The Artist's Impulse with Crystal Wilkinson

[00:00:00] I didn't even know what an agent was and I didn't know how to accept love either. Didn't know how to accept that people liked my work. That's how low my confidence was in the work that I was doing. What's good?

[00:00:13] I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black and Published, bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. Today's guest is Crystal Wilkinson, author of the cookbook memoir, Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks.

[00:00:35] It's a book born of grief and infused with heart, love, and care for the elders who nurtured us with their hands and taught us the importance of being able to feed and fend for ourselves.

[00:00:49] Should the revolution come, like you need to be able to make a biscuit if you, like we saw that during the pandemic, like if you can't get out and you've got just a few ingredients, you need to at least be able to go into survival mode and make

[00:01:04] something wonderful if you have to. A poet, a novelist, an essayist, Ms. Crystal, who was recently named a 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow, does this writing thing for real. The reason she says she's never written solely for publication.

[00:01:22] Plus how she's haunted by her own artistic impulses and how she squares being a radical feminist with her deep knowledge of the kitchen, foodways and the power that comes from feeding her family. That and more is next when Black and Published continues. OK, let's jump right in.

[00:01:54] Ms. Crystal, when did you know that you were a writer? I think as a child, you know, I was a really quiet child, really shy, but an avid reader. And my grandmother always said that after I had read all the books in

[00:02:10] the house, I started writing my own. And I sort of remember that process of writing things down. And I think when I the first time I connected myself to a book was when I had written like a little story called My Dream Come True.

[00:02:25] And I got on my grandmother's sewing machine and I sold a binding down the side. And I was like, OK, yes, this is what I want to do. I love that. I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say they got to the sewing

[00:02:39] machine and made the binding. Yeah, yeah, that's what I did. I sold a seam down the side and it felt like a real book to me. And I thought, yeah, this is what I want to do.

[00:02:52] So then knowing that from such a young and early age and pursuing that yourself, what did that look like to put in practice in life? I didn't really know. You know, I was among the first generation to go to college and I didn't even

[00:03:08] know what that meant to major. You know, and I was so shy. I remember sitting in the counselor's office and my head was down and I was The counselor asked my grandmother, well, what does she want to major in?

[00:03:22] And my granny said, well, she likes to write awfully well. And the counselor said, well, I'm going to put down journalism. And I just nodded my head and said, OK, I didn't really know what any of it meant. So I did major in journalism.

[00:03:37] But even though that was sort of forward facing or outward facing, all of my inner writing was in journals, was writing stories and poems for myself. And it probably wasn't until I was much older and had children of my own that I started like easing those pieces out.

[00:03:58] We had a collective here called the Working Class Kitchen. It was a group of women that got together and read pieces to one another. And they had like an open mic. And I remember saying, OK, by going to that once and thinking, OK, I'm

[00:04:13] going to read, I'm going to read next. Yeah, that was great what she just read. I'm going to read my next and then chickening out and being like, no, no, no, no, I'll wait till some other time. And that was also the time that I met Frank X.

[00:04:25] Walker and Nikki Finney and became involved in the Afro-Latian Poets. And that's when things just sort of busted wide open when I when I met the Afro-Latian poets because found kinship, you know, found family, other black writers who were from where I was from and doing something similar.

[00:04:45] And finding that kinship, do you think that's what gave you the courage and the confidence to go after something that you had always been doing so privately for yourself? I think so. I mean, there was two things, working class kitchen first in the Afro-Latian Poets.

[00:04:59] And also, I just kept taking these risks, even though by then I was a single mom with three kids struggling, trying to work, would work all day and then come home and write. I just kept taking risks.

[00:05:14] So the other thing that happened was I saw on the back of Essence Magazine an ad for the very first Hurston Wright workshop. And I thought, I'm going to do this. Like, I'm going to at least apply. And I didn't really know again what to expect.

[00:05:28] I'd never been to anything like that. And so I applied and I got in and then I thought, how am I going to get there with my poor self? And so and who's going to keep my children? So my mother said she would keep the kids.

[00:05:42] And I was working for a small women's college at the time in the PR office. And I just decided, OK, I'm going to go for this. And I went to the president of the college and I said, Dr. Bach, can I really want to go do this?

[00:05:59] Is there any way that the college can help me? And I had never really advocated for myself that way. But Hurston and Wright, the names together on the page and knowing that Marita Golden was involved, I was just like, I got to do this somehow.

[00:06:17] So he gave me the presidential car, which was like a hoopty basically, like an old model Lincoln Continental. And I whipped that bad boy to Virginia and went to that first conference and that was it. That's where I met Marie Brown, who was actually my first agent.

[00:06:38] And I didn't even know what an agent was. And I didn't know how to accept love either. Didn't know how to accept that people liked my work. So I thought she was just being kind when she said, I would love to see more of your stories.

[00:06:54] And I was like, OK, well, I'll send them to you sometime. Or maybe I can email them. And Marita Golden was saying, Marie Brown is an agent. Like she is. I said, OK, well, that's great. And she was naming all the people that she was an agent of.

[00:07:16] And I just knew that she couldn't be talking to me in a professional way. That's how low my confidence was in the work that I was doing. And so Marie Brown was my first agent. And she rearranged the stories that ended up being BlackBerry's BlackBerry's.

[00:07:32] I don't. I love this story. But I wonder because I think I'm astonished by hearing you talk about how reserved you were in the belief in your gift, in your work, in your words. And so it was like reading you on the page

[00:07:51] and then hearing you say that. I don't know. It's just such a disconnect for me. And I wonder, how do you feel about your work now that you've been doing it consistently and at such a high level for so long? I think it continues to surprise me.

[00:08:09] I'm not going to belittle my hard work, of course. And I'm not going to belittle my education or the fact that I've done it so long. But there's still that uncertainty. I think it will always be there. And one reason is because I'm always

[00:08:24] doing something out of the box. I'll say out of the box. I'm sort of an eccentric when it comes to writing. I've never written solely for publication. I've always thought, well, I wonder if this will work. Like why can't I?

[00:08:39] Why does my poet self and my fiction self and my nonfiction self have to live in separate bodies and come out as separate entities? What if I spent all of that on the page at once? What if I put a lyric essay in my collection of poetry?

[00:08:57] What if I insert a prose poem in the middle of my novel chapter? And then in praise song for the kitchen ghost, it's like what if I do all of these things at once? And so I think that I've gotten better

[00:09:14] at that hybridity because it is very much who I am. And it's kind of like when I'm teaching writing, I always have students read a writer's first books because what I say to them is that their seams are showing.

[00:09:32] Like I think I used to say the slip is showing at that point before they perfected it. So the seams are showing before they, you can see a writer trying to do something before they perfect it. So I don't, I mean, I certainly don't think

[00:09:51] my work is perfect, but I think I've been doing this sort of hybridity for a while that I've been able to reach a certain balance and control of it that works for a reader and probably makes a publisher scratch their head,

[00:10:09] but also like wonder if this will work. And then just finding both readers and publishers and editors and agents that say, okay, I get it. Like, I don't know, like I get this. So let's take a chance on her and see if this works.

[00:10:27] But I'm always unsure about a piece from beginning to end, like I'm unsure of, I guess I'm unsure of how it will end up, but I do follow my passion. I'm never unsure about that part. Like I'm never unsure about that this is the work that haunts me.

[00:10:47] This is the work that demands to be written about right now in this particular way. You mentioned that you're never writing solely for publication and because of your eccentricity in the hybridity of your work, it makes publishers intrigued as well.

[00:11:06] What has, I wanna say freedom been like for you in an industry where for I think so many writers, and I'm saying this after coming back from AWP, so you understand my context, is the validation of publication and getting into that industry.

[00:11:26] I mean, I think freedom for me has meant that I've gotten published by small presses that I've gotten published by university presses like birds of opulence was part of my MFA thesis. And it took how many years of 10 or more years for that little small novel.

[00:11:48] It took probably that long for it to get published. It took me a long time to sort of crack the nut of it because it is like something that's a little bit different like in it's a fragmented novel.

[00:11:59] And so I don't really consider it a short story cycle or a collection of stories, it's a novel. So it took me a while to make that work. And then I wouldn't really, I was stubborn in that I felt like it had to be told this way.

[00:12:13] But part of that sort of being eccentric that way or being determined that way meant that I wasn't published earlier by mainstream publishers. There was, for example, birds of opulence. I did have an agent who probably could have made my career take off to another level,

[00:12:33] asked me to remove some of the elders and make it sort of a women's lit novel that would be between the two friends and not include the elder women that I include in that novel. And I just said, no. I just said, well, thank you.

[00:12:50] Because I think communally in my own personal life and in my imagination, we aren't anywhere without our elders. And so the representation of that concept of the women being there and it being multi-generational was important to me. And so I didn't compromise on that.

[00:13:09] So it took a long time for anyone to sort of take it up. And it was a university press of Kentucky that did, that said, okay, we really wanna publish this. And the agent that I had at the time was a little resistant because

[00:13:24] she was still really trying hard to get it at a larger house. And I finally said, no, they get it and they wanna publish it. So let's do this. Like, you know, I don't have 20 more years to kind of wait on mainstream publishing.

[00:13:42] So I went ahead and went with them and it worked because that book was a gateway into the other work. You know, it validated the two sides of me. Like it won Appalachian Book of the Year and it also won the Ernest Gaines Award,

[00:13:59] which is one of our largest awards. So I was really, felt really validated and was really excited about it. Do you think that holding strong to your story and knowing what you want your characters and stories to do on the page has helped you

[00:14:20] in the birth of Pray Song for the Kitchen Ghost, which is full of the elders and full of the ancestors and full of the hybridity that I think you've become known for? Yeah. I mean, I think it's part of my maturation too as a writer.

[00:14:32] Like even though I couldn't resist taking the risk, there was always like, well, you know, here you are like taking the risk again. So this is another sort of strange book that you don't know who's going to publish it

[00:14:48] or if anybody will, but I just knew that I had to, you know, and I don't begrudge anyone who writes solely for publication. I've always thought that publishing means to make something public in some way. So I always knew that my work would be

[00:15:06] in the public in some way. And it didn't really mean, it wasn't everything. For some writers it's everything to be published by the big houses. It's never been everything for me. What it's everything for me is to have an idea.

[00:15:22] You know, ideas come to me like being on the Rolodex like I'm constantly thinking about things that I could write about. But when something haunts me and it sort of flips over and flips over and flips over and keeps identify itself like, okay, here I am.

[00:15:37] When are you going to get started on this? You know, whether it's a character or a storyline or like the idea of the kitchen ghosts themselves haunted me for years and haunted my work. Like, you know, it was a real thing.

[00:15:50] Like when I first came up on it, like, cause after my grandmother had died and I was trying to cook Thanksgiving dinner and thinking like, I can't do this. And I went and got her dress and hung it up. And that was really personal.

[00:16:03] But as we do as writers, I used it in my fiction. I used it in my poetry. And so I think I was sort of opening that up to be used in a non-fiction book the way that I did. So these kind of things kind of,

[00:16:21] they have to sort of be in the imagination brine and sort of sit for a while before I pull them up. But I think the art, you know, and people probably find this strange but the art of it has always been more important to me

[00:16:37] than being published mainstream, even though I am published mainstream now. I thought that I would find a way, like I never wanted to self publish but I thought I could find a way to get my work out to the world.

[00:16:51] And you know, after I got over some of the shyness, if that meant that I didn't have a volume of poetry but that I went and did readings of the Afro-Latian poets or alone every so often and read it out loud, you know,

[00:17:05] it's a way of sort of sharing it with a small group and to make it public in some ways. And you're sharing the word with people. I always thought that would be enough. Like I didn't expect Perfect Black to, I thought it would be a regional book.

[00:17:21] There are certain poems in there that teachers ask me for every year. Like there's a poem about tobacco. So in Kentucky, when it's tobacco stripping time or planting time, teachers would email me and say, can you, we need that tobacco poem to be in the classroom.

[00:17:38] And there would be other poems that people would request. So I thought, well, this would be a good way for this book to be sort of regional. I didn't expect it to be national or win the NAACP Image Award. But I mean, none of it's accidental.

[00:17:53] I don't wanna sound like that. I've just sort of been like, la la la, sort of falling on top of success as I go along. Don't get me wrong, the work has been hard, but the art of writing has always, and the process of writing has always

[00:18:08] been more important to me than publication. Or maybe it's equally as important. Like what I'm saying is that I was never one that's like, okay, I'm gonna write this national best seller. Like I've got to do it this particular way because I know that this will sell

[00:18:26] and Oprah's gonna call or whatever. People set different goals for themselves, but that was never my goal. Those big things were never my goal. Like do I accept those things gladly? If Oprah calls, I'm gonna pick up the phone. Yeah, hey girl. Thank you.

[00:18:45] But there are some writers that those are their, that's their goal. They wanna win all the prizes. They wanna be losted up in that way. But the process of writing has always been important. You know what it is? It's that artistic impulse, right? To create something.

[00:19:00] So I think that that sort of outpouring stage is really how I stay alive. Like I'll never stop. If I never got published, I would continue to write because of that. That really does something for me. Being able to follow an artistic impulse

[00:19:16] with a character or with an idea and follow it to fruition and then go in and try to make it the best, using craft tools to try to make it as best as I can. Often I'll sit on things. It's like, okay, I'm done.

[00:19:34] And then I have to remind myself that there's another process to this. Like what are you gonna do with this? Is this part of something larger or are you going to try to send this out? I'll call them pleasure houses.

[00:19:45] Like I'll have a story that I've worked on for years or a poem that I've worked on for years. And when I'm stuck on a current project, I'll go back in and sort of mess with that one

[00:19:56] and say, oh no, let me go back to my pleasure house and go in and play with that story or that poem or that essay. So then what was the artistic impulse that led you to follow Praysong? Cause it does feel like it was grief,

[00:20:12] but I don't wanna put those words in about. I mean, I think it was grief. I don't think I was able to put my finger on it. I had been, one of my next projects is a book about my mother. And I had been wanting to write

[00:20:27] about my mother's mental illness for a really long time. And she was still alive and I had written about it, had talked to her about it. She was excited about it. And when she died, I realized that I had been writing

[00:20:41] from a place of anger at her mental illness that it had taken some sort of normalcy, our mother daughter relationship away from us. And so I was angry about that. And I didn't realize that I was writing with this undercurrent of anger.

[00:20:59] And so it's taken me a long time to come back to that project because when I, that impulse wasn't there anymore because what had replaced it was grief. And I think it was the same thing. You're right. With the praise song, I was trying to get at something.

[00:21:18] It wasn't until I got a full draft of that book that I realized what you realized from reading it that there was this undertow of grief and reconciliation and the African concept of sankofa. How do we, if we're gonna reach back, how do we do that?

[00:21:35] How do we reach back and move forward? How do we take what was and move that forward? Sometimes it's a choice, like what we bring forward and what we choose to leave back there and how do we honor those ancestors properly?

[00:21:53] Like I've always sort of done it again, like having a thread of truth and I just layer fiction on top of that. But when I was confronted with the whole truth, like it was a daunting book to write even though there's some joy in there, it's about food.

[00:22:08] So of course it's joyful, but I think food is the lens through processing grief. And I realize that to a certain extent, but since I've been on book tour, it's been amazing how many people come up to me with like tears running down their face

[00:22:21] because they are processing that too and thinking about their own ancestry and their own ancestors. Yes, when you read the book, even though I recognize the grief, it doesn't feel happy. I don't know how you did that. Maybe it is the food

[00:22:40] and all the memories that are tied to food are joyful and not heavy, but I think the analogy is coming to me it's like soul food. Like there is a way that soul food can be prepared where it's still good for you and it's not heavy.

[00:22:53] Well, that's what we do as black people, right? We're able to hold those things at the same time and that's what I wanted to write about. That's why I have those scenes in the book where my fourth grade grandmother, Aggie speaks for herself and she's like cooking food

[00:23:07] for not just her immediate family but the people that are there and that's like taking research. Like I knew that the white Wilkinsons owned 20 slaves. I knew what their names were. I knew that this was enslavement, but I was thinking about what were her moments of respite?

[00:23:26] What were her moments of joy? And so I have them sitting around an outdoor pan of food, making ash cakes and laughing. And my grandmother had been in the kitchen since she got married at 14. And so she had been in somebody's kitchen,

[00:23:46] her own kitchen for 60 years when she passed. And I know that it had to be hard on her as a young housewife, as a girl. And it had to be hard on her as a woman. Like she did all that. She worked for the white folks,

[00:24:03] then came back and worked for herself in her household. But she always found time to tell a joke or the kitchen was where we got our hair done and the kitchen was where people danced and people sung in the kitchen. And she got joy from showing her love

[00:24:24] by cooking a good meal for her family. All right, so can you read something from Price's song and I can get into my specific questions from the book? Sure. Crystal Wilkinson's cookbook memoir, Pray Song for the Kitchen Ghosts is a genre bending old to her grandmother, Christine,

[00:24:46] her mother, Dorsey, and all the elders and ancestors she uncovered through research and conjured in her imagination to reframe the narrative about what it means to be Appalachian and why there's more than one version of soul food. Here's Crystal. Well, since I have been talking about this,

[00:25:04] I'll read just a little passage from what I was just talking about. I don't think I'd be wrong if I said that my family's love of bread began with ash cakes cooked in an open fire outside a cabin in Kentucky in the late 1800s.

[00:25:22] Though it's conjured by my imagination, I can see Grandma Aggie by the fire, taking the rations of cornmeal, adding boiling water and salt, shaping this stiff batter into ash cake so there'd be bread. There's always been bread. Grandma Aggie presents herself

[00:25:40] across nearly 200 years of bread making in our family. She manifests before me from 1810, shows her used to be to my own now. She says, come Saturday, when you get your rations, they'll all be hungry. The women will stand around holding their hurting backs.

[00:26:00] The menfolk will sit on the ground or on turned up buckets, rest their elbows on their knees. You're tired, tired down clean to the bones in your feet, but these children, the old people too gotta eat. While the cow peas is cooking in the big pot

[00:26:17] with that little piece of salt pork over the fire, take you out enough cornmeal to make bread for everybody. Don't use it all now. Save enough for mush through the week. When them coals get to blazing, take you a large helping of that cornmeal.

[00:26:33] Depends on how many mouths you're trying to feed and mix in a little salt and just enough boiling water that your spoon stands straight up in that batter like a proud man. Use your hands and work up a dough, shape your dough up in cakes.

[00:26:48] Now wrap you some wet leaves. You can use greens, can even use oak leaves around each one of them cakes then set your cakes up on them hot ashes in the fire. Don't have no leaves, just put them cakes on the ashes. They'll be just fine.

[00:27:04] When it gets to smelling good and mixes up with the smell of them peas, everybody will come out and stand around waiting with their tin plates. Some of them will eat straight from the pot with a homemade spoons or even out of the palms of their hands.

[00:27:20] They won't be on you worrying you about when it's ready, but you'll see the tremble in their eyes. Here's their stomachs talking back instead of their voice boxes. When the food's ready, you send somebody back in the kitchen to fetch Judah so she can eat.

[00:27:35] Put a good dab of them peas on the plate and serve up an ash cake for everybody. You know, that's good eating. Thank you. So a lot of the texts relies on both research and on memory. And you talked a little bit about the research process

[00:27:51] and you mentioned a few times in the book how it feels to make you see the deed from Aggie's husband, but also owner. And the things that he gave her and some of the things that he deeded to her were items for the kitchen.

[00:28:12] I know we've been talking about the importance of how black people are resilient and a lot of that resilience is connected to food which means it's connected to the kitchen. Why do you think that the kitchen and food specifically plays such a central role

[00:28:30] in how we perhaps define ourselves and redefine ourselves consistently? I mean, I think like for Aggie who was my fourth great-grandmother, you know, in that moment that you're talking about when I found where Tarleton, the white man who's my fourth great-grandfather, when I found that deed,

[00:28:55] I saw the kitchen as a source of power. She was enslaved. He owned her. He owned her 10 children. And I imagined her saying, well, what's mine? What is mine? And he actually deeded her those household items, pots and pans and skillets and that sort of thing.

[00:29:17] So I think that we return to food because it's a source of power. Even in the poorest of households and even in my own household as a poor single mother at various points in my life, that was what I had control of, right?

[00:29:36] Even with the barest minimum of foods, even if I didn't have anything but a couple of cans of green beans or whatever it was, if I had flour, I could make bread. Like that was, I was in control of how those ingredients were put together.

[00:29:51] And that was something, even when there was hardly anything that I could give my children, like I knew there was something almost magical in that, that, yeah, these things ain't ever been put together before, but I'm gonna make them taste good

[00:30:06] and this is what we're gonna have for dinner. And I think because of that, and you talked about confidence earlier, that was one place I was always confident that I'm gonna turn this into something. We're gonna make some soup, I'm gonna do something.

[00:30:21] And I think it's the same with a lot of children across the country. Like I don't think my children realized how poor we were because they were always fed. Now they had some strange meals, but they were always fed. So I think that even as a feminist,

[00:30:37] I believe that just like we take over other words, like I've reclaimed the word country. Like when I grew up saying somebody was country was like, you might as well have been calling them a cuss word or calling them a name. But I think that we can,

[00:30:53] there's the reclamation of kitchen. I met when I was in South Carolina, I've met a couple of really wonderful sort of intuitive cooks that rely on the ancestors to tell them what to do next and what ingredients to use.

[00:31:06] And so I think that it's a source of power for us. You talk about your children, especially as they're being adults toward the end of the book, as you all are going through the pandemic and trying to have holidays with masks and social distance

[00:31:19] and watching them on Zoom cook and or not. And then also re-examining what does it mean to be a radical feminist, but also be beholden to the kitchen in a way? What do you make, I guess of my generation and younger

[00:31:40] who are very much, no, I don't cook. I'm not going in the kitchen. We can order out for that. Well, as Tabitha Brown says, that's y'all's business. And more power to you. Cause I mean, I think that's the other side of this.

[00:31:57] Cause I had to, as one of the things that, as you know, I would struggle with in the book, I had to struggle through that. The idea that all of this knowledge that I have about the kitchen and how to cook that came from my grandmother

[00:32:13] and being a feminist who still will stand up on holidays and cook all these meals. And when my daughters say, uh-uh, you know, or even my son, like he's a single father who cooks every night. It's like, it's okay.

[00:32:29] You live your life the way that you want to live it. I do think that everyone needs not just food, but good food in their lives. And so more power to the younger generation that doesn't want to cook, but I think you should know how to cook

[00:32:50] at least something that you enjoy cooking. And if you have money to go out and get good food, more power to you. Like, you know, do your thing. Like I don't, you know, I think everybody should at least try it once or have one dish that's their specialty

[00:33:08] that they can cook. And you should have some knowledge of food just in general. Like there are people who, and I don't think it's generational, there are people my age that don't even know, they don't know the difference between blueberries and blackberries or the difference between, you know,

[00:33:23] they don't, they just don't know because they rely on restaurants or they rely on fast foods or, and I don't mean just fast food restaurants, but a lot of us rely on like, I'm gonna go pick up this frozen meal and throw it together.

[00:33:39] But I think it doesn't hurt to have some knowledge of food. But again, that's your business. We live in a time where everybody can make their own decisions and their own choices. And that's the reconciliation I had to do with my children. Like, all right, you know,

[00:33:55] my daughter finally said, well maybe I'll do one traditional thing. The other twin who was so rebellious hosted us for the harvest meal this year. So I was like, okay. And I thought, okay, we're onto something. We are onto something. And then she's like, oh no,

[00:34:13] I just wanted to see if I could do it once. I might do this next year, mama. I thought, well, I'm passing the, this is great, I'm passing the baton. She's gonna do it. And she was like, mm-mm. So her and her girlfriend are like,

[00:34:28] we might do it every other, I don't know. Like they're in, they worked so hard that they're like in a mode now. Like every year, I don't know. When I was married and my then husband's family found out that I could and do cook,

[00:34:50] I was quickly put into the rotation. Holiday. Yeah, I mean, I think we put too much pressure on people too. I mean, I think that, you know, like, what I'm saying is just a suggestion. And a lot of it is both for the health of it

[00:35:09] and also the joy. And should the revolution come, like you need to be able to make a biscuit if you, like we saw that during the pandemic. Like if you can't get out and you've got just a few ingredients,

[00:35:24] you need to at least be able to go into survival mode and make something wonderful if you have to. But, you know, power to everybody. Like if that's, like I said, that's your business if you don't want to do it. But then there's also like a hope

[00:35:42] that my book at least puts things on people's mind about sort of the legacy of it if you have that sort of like, who are your kitchen ghosts and how you can choose to honor them. So with that said,

[00:35:57] you say in the book that Aggie is the inspiration and Christine, your granny is the spot. That makes me wonder, are you the heart? I'll say yes. Yeah. I mean, I think because I have been sort of the family

[00:36:15] griot, like I have been the one since I was a child that always wrote things down or always remembered things or I was always the one that was underfoot too, like in the grown people's business, you know, sort of taking at least mental photographs

[00:36:32] of what was going on. So I know that my cousins and other members of my direct family have thanked me for remembering all of these things and for writing them down and for honoring our family in this way. And then by extension,

[00:36:51] I think other readers have been able to think about their own families and be moved by that. So maybe, maybe I am the heart or maybe the writing itself is the heart and I had to do it with my heart, but yeah.

[00:37:05] Also in this book, you are very clear that it's about Afro-Latching country cooks and you say right on page one, to disregard the Black Mountain presence is to erase both the past and the present. And I was like, oh, we just sat

[00:37:21] and struck it straight from the first paragraph. Yeah, let's be clear. Right. So then can you talk more about how the foodways shift and change depending upon location to give you the specific kind of cuisine and culture that you talk about in the Afro-Latching region?

[00:37:43] Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with geography, right? A lot of it has to do with the rough terrain of like the hills that I come from. Like, you know, in the deep South, a lot of people conflate the two.

[00:37:58] It's like, oh, it's the same. Like soul food's the same everywhere. Like Southern food's the same as Appalachian food. And I think what makes it different is the way that we had to live and the way that we currently live.

[00:38:10] Like you can still grow crops in the deep South even in winter, there are winter crops that you can grow. You can't do that here. Like you can't grow anything after a certain amount of time, because it's too cold. You're gonna have ice, you're gonna have snow.

[00:38:26] You can't plant a winter garden. So I think the idea of preservation and sort of putting things away, my grandfather, for example, like at hog killing time, if there's a hog killing time in deep South, you might have barbecue. You might have things that you do

[00:38:44] with the meat right there. But where I'm from, like if you kill an animal, you're gonna put up as much of that because there's gonna be lean times come winter. Like there's gonna be lean times. So you have to have the hams preserved

[00:39:00] and you have to have salt pork put away and bacon and those kinds of things. So that even as the winter progresses and you've eaten almost everything, then you can have like these slivers of meat to put into the greens.

[00:39:16] And you either can as a preservation for winter or you dry things like, we have these shucky beans or leather britches where you dry out the green beans. And then in the middle of winter, you can rehydrate them with some water and then you have like some freshness.

[00:39:38] And of course that's to eat, but then there's also like a nutritional value to those things and preserving those foods. So I think that that's all part of it. In the book, I talk about a little bit of everything. There's like a little spreading of historical information

[00:39:55] and you know, like our love of sorghum that's really popular now in restaurants and other places was something that was needed because sugar was scarce and sort of sorghum syrup, which is was a sweetener. Like I used to put it in coffee, tea,

[00:40:15] put it in the desserts because there was a lack of sugar. And so like in Aggie's time and in my grandparents' time, we didn't have the big sugar industry that the deep South has, which I think also brings up some of the food fights.

[00:40:31] Right? Like some of the food fights, I love a good regional food fight. So sometimes on social media, I'll say, you know, grits and then people are like, there she go. You know, should grits be savory or sweet?

[00:40:46] And then you'll, I think that was one of the posts that had the most responses to, cause people just go off in their regional foods. Like do you put sugar into cornbread? And then here everybody goes, uh, you know, whichever side they're on.

[00:41:03] No eggs in the mac and cheese people. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I got into it with somebody about putting an egg in the gravy. I was like, Oh Lord, why are we putting eggs in the gravy? In brown gravy? Yeah. It was a thing. It's a thing.

[00:41:29] So I think that, you know, a lot of things are familial, like passed down in families and a lot of it's regional. You know, my friend Kelly, Kelly Norman Ellis says that the chopping up an egg, a boiled egg in the gravy is a Southern thing.

[00:41:47] And I'm like, I have never in my life had gravy with egg and then several people chimed in like, yes, we've done this for years. We always do this. I saw Kelly at AWP at the Afro-Lagin Poets reading and I loved her reading and her micro essay.

[00:42:08] I will forgive her for putting egg in a gravy though. Because I loved her reading that much. No, thank you. We also only eat savory grits. But although I've come around, you know, I used to like, everybody would be so disgusted, including my husband,

[00:42:26] that I would take grits and put sugar and butter in them. I've never had sweet grits, never in my life. Don't want to try it. Well, I have learned to like savory grits. I took Jackson, Mississippi to make me love savory grits

[00:42:44] and I've been chasing that particular taste. Now I can make some good savory grits now, but again, not like the older black woman I met in Jackson, Mississippi who made some, like I have not perfected her recipe yet.

[00:43:00] So you say on page 30 that I spent my entire life striving to be a competent cook to show my love and care through food. Do you feel, after all that you said about being shy and all of that,

[00:43:13] that you are now showing your love and care through words? Yeah. I thought you were about to say, do I feel the same way about writing? And yeah, I mean it's true. I think I have spent my whole life trying to perfect my craft too with writing

[00:43:34] to show my love and care. And also, the other side of that is in the classroom in trying to help. And I don't mean just the university classroom, but like I have my own imprint now, Screendoor Press and I am so excited about bringing out

[00:43:51] two new black writers within the next year that there are so many people either on the page or in them living their lives as writers or directly help me that I feel like I have to to pay it forward, to give it back.

[00:44:09] And so I try to find as many ways as I can to do that. All right, so before we go, I wanna do a quick speed round of the game before I let you go for the afternoon. What is your favorite book? Trying to think of which one.

[00:44:25] Corrigadora, Gail Jones. All of Gail Jones' works my favorite book. So then who is your favorite author? Toni Morrison. Who is your favorite poet? Nikki Finney. Name a poet you think people don't know enough about. We're gonna go all the way in the household

[00:44:45] up from some dirt, AKA Ron Davis, my husband. Okay. If money were no object, where would you go? What would you do and where would you live? Africa, without a doubt, probably. Maybe Ghana, I'm not sure, maybe Kenya. What brings you joy? Food and acts of service.

[00:45:12] And what brings you peace? Writing and reading. So our game is called Rewriting the Classics. Classic is however you define it. Name one book you wish you would have written. Sula. Name one book where you want to change the ending and how would you do it?

[00:45:32] You didn't tell me this one would be a test in how hard this one would be. I don't know. You know, one of the things about the ending of books is that I feel the same way about a short story that the reader should be lofted up

[00:45:47] to the next level of understanding. And all of the writers that I love do that already. Like you come away from those books. You want to read a book and then after it ends, you have that feeling of like, that was good.

[00:46:04] And you pack the book and you have that feeling of being lofted up to some other level of understanding about yourself or about the characters or about the place or about something. And so all the books that I would change the ending of,

[00:46:19] I don't want to name those authors. I could probably look at some now since I'm surrounded by books, but I am, I don't know. Shouldn't be going around changing other people's books. Okay, so you may not answer this. I'm cheating, I'm cheating.

[00:46:36] It's okay and you might not answer this next question because I see you are way too gracious, but if you want to do only dead, oh white man, that's fine. But name a book that you think is overrated or overtaught and why.

[00:46:49] All of them, all of the dead. Old white man. I mean, I think Shakespeare's overrated. Like, you know, like Ernest Gaines, I have great respect for like the Russians and some of those. So not necessarily them. Like I think that they do good at sense of place,

[00:47:14] but yeah, there's so many classics and you know, all our books are getting banned. Like we need to be reading more of what the world is really like through black writers and writers of color. Like enough of all that other stuff already. Amen. So my final question.

[00:47:37] That was gracious too, because I didn't go in on anybody but Shakespeare. You didn't. I was waiting for it, that was very gracious, but it's all right. Hey. So my final question. When you are dead and gone and among the ancestors, what would you like someone to write

[00:47:53] about the legacy of words and work that you've left behind? That I depicted people in an honest way and beauty in a beautiful, honest way. Big thank you to Crystal Wilkinson for being here today on Black and Published. Make sure you check out Crystal's latest book,

[00:48:15] Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks, out now from Clarkson Potter. And if you're not following Crystal, check her out on the socials. She's at Crystal Wilkie on Instagram and Twitter. That's our show for the week.

[00:48:35] If you liked this episode and want more Black and Published, head to our Instagram page. It's at Black and Published, and that's B-L-K and Published. There I've posted a bonus clip from my interview with Crystal about how food is central to Black people

[00:48:53] holding grief and joy at the same time. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. I'll holler at y'all next week when our guest will be Donna Hemmings, author of the novel, The House of Plain Truth.

[00:49:08] One of the questions that I think I keep asking in my work is where is home and how do you define this home? Is it a place? Is it, you know, like a certain person? Because I think for all of us,

[00:49:21] I think we're all still looking for this place where we can truly belong. That's next week on Black and Published. I'll talk to you then. Peace.