist. The ranch dressing, I don't know, I mean.
Luke Burbank: That never happened?
Lane Regan: OK, so there is a part in my other book, Burn the Place, where at this Italian restaurant, if you take this bread that's from Toronto, and the Toronto bakeries, and you put it in the oven, and then you dip it in like the craft 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 had... I think I...
Lane Regan: I think I made pierogies at the farmer's market, not the ranch.
Luke Burbank: We have to we've got to get someone to take down an article where it talks about you making homemade ranch dressing because
Lane Regan: I mean, I've made homemade drinks.
Luke Burbank: I just loved that for your bio so much, I guess I wanted it to be true. By the way, we're talking to Elena 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.
Lane Regan: Well, I mean, OK, here's the thing. Essentially, I'm in the business of entertainment, right? In a way that, as a chef, in 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 environmentally, but also just physically, mentally, whatever. We don't have time for that in this 15 minutes.
Luke Burbank: I appreciate you producing the show on the fly. Good looking out.
Lane Regan: I think that as chefs, sometimes people are taking themselves too seriously and they're causing a whole lot of others, like young people who are interested in food and interested in creation artistically or whatever, a lot of strife. I think 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 are mad at their employees, and they, like, ah, this thing needs to be this way, is just so, it's like, what's the point? You know? So. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: So now, if I understand it right, if you yell at an employee, it's your wife.
Lane 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?
Lane Regan: Yeah, and 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, sell pierogies at the farmer's market, not ranch dressing. [Luke: All right.] But...
Luke Burbank: Agree to disagree. I'm hearing different things.
Lane Regan: I mean, the inspiration comes from somewhere. I'm going to make some ranch dressing.
Luke Burbank: Please do.
Lane Regan: Perogies. Anyways, so I have this little like underground thing at my house where I serve ten people on Fridays and ten people in Saturday...
Luke Burbank: And this is when you're living in Chicago.
Lane Regan: Right, 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 one, I'm sure it piss a lot of people off.
Luke Burbank: That wouldn't go over well at the Buffalo Wild Wing.
Lane 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, and this is frustrating I'm like I just need to go back to bed, but You know yeah, that's the whole thing anyways You'll read in this book if you do get my book that there's a lot of things that keep me up at night You won't be surprised about this.
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 you've forged, particularly mushrooms. So could you read a little about that?
Lane Regan: This is from chapter 15 called Ephemeral Sexual Organ. It's not that sexy. All right, so we're going to kind of start in a couple of paragraphs. Mushrooms are sexy. Some are multigendered. Others are male and some are female. Some reproduce together and some aren't 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 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. Do 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 forest, mushrooms will 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 birthday 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? OK, so on August 1, 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 sheep's head mushrooms bundled in paper napkins. He stood in the hospital room's 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 sat 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 sheep's heads. 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. Ha. 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 green. The air of the room, 3E, was warm and thick and smelled a fresh baby and stretched hospital sheets. Dad sat in a chair beside the bed. In mom's arm, I was seven pounds and a few ounces against her breast. My sisters would arrive soon, but were 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: Elena Regan reading from her book Fieldwork here on Live Wire.
Luke Burbank: That was Lane Regan, recorded in front of a live audience at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Lane's book, Fieldwork, A Forager's Guide is available right now. 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 to find out what we're talking about here on Live Wire. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX, I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. 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: Okay.] So don't put too much pressure on yourself. All right.
Elena Passarello: Okay.
Luke Burbank: 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: Mmm, I know he's from Georgia originally.
Luke Burbank: I'll give you a hint, it's not in the state of Georgia, which leaves you 49 other possibilities. This city's Cascade Hollow Distillery is located along America's Whiskey Trail, and George Dickle Whiskey is produced in this place.
Elena Passarello: Oh, I do believe you're talking about Tullahoma of Tennessee. [Luke: Oh, my gosh.] You have me in George Dickel, 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 Tullahomah, Tennessee on WTML. This is Live Wire. Okay. Before we get to our musical guests this week, a little preview of next week's show, but we are going to be joined by chef and author J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. He's a James Beard award winner. He's cohost of the podcast, the recipe, and he's an all around food savant. Okay. I've been out eating teriyaki with Kenji. The guy is amazing. Uh, he's going to talk to us by the way, about teriyaki, also about his sobriety and very importantly, about the proper way to cut an onion. Then we have got music critic legend Ann Powers. You might know her as an NPR music critic. She's also the author of several books on music, including her latest, which is titled Traveling on the Path of Joni Mitchell, which explores the life and career and influences of Joni Mitchell. And then speaking of music, we'll have some music from alternative folk singer, songwriter Khatumu. Who, here's a fun fact, was also a member of the Yale Wiffin Poofs, which is the world's oldest acapella group. So make sure you tune in next week for the show. 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 e-mail 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, it's super easy too. You head over to livewireradio.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 Holt Center in Eugene, Oregon. What song are we gonna hear?
Baroque Betty: This is the title track to my album. It's called Sobering Up.
Baroque Betty: [Baroque Betty with Mood Area 52 perform "Sobering Up"]
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 gonna do it for this episode of the show. A huge thanks to our guests, Ross Gay, Lane Regan, and Baroque Betty, along with Mood Area 52.
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 Yasmin Median 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 Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Miriam Fiorli 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 livewireradio.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.
