Episode 718
Gabe Henry, William Nuʻutupu Giles, and Sir Woman
Writer Gabe Henry unpacks his book Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell, which humorously explores the centuries-long evolution of the Simplified Spelling Movement, where "laugh" most became "laf;" Hawaii-born Samoan poet and educator William Nuʻutupu Giles performs a piece that reflects on making art in the language of his colonizers; and singer Kelsey Wilson recounts the "trippy" experience that led to the formation of her soul group Sir Woman, before performing the track "High Praise" from their album If It All Works Out.
Gabe Henry
Humorist and Writer
Gabe Henry is the author of Enough Is Enuf, which is a “smart, lighthearted chronicle of the simplified spelling movement” (The Wall Street Journal) and its many failed attempts to change laugh to laf, though to tho, and love to luv (tu naim a few). Henry’s work has appeared in TIME, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, US News & World Report, and more. He has spent more than a decade exploring the strange history of simplified spelling, which, by his own admission, has only made him a worse speller.
William Nuʻutupu Giles
Poet and Educator
William Nu’utupu Giles (he/they) is an afakasi Samoan poet from Honolulu. They write poetry, plays, and devastating insults. William is a National Poetry Slam Champ and has taught creative writing throughout Oceania in Aotearoa, Papua New Guinea, and Guåhan. Their collaborative theatre projects toured across America as well as in Manchester, England. William writes with metaphor, music, and nature to shade faces of colonization and diaspora. His work has been featured by HBO, The National Parks Service, and NBC News. When not poem-ing, you can find William singing, baking cookies, practicing tarot, or feeding the neighborhood crows.
Sir Woman
Solo Soul Project from Kelsey Wilson
Kelsey Wilson, performing as Sir Woman, is an Austin-based musician who rose to prominence after 14 years as lead vocalist and violinist of the Americana group Wild Child. Wilson launched her solo project in 2022 with a self-titled debut album that earned her Artist of the Year at the 2023 Austin Music Awards. Her music, drawing from early influences in gospel, R&B and soul, has garnered features in Rolling Stone, Spin.com, Variety, and the Austin Chronicle, while accumulating more than 30 million Spotify streams. Wilson's upcoming double album project—If It All Works Out and If It Doesn't—showcases her versatility, blending Motown-inspired brass, '90s R&B and soulful ballads.
Show Notes
Best News
Elena’s story: “Shelter dog credited with recognizing man's seizure gets adopted”
Luke’s story: “Newfoundland couple’s love note in a bottle found 13 years later on Irish shore”
Gabe Henry
Gabe and Luke discuss the history of American English spelling, as recounted in Gabe’s latest book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell.
Live Wire Listener Question
What’s a word that you struggle to spell?
William Nuʻutupu Giles
William reads a poem co-written with Hawaiian poet Travis Thompson and Youth Speaks (Hawaii).
William makes an appearance in the new book, We the Gathered Heat: Asian-American and Pacific Islander Poetry Performance and Spoken Word.
Station Location Identification Examination
This week’s shoutout goes to KLNI-FM, of Decorah, IA.
Sir Woman
Kelsey and her band perform "High Praise" from their new double-album If It All Works Out / If It Doesn’t.
-
Luke Burbank: This episode of Live Wire was originally recorded in July of 2025. We hope you enjoy it. Now, let's get to the show.
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire! This week, writer Gabe Henry.
Gabe Henry: I was a big grammar nerd. I would go further. I would say I was a big grammar cop. I would correct people. I would judge people on spelling, on commas.
Elena Passarello: Poet William Nuʻutupu Giles.
William Nuʻutupu Giles: For so long writing was like something I did shamefully in my diary away from anyone humanly possible.
Elena Passarello: With music from Sir Woman 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 for tuning in from all over these United States. We have an absolutely great show in store for you this week. First though, of course, 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, in fact, good news happening somewhere on this planet. And we're going to find it for you and present it to you right now. Elena, what is the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Dog news, dog news, happy dog news. Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof. If A Walker Spring our amazing composer ever needs an apprentice. I think I just that's my audition right there.
Luke Burbank: No notes. I mean, I love that.
Elena Passarello: It's worth singing about this news, I love it. So last month, there was a pet adoption event in Rustburg, Virginia, and a volunteer was walking a lab pity mix named Sienna around, sort of showing her off. And all of a sudden, the leash goes tight and Sienna just makes a beeline across the event to this guy, 46 year old guy named Josh Davis. And puts her paws on his chest and says hello, I guess, and won't leave his side, won't budge, is doing that dog thing in the movies where Lassie's trying to get your attention because Timmy's down the well or whatever.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, yeah.
Elena Passarello: And everyone was like, what's going on? And then his wife came over, Josh Davis's wife came over and was looking at him and she can tell, he's an epileptic and she could tell by the way that his eyes were moving that he might be on the verge of having a seizure and he remembered that he had forgotten to take his medication that day and you know, so this dog, who they think is completely untrained, a stray, was actually able to warn the sky on the other side of the room. Whoa. Yeah, that he was about to have a seizure. So, dog of the year, but you know, what would be the perfect happy ending to that story would be if Josh then got to take the dog home. That couldn't happen though, right? I mean, not in this economy? It didn't happen. Because Josh and his wife already had three rescues at home. I saw a picture of them. They're very cute, but they also look like divas. So maybe not so much but fourth dog. But the second best happy ending would be Not too long after that, a family who also has an epileptic son.
Luke Burbank: Woah.
Elena Passarello: Uh, brought her home, and now Sienna is a happy member of Shannon Sweeney's family, where apparently she throws all 60 pounds of her onto her loved ones and smothers them with kisses. She's the cutest dog, so all's well that ends well in Rustburg, Virginia.
Luke Burbank: Amazing that this dog without any formal training had sort of just intuited this. I mean, that's incredible.
Elena Passarello: I guess that's how they figured out that dogs could do this, you know, like there's just something about the way that they can tell behaviors.
Luke Burbank: They are very, I mean, I would say this kind of goes for dogs and cats in my experiences, like they can sense when your emotions shift.
Elena Passarello: Mm-hmm.
Luke Burbank: It would seem, you know, like they're they're pretty keyed into what's going on with us, which is incredible Speaking of the emotion known as love elena. You know that I'm big on romance. It's my middle name That's why i've been married so many times and um I've got a story about about romance for you which uh sort of unfolded a couple of weeks ago on a beach on the southwest coast of Ireland on the Mahariz Peninsula Kate and John Gay were walking along the beach and they found a bottle on the beach and so they brought it home and in fact they got together they're in part of a conservation group there in Ireland that's looking to take care of this peninsula so they got their friends together and they opened up the bottle and the bottle had like I guess you would sort of call it like a not so much a love letter but like a love diary entry like it was written by two people named Brad and Anita and what they wrote on the piece paper that was in the bottle that was found in Ireland was, "Today we enjoyed dinner, this bottle of wine, and if there's children in the room, shield their ears and each other on the edge of the island." I don't know. Take that for whatever.
Elena Passarello: So they had a little, uh, let's say alfresco experience. I mean, I guess that's what's implied here. And then Chuck the bottle of wine that they had drunk.
Luke Burbank: Into the ocean into the Ocean in Newfoundland 13 years ago because Brad and Anita at the time were there were dating he was living and we find this out now he was living in British Columbia he was a police officer she was going to nursing school in New Finland and so they were visiting each other and they were having a lovely little time together and through the bottle into the Well, Brad says he actually didn't think it made it into the ocean. He said he gave it quote all he had, but he thought it definitely smashed on the rock.
Elena Passarello: Well, he was probably tired after all that.
Luke Burbank: The wine, the other stuff. So, uh, Brad and Anita had no idea that this bottle had actually gotten into the ocean and had then drifted across the Atlantic ocean and ended up in Southern uh, Ireland where the folks that found it went and got online and were able to figure out the Brad and the Anita were Brad and Anita Squires who are married with three kids. This was sort of, I guess, maybe the moment that kind of sealed the deal for them. Since then, they've been married, they've raised a family together, they're living like, by all accounts, a happy and romantic life all these years later.
Elena Passarello: That's wonderful.
Luke Burbank: I know, isn't that sweet?
Elena Passarello: Yeah!
Luke Burbank: I mean, you would think that the chances are pretty slim that the two people who were downing the wine and having public sex would be able to piece that together for a happy and functional marital life together, but maybe that's their secret. I don't know, but shout out to Brad. Let's all get on that. I guess, seriously, it's going well for the squires. And that's the best news that I've heard all week. All right, let's get to our first guest this week, who has spent more than a decade exploring the history of something that I had no idea about, Elena, until we got this book. It's the Simplified Spelling Movement. Basically, it's been this attempt over many, many years to change the way we spell a lot of words in the English language, including laugh, like changing it to L-A-F, or love, changing it L-U-V. It was unclear what these people's plan has been for Liv. But, you know, we can deal with that later. Now, by his own admission, the research on this project has actually kind of left him maybe with more questions about spelling than he started out with. But it's generated this really fascinating book, which is called Enough Is Enuf. E.N.U.F. Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier. E.E.Z.I.E are to Spell, which the Wall Street Journal calls a smart, lighthearted chronicle of the simplified spelling. Take a listen to Gabe Henry, who joined us at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Gabe, welcome to the show. [Gabe: Thank you for having me.] This book was really incredible. I've learned so much from it, but it's written with such a light touch. It's a really fun read. I'm just curious though, cause it really dives deep on language and spelling and grammar and things like that. What was your sort of like, I don't know, grammar nerd status like before you started on this book? Were you always someone who was tracking that kind of stuff? And it's not just grammar, it's spelling, but were you a word person?
Gabe Henry: I was a big grammar nerd. I would go further. I would say I was a big grammar cop. I mean, I would correct people. I would judge people on spelling, on commas. And I think writing this book kind of softened me. It made me a little bit more accepting of those people who stray from the grammatical path.
Luke Burbank: And the spelling path. Right?
Gabe Henry: The spelling path.
Luke Burbank: One of the things you mentioned in the book which had never occurred to me is that basically English is the only language where we have spelling bees and that tells you something.
Gabe Henry: It's true. We have the most complicated, irregular, inconsistent spelling, and a lot has to do with our history. England was invaded so many times over hundreds of years by the Romans who spoke Latin and the Vikings who spoke Norse and the Germans and the French. And then over time, all these languages kind of merged and mingled into this messy hodgepodge that we call English.
Luke Burbank: You know what's funny, Gabe, is my next question to you was, can you give me a little, the history of the English language and then my joke was gonna be to say, can you do it in 30 seconds? But you just did that. You actually really did that very, you summarized it very neatly. [Gabe: You're welcome.] Thank you. But this is not the case with a lot of other languages. I just assumed, because I'm a fairly unsophisticated person, that every language had its weird spellings and just quirks and, this is just not the the case though, to the degree it is in English?
Gabe Henry: People who are bilingual, people who learned English as an adult, you'll know that it takes a lot longer to learn our spelling. It's less regular, and we have a lot of silent letters. A lot of languages have silent letters, it's more the inconsistent distribution of these silent letters so think of the letters like O-U-G-H that can be pronounced through, though, tough, cough, bough, thought, those are the six main ones. And then there's the old English hiccup, which used to be spelled hiccough. I mean, it goes on and on, you get the idea.
Luke Burbank: Is this because we have too many sounds, not enough letters problem?
Gabe Henry: Yeah. So people who study this, linguists, they identify that a lot of our problem comes down to we have 26 letters, but 44 sounds in our language. So a lot those letters have to do double duty, triple duty to make up for those 16, 18 missing phonemes. So it's like having 44 jobs that need to be done and having 26 employees. No one's happy. And then the result is that English, it takes children up to two to three times longer to learn spelling compared to like Spanish or German or these more phonetic spellings. We also have twice the rate of dyslexia. I mean, there's some real world consequences for all this.
Luke Burbank: This is Live Wire from PRX, we are talking to Gabe Henry about his book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell. Stick around, we have much more with Gabe and what I think might be the cutest segment in Live Wire history coming up after this break. Welcome back to Live Wire. I am your host Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are listening to a conversation that we recorded with Gabe Henry, talking about his book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell. We recorded this live at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Let's get back into it. Can you tell me about some of the pretty well-known people who have tried to fix this situation over the years?
Gabe Henry: A startling number of historical figures have tried to fix our spelling. Benjamin Franklin, he came up with this alphabet in 1768 that removed six letters and added six new letters and re-spelled words phonetically like busy, B-I-Z-I, and you is I-U. And that proposal didn't go that far, but... Well, didn't he send a letter to like a lady?
Luke Burbank: Well, didn't he send a letter to like a lady friend written in this language, and she was like, honey, no.
Gabe Henry: So Franklin wrote up this proposal. He sent it to one friend. It's kind of his confidant, this woman, Polly Stevenson, and just asking her for advice. And she took three months to respond, so that's an indication right there. [Luke: It was the equivalent of like the three dots under a text.] That's right, yeah. She left it on read.
Gabe Henry: And then when she finally did respond, she was not happy, like she was happy to receive this letter and then have the responsibility of giving Benjamin Franklin, the Benjamin Franklin advice on what she really realized was impractical. So she responded and her response was so lackluster that Franklin really never spoke about it publicly again.
Luke Burbank: Didn't he sort of bring it up with Noah Webster? He kind of revisited it with him at some point?
Gabe Henry: Revisited it about 20 years later, in 1789, Noah Webster, who we all know as the creator, writer of Webster's Dictionary. He's a young man, he's 27, he is rubbing everyone the wrong way, no one knows who he is yet.
Luke Burbank: Oh yeah, can we read, I have this right here, some of the insults that people at the time were saying about the guy who invented our dictionary that we go to. This was amazing to me. He was so off-putting as a person that people called him a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot. It. That actually sounds familiar. A toad in the service of sans-culottism, a great fool in a bare-faced liar, a spiteful viper, a maniacal pedant, a dunghill cock of faction.
Elena Passarello: I'm saving that one.
Luke Burbank: An incurable lunatic, and a deceitful news monger.
Gabe Henry: Yeah, so this is the man that we're getting all our words from yeah this deceitful viper what?
Luke Burbank: Why did people not?
Gabe Henry: He had this personality where he was very arrogant, looked down upon people. He would give these lectures where he would basically call out people for their grammatical failures. He-.
Luke Burbank: Oh, like you used to.
Gabe Henry: Like me and I've changed my ways. Noah Webster didn't, and that's just his personality, but his proposal for spelling reform in 1789, this is the birth of the American Republic, and all the founding fathers are trying to figure out ways to distinguish American culture, identity, and language from that of its former oppressor, England. So there were discussions about what our new language would be, some people posed French would be new American language. Other people said Greek, and Noah Webster comes along and he says, we can continue to have English, but we'll write in American English, and this American English will be simplified. We'll write laugh as L-A-F, tough as T-U-F. Though is T-H-O, tongue is T U-N-G, and it was this radical proposal, and he published this. The response was just pure indifference at best. Mockery at worst, and it was incessant, it was relentless. And he basically eventually withdrew this proposal. But before he did, he was working on it in collaboration with Benjamin Franklin, who we saw as his mentor, this elder statesman who had attempted this once before.
Luke Burbank: Can we talk about Samuel Johnson a little bit first of all remind folks who Samuel Johnson was and then how he sort of played into the situation
Gabe Henry: Samuel Johnson was the first lexicographer, meaning dictionary writer, the first major dictionary writer in English. He was British, though, and he published his dictionary in 1755. It was a huge two-volume tome. It weighed, I think I did this calculation. I have it in the book. It weighed as much as a car tire. And he was the first person to, in a thorough way, in an authoritative way, to crystallize and concretize English spelling and words as we know it. But the thing is, he did this out of a place of patriotism because he loved England. As much as he loved English, he hated America. So, he inserted in his dictionary all these slight insults to... America, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, all these places that he decided were not up to snuff with England.
Luke Burbank: Because this is what I, of course, didn't think about till I was reading the book was that people made up the dictionary at some point. I mean, you know, they were trying to research it and trying to be accurate and collect up what everybody was meaning when they would say a word, but at some there was a lot of judgment calls. And it's just basically one person making a list of words.
Gabe Henry: It's one person alone in the room for 20 years making a list.
Luke Burbank: And he also, I'm trying to find the exact spot in the book, he had some pretty questionable definitions that you write out, these like, I don't know if you'll remember off the top of your head, but yeah, he had a like belly god.
Gabe Henry: A belly god, one who makes a glutton of himself with food, he's a belly god. He eats everything. Which I kind of want on a t-shirt.
Luke Burbank: Can we talk about the funny fellows? Kind of like the proto stand-up comics, as you put it in the book.
Gabe Henry: After Noah Webster. Simplified spelling starts gaining momentum, and a lot of proposals come out, dozens of proposals, all varying in their angles and their degree of simplification. Some of them were brilliant, some of them were absurd. But as simplified spelling gained momentum in the 19th century, America's humorists couldn't resist poking fun at it. So a group of writers calling themselves the funny fellows, funny spelled P-H, fellows spelled P.H. Hmph! They kind of turned simplified spelling into this micro-literary genre, and turned deliberate misspelling into this popular thing. And they kind of made a name for themselves in their deliberately misspelled humor pieces.
Luke Burbank: But you sort of say in the book that the funny fellows kind of hurt the movement, this simplified spelling movement, because they turned it into a big joke.
Gabe Henry: Yeah, first of all, it's very easy to make fun of simplified spelling because it looks like child writing. It is as simplified and phonetic as you can get. If you ask a four-year-old to sound out enough, they would probably spell it E-N-U-F. So this is, even though these simplified spelling proposals came about in a serious way, it was just very easy mock. And because the Funny Fellows had such visibility and such literary prestige, they kind of killed the movement, not entirely, but they made it a target of ridicule for the rest of time.
Luke Burbank: Has it in some measurable way held us back as a society, the fact that we have this complicated language?
Gabe Henry: Yeah, I mean, I think that the languages we have it now, as I said, because it halts childhood learning, it is a barrier for English as a second language. It is also a big barricade for anyone who's trying to become literate as an adult, maybe for whatever reason, you didn't learn how to read growing up. But learning as an adults, now you have to struggle with all these versions of O-U-G-H and words like womb. Which rhymes with room, but not with comb.
Luke Burbank: Right.
Gabe Henry: Or choir, which rhymes with lyre, and as well as squire and fire and pyre and fryer and probably a dozen more. It has held us back, I think. But the question of whether we should become simplified spellers, I don't know if that's really the way to go, to artificially push us in this direction. I think that change in that way comes more from the bottom up, not from the top down.
Luke Burbank: And yet, we have texting, which you talk about in the book. It's like, you know, what are the nature bats last? We've just landed on this kind of simplified spelling for convenience sake now, kind of without anyone making us do it.
Gabe Henry: Yeah, I mean, that's the great irony, that for centuries these reformers were pushing their simplifications upon the public to no success. But when left alone, the language seems to be naturally simplifying, at least in this informal, digital, shorthand way. And it's to fit the needs of our more interconnected society, our faster-paced society, just our more modern world. And I think there are words today we use all the time, like Though spelled T-H-O, which I probably text three times a day. I think my dad texts about 20 times a day.
Gabe Henry: Just to say it's not generational specific, it's all. And words like through THRU, these are more common now than Noah Webster ever could have imagined when he proposed them back in the 1700s.
Luke Burbank: The book is Enough is Enuf. Gabe, Henry, stick around for a quick second. We want to do one more exercise with you because we know that you've been spending a lot of time immersing yourself in the simplified spelling movement. There's another, I don't know if you know about this, it's a kind of an intuitive spelling movement that's going on. It's called brave spelling. This is a real thing and it's where you sort of let kids try to spell things themselves and just kind of see where they end up. And it turns out there is a practitioner of this method here in Portland. She's a kindergartener named Poppy. Also happens to be the child of our executive producer, Laura Hadden. Here's what we wanna do with you, Gabe. We wanna sort of do like a reverse spelling bee, okay? So we had Poppy, who is six years old and in kindergarten, try to spell some words. And we recorded that. And we're gonna play you, Poppy trying to spell these things. And we want to see if you can guess the word. That Poppy was trying to spell. Okay, I'm ready. Okay, here comes the first one. Some brave spelling from Poppy.
Poppy: C-A-P-L-D-I-S-E-M
Luke Burbank: C-A-P-L-D-I-S-E-M.
Gabe Henry: Capitalism.
Luke Burbank: That is exactly right. [Gabe: Yes.] Well done.
Luke Burbank: Let's go to Poppy for the answer.
Poppy: Capitalism
Luke Burbank: Great work, Gabe. It's clear that you have been studying your spelling.
Gabe Henry: I just have the brain of a four-year-old, six-year old.
Luke Burbank: All right, here is word number two, spelled by local Portland resident Poppy.
Poppy: M-I-S-T-I-L-A-N-E-I S.
Luke Burbank: That's M-I-S-T-I-L-A-N-E-I S.
Gabe Henry: There's a real phonetic logic to all of this. Is it miscellaneous?
Luke Burbank: It is miscellaneous. Very good.
Luke Burbank: Here's Poppy with the answer.
Poppy: Miscellaneous.
Luke Burbank: All right.
Elena Passarello: Said fast.
Luke Burbank: Well, I think what I cut out from that, let's see if we can go back to the original source file, if I can do this on the fly. It was Laura trying to coach Poppy through saying it more quickly.
Poppy: Miscellaneous. [Laura: Okay, can you say it faster?] Miscellaneous.
Luke Burbank: You're doing really, really well, Gabe. This is impressive. All right, here's our final word. See if you can figure this one out from Poppy.
Poppy: D-O-D-U-R-D.
Luke Burbank: D-O-D-U-R-D.
Elena Passarello: It really is just like a spelling bee.
Gabe Henry: Daughter?
Luke Burbank: Daughter is right. That's right. Daughter.
Elena Passarello: It's interesting that she wanted to put the D on the end. There's something about what the R does that makes her want to put like a terminal.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, right. That's incredible, Gabe. I want to play one last thing. We did try to get Poppy to spell patriarchy, and she was uninterested. Take a listen to this.
Poppy: [Laura: Can you spell patriarchy?] No, I'm only doing happy words.
Luke Burbank: If you want to take Poppy on the rest of the book tour with you, Gabe, I think...
Gabe Henry: Well, I was actually looking for an audiobook narrator.
Luke Burbank: You found em. That's how you play Reverse Spelling Bee. Gabe Henry, thank you so much for coming on Live Wire. Great job.
Gabe Henry: Thank you so much for having me.
Luke Burbank: That was Gabe Henry right here on Live Wire, his latest book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell is available to read. 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. This is Live Wire. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Of course, each week on the show, we like to ask the Live Wire audience a question. This week, we were inspired by Gabe Henry's book about spelling. So Elena, what did we ask the audience?
Elena Passarello: We wanted the audience to tell us a word that they have a hard time spelling. Gosh, restaurant. Mm, definitely.
Luke Burbank: Defy a Nightly.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, you gotta put finite in there.
Luke Burbank: Also separate is a problem for me because I feel like it should be an E, but it's an A.
Elena Passarello: I thought you were going to say, also, Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Yes, that one's always been hanging me up for years and years. Here's what we did. We actually went into the live audience at a recent taping of the show and asked folks to tell us about the words that they have a hard time spelling. Here's Megan and Jonathan.
Megan: Worcestershire sauce.
Jonathan: Worcester sauce. Worcestershire sauce, Worcestershire sauce, you spell it. W-O-R-C-E-S-T-E R-S-H-I-R E.
Elena Passarello: Although everybody in Worcester, Mass. Uh-huh. Has had a spell. [Luke: Right?] It's a shame.
Luke Burbank: I mean, I don't even think there's a chance in heck that I could spell Worcestershire. No, no. I can barely say it. I'm still on the same bottle I bought in my 20s. I don't understand the business model of that sauce. I believe they sell you one bottle per lifetime. Yeah. Unless you're having a lot of Bloody Marys.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. All right.
Luke Burbank: All right, here's a word that Cameron, a recent attendee of a Live Wire taping, has trouble spelling.
Cameron: Gruyere. Gruyere like the cheese. G-R-U-E-A-R-R
Luke Burbank: I don't think that was right.
Elena Passarello: No, I don't think so. I think you've got to get a Y involved, for sure.
Luke Burbank: I feel like you should get also a special dispensation if it's a word of like a different origin in terms of language like oh yeah I mean I don't think we should be if you grew up speaking English and it's the only language you speak I don t know if there should be an expectation you can spell French cheeses.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, or hors d'oeuvres.
Luke Burbank: Horace Duvers?
Elena Passarello: There's always that moment like if you've only heard a word the first time then you see it in print and you're like What is oh, that's how you do that like facetious the first I saw facetious. I was like what?
Luke Burbank: I am still having that experience at 49 years of age. Yeah. Okay. This is Colin. Now this is a little bit. I mean, it's a, this is sort of a word about a bodily situation that I think we can play on public radio. Okay. But this is Colin having trouble spelling this word.
Colin: Diarrhea.
Audience Member: Yeah, can you attempt to spell diarrhea for us? Yeah, just do it.
Colin: From England.
Audience Member: Yes.
Colin: I think something like D-I-A-R-R-H-O-E-A.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, because it's spelled, this is part of the book, right? Like it's spelt differently over there. When people came here, there are certain English words that were spoken in the UK that we decided to take like the U out of flavor and labor. Diarrhea for some reason got a new spelling, but it's also impossible. But over there, it ends in an O-E-A, I think.
Luke Burbank: My hope is that I don't have to spell that word very often on either side of the Atlantic ocean.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, and there's only four letters and runs, so, you know.
Luke Burbank: So, you know, like. Yes, that's my version. It's sort of like, you might call it porky pigging it. Like, you take on a word, you realize, I'm not gonna be able to spell this. What's the shorter version of this word that will convey the same meaning?
Elena Passarello: Yeah, yeah.
Luke Burbank: Anyway, I don't know if that segment made us smarter or just feel less bad about the fact that none of us can spell anymore. But thank you very much to our brave listeners who weighed in on that. Our next guest here on Live Wire is a National Poetry Slam champ whose work has been featured on HBO, NBC News, and the National Park Service, among other places. They've performed across the country from the San Francisco Opera House to the Kennedy Center to Broadway to the Hotel Crocodile in Seattle, which is where we met up with William Nuʻutupu Giles, who joined us for a special Live Wire event. Take a listen to this. William, welcome to Live Wire. [William: Thank you. I am very, very excited to be here.] I'm curious, well, first of all, where did you grow up? [William: Honolulu, Hawaii.] What was the, I see, some people just flew in. What was a kind of spoken word culture like that you grew up with the poetry? What were you hearing as a kid?
William Nuʻutupu Giles: I feel really lucky. I found a poetry community called You Speaks Hawaii where basically a bunch of teachers after they got done teaching school decided to run poetry workshops and open mics for young folks. I got really lucky to just have amazing mentors and be able to find a community because for so long writing was like something I did shamefully in my diary away from anyone humanly possible. [Luke: Really?] And so it felt really cool to finally find a place where like I could polish my little gems in secret and then find people both to listen to and also to share with.
Luke Burbank: So you were one of those kids who kept a diary and that was how you were sort of processing your feelings and trying to make sense of your world? [William: Yes. Absolutely. Not by talking to other people. Simply by talking in my notebook.] Honestly, you'll fit right in with the Live Wire listeners. Do those diaries still exist?
William Nuʻutupu Giles: I'm sure I have a few of them that I will lock in a vault soon and never show anyone.
Luke Burbank: Were you, were you a hip hop kid? Were you listening to hip hop? Were you listen to like spoken word in the sort of more pop culture way?
William Nuʻutupu Giles: No, I was listening to musical theater and like acoustic music and Hawaiian folk like any everything and everything.
Luke Burbank: Because then I know that you went through this spoken word and hip hop program in Wisconsin, right? Which I think you were saying was pretty pivotal in your development. First of all, Wisconsin, known hotbed for hip hop. But what was that program like and what did you learn from it?
William Nuʻutupu Giles: Yeah, it's through the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives. Oh my. It was just a phenomenal hip hop learning theater program. They recruited 15 students every year. And for me, it was the first time I'd seen arts invested in similar to a sports program. So that felt very cool. It was like 15 of us, singers, dancers, poets, break dancers, graffiti artists. And they were like, great. Your first assignment is to work together and use all your talents and create a 15 person play. And we're like, what? But it was beautiful, like I got to work with poets, I got to perform a poem while if someone breakdanced and another person like played the cello, like it was just so cool to see all these intersections of art.
Luke Burbank: Well, can we hear a poem?
William Nuʻutupu Giles: Yes, absolutely.
Luke Burbank: What can you tell us about this poem?
William Nuʻutupu Giles: This is a poem I wrote with actually one of my mentors, one of the co-founders of You Speaks Hawaii, where I started writing. Travis Thompson, a phenomenal Hawaiian poet. And we wrote this piece to kind of share at the National Poetry Slam in 2014, how it feels to be an indigenous person. I'm of Samoan descent. I was born and raised in Hawaii, and he's Hawaiian. And it was like, how do we feel that our entire artistry is in a language of someone who colonized our people? And it's like art art. That was, it was like, is this empowering? Is this disempowering? Do I feel good about like? It was just a very interesting kind of like cultural reflection and a chance to kind of bring these same sort of academic rigor to our research and then present that, that sometimes difficult, sometimes difficult history in hopefully a beautiful or less painful way.
Luke Burbank: All right, let's hear that now. This is William Nuʻutupu Giles here on Live Wire.
William Nuʻutupu Giles: For over three and a half millennia. The islanders of Pacifica spoke without alphabet or written language, so spit me a poem with the names of the wind and the rain, the sacred spaces of your gods and ancestors. The people of Oceania retained all knowledge and all history through the shaping of spoken word into muscle memory. Every story, a poem. So spit me poem of how the world was made, beginning with your grandmother's face, how respect of land on this earth was poured from the thick cocoa of her eyes, every island. And continent broken only by her blinks. You see an ocean erases all that is written in sand, so my ancestors etched everything into the tides of their tongues. Now as a historian, while I retell the tales of my ancestors using a colonizer's English, I am unsure if the act is one of resistance or oppression. I sometimes still see my tongue the way an amputee feels the itch of a dismembered limb it aches when I say my own middle name, N'utupu. See I was born with the pride of my history but no knowledge of my language, speaking with the pride of a skin I lived with, but not in. Imagine the entire knowledge of the world ended with what you could remember. In ancient Polynesia, the children with the best memory skills were chosen to be the culture keepers, the storytellers. They were handpicked to be poets, weaving today's events into yesterday's lore. They were practicing immortality and breath weaving generations through the genealogies until foreign diseases interrupted entire bloodlines with death. In just over 100 years of the arrival of the West, nearly 90% of the native Hawaiian population was dead. And their language was banned, only one in 10 survived. So a knowledgeable person's death was the same as a library burning down today. We are still sifting through the ashes of a culture once deemed illegal. We are the descendants of the 10% who learned to speak in smoke, and sometimes I still see my tongue as just a colonizer's shovel. With most words, I am unsure if I'm burying my ancestors or digging them up, so spit me a poem. About rebirth and redefining home, about the ways your forefathers died and the ways that you have grown. Though I do not sound like my ancestors, I still practice their traditions. These bones still remember their stories and I cannot escape the history of colonization any more than I can escape their near extinction. So my own personal culture must be more than language. It is practice. So I'll spit you a poem. Without alphabet or written language, weaving today's events into yesterday's lore. I will spit you a poem with all the knowledge of the world, ending with what I can remember and more. I will teach a hundred years of colonizers that a language is the most dangerous weapon you can give to a bloodline of storytellers, culture keepers with a responsibility to speak no matter the split tongue. So spit me a poem that is more rope than it is stone and I will weave. Your story into the library born within these bones so that our stories will never have to die, so our stories we'll never have to live.
Luke Burbank: That was William Nuitupu Giles recorded live at the Hotel Crocodile in Seattle, Washington. You can check out their work and many other talented poets in the new book, We the Gathered Heat, Asian American and Pacific Islander poetry performance and spoken word. All right, we gotta take a very quick break here on Live Wire, but do not go anywhere. When we come back, Sir Woman will play us a song that you do not wanna miss. I've already heard it and I can verify. It's really good. Stick around, more Live Wire in a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right. I can see you furring your brow, Elena, because you know that it is time for station location identification examination. This is where I like to quiz our esteemed announcer, Elena Passarello about a place in the United States where Live Wire is on the radio. And Elena's got to try to guess where I am talking about. Okay. This city is located. In something known as driftless area also known as bluff country or the paleozoic plateau which means it's a part of the country that was never covered by ice during the last ice age.
Elena Passarello: Huh, so it's a place that gets cold that's east of the Rocky Mountains.
Luke Burbank: Yes, yes, yes. I like how you're thinking. It's also home of the Vesterheim Norwegian American Museum, which every July hosts the Nordic Fest, which includes a variety of activities ranging from the Nordic rock throwing competition to my favorite, the lutefisk eating contest. You should see me put back the lutefisk .
Elena Passarello: Well now we're definitely going to be up there in the Scancey Minnesota-y
Luke Burbank: You would think so it's, it's it's up near there, but, but go, go a little south. [Elena: Go a little more Iowa.] Yes. You're in the state.
Elena Passarello: Okay. And the bluff and there's a lot of glacier coverage in Iowa. So we're in the definitely in the Eastern part of the state.
Luke Burbank: Yes, the next hint I have for you is also extremely old. It's 470 million years old, which I don't know if that's going to help you a meteorite as big as a city block smashed into the place that is where this city now is, um, the impact dug a crater nearly four miles wide that now lies beneath the town and is filled by an unusual shale that for, I see you nodding your head like this actually means something to you.
Elena Passarello: Well, you know, I lived in Iowa for three years and we drove to absolutely everything that you could do, including the world's largest pineapple. I feel like maybe we did go to the meteorite and it was in like the
Luke Burbank: Okay, D.
Elena Passarello: Decora? Decora! [Luke: Decora, Iowa!] Decora.
Luke Burbank: Good old Decora, Iowa, which is where we're on KLNI-FM radio. Shout out to the folks tuning in in Decora, Iowa. All right. Before we get to our performance by Sir Woman, a little preview of what we are doing on the show next week. We are gonna talk to Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor from the incredible podcast Ear Hustle. They're gonna be talking about how they created the show while Earlonne was still in prison. Then we're gonna get some comedy from Dylan Adler, who will reveal what he considers to be a real missed opportunity on his college admissions essay. Then we're gonna have a chat with and hear a tune from our friend, the Americana singer-songwriter Margo Cilker. We've got an incredible hour of radio coming your way next week, so don't miss it. This week on the show, our musical guest features the Austin-based musician, Kelsey Wilson. And her band playing their unique blend of soul and funk and R&B, which earned Kelsey Artist of the Year Award at the Austin Music Awards, and also has garnered more than 30 million Spotify streams. This is Sir Woman, who joined us at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen. Hello, hello, welcome. I know, Kelsey, that you get asked about the name of the project a lot, but I was reading about it on your website and I thought, this is actually Bears talking about because the way this name came about for the band or for your performing as this band also oriented your thoughts about the kind of music you were gonna make?
Kelsey Wilson: Yeah, that kind of just all happened at once I'm gonna all give the NPR version of this story. When you first brought it up, I was like, it's not like super family-friendly. I was on a lot of mushrooms And I was in Florida, which is an important detail. Love you, Florida. I was I was with another band for about 15 years touring and playing music. And it's called Wild Child and it's more like indie folk. It's very sweet ukulele. And I was on a bunch of mushrooms. And we were playing a festival. I think Snoop Dogg was a headliner. It was like Snoop Dogg and the funky meters. And it was like, choose between the funky meters and Snoop Dogg. And I was like I want to see the funky meters because I hadn't before. No one was there. Everyone was watching Snoop Dogg. But I'm watching the funky meter by myself. And I walk back to the artist lounge because I don't know. I think I'm going to meet them or something. Again, tripping. And I'm wearing all these jackets and stuff because it's kind of cold and security can't see me. And they just start yelling at me and saying, sir, sir. And I just keep walking because they're not talking And then she says, woman. And I was like, whoa. OK, Sir Woman, she was talking to me. I am Sir Woman. And it just kind of all clicked. I was, like, I am not supposed to make indie folk music. I don't listen to indie folk. I like the funky meters. I'm watching the meters and not Snoop Dogg and not the chain smokers or whatever other DJ was happening. I was this doesn't fit. Or woman is something else. Someone else, she's this creature in the woods that's not supposed to be there. And yeah, just kind of all, I had all these songs start like happening in my head after the name appeared and yeah, now we're like a 20 person band. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, right. You have this new double album release, if it all works out, is one of the albums, and then if it doesn't, it's the other album. It's really covering your bases there.
Kelsey Wilson: I'm a very serious person. I don't know if you can tell. Yeah, they also are supposed to come with a mood ring in the shape of a 69. And it gives you a mood chart. So you put on a mood ring, and it'll tell you what album you need to listen to.
Luke Burbank: Gotcha!
Kelsey Wilson: Yeah, but the mood rings didn't come out. You have to like, they're temperature controlled and it has to get like over 200 degrees to change colors, so you don't get a mood ring. But the idea was there. You just have to know what mood you're in.
Luke Burbank: Trust your heart as to which one of the albums you should be reaching for. That you should be reaching for?
Kelsey Wilson: It's from, I have this quote that I kind of live by. It makes me feel better about absolutely everything. It's, if it works out great, if doesn't, even better. Like, even Better. We have no idea, right? Feels good. So it's kind of like, yeah, it sounds like it's an album for a good day and an album a bad day, but it's actually album for good day and an an album an even better one.
Luke Burbank: Nice.
Kelsey Wilson: That's kind of where, what it's for.
Luke Burbank: Well, what song are we gonna hear?
Kelsey Wilson: We're gonna hear a song off, If It All Works Out, called High Praise.
Luke Burbank: All right, this is Sir Woman on Live Wire.
Sir Woman: [Sir Woman performs "High Praise"]
Luke Burbank: That was Sir Woman, right here on Live Wire, recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Their double album, If It All Works Out/If It Doesn't, is available right now. Well, this all worked out. I think this was a great episode of Live Wire, which we find ourselves now at the end of. A huge thanks to our guests, Gabe Henry, William Nuʻutupu Giles, and Sir Woman. A special thanks this episode to Roger Meyer, the Hotel Crocodile, and Tonya Zubia.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our Executive Director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our technical director is Eben Hoffer with assistance from Ness Royster, Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our assistant editor and our house sound is by D.Neil Blake. Ashley Park is our production fellow.
Luke Burbank: Valentine Keck is our operations manager. Andrea Castro-Martinez is our marketing associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Ayal Alves, and A Walker Spring who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid.
Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by the City of Portland's Office of Arts and Culture. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank member Tobey Fitch of Portland, Oregon. Woohoo!
Luke Burbank: What up, Tobey and Terry? For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast head on over to livewireradio.org. I'm Luke Burban. For Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team, thank you for listening, and we will see you next week.
PRX.
Staff Credits
Laura Hadden is our Executive Producer, and our Producer and Editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our technical director is Eben Hoffer. For this episode, Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our Assistant Editor, our house sound is by D. Neil Blake, Ashley Park is our Production Fellow, Valentine Keck is our Operations Manager, Andrea Castro-Martinez is our Marketing Associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Ayal Alves and A. Walker-Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid. Performing with the Lullaby Project and artist Stephanie Schneiderman are members of the Oregon Symphony: Peter Frajola and Inés Voglar Belgique on violin, Amanda Grimm on viola, Kevin Kunkel on cello, Jason Schooler on bass, and Zach Galatis on the flute. Also, special thanks to our friends Halle and Rick Sadle. 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 Stephanie Kuo of Brooklyn, NY, and Rachel Murphy of Portland, OR.
