“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.” — David Mamet
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” — Mark Twain
Pairing a warm fruit-filled pastry and a sultry bourbon seems naughty somehow, a slap in the face of propriety. Pie goes with coffee. Everybody knows that. Whiskey, on the other hand, is the drink of outlaws and ne’er-do-wells, or people who style themselves as such, which is more common these days.
“They’re both substances that you could do all on your own but might feel a little bad about when you're all done,” author Kate Lebo observed in a recent interview with Salon. “They're better enjoyed with people, but as good as they are, they can still go bad.”
Put the two together, as Lebo and her collaborator Samuel Ligon have been doing since 2012 to lure audiences in live readings of short stories, essays and poetry written by favorite writers, and the results vary wildly. But the servings Lebo and Ligon curated to create “Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter & Booze” prove there’s magic in this mating of sweetness and sin.
All it takes to yield stunning, delicious prose, the pair discovered, is a suggestion: Pie. Whiskey. Both, perhaps. Why not? The chemistry is undeniable. Pie teases out thoughts of reward and pleasure, while whiskey fuels folly and soothes regrets. The fiction, essays and poetry in “Pie & Whiskey” capture crumbs of these notions or plummet into the messy filling of conflicting emotions, with dessert and drink taking on very different roles and guises.
Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s “And Then There Was Rum Cake” examines, among other things, how the differences between her Indian heritage and that of her white Midwestern husband can be marked by types of flour and preparations of pastry. Anthony Doerr muses upon love lost in his short story “Heavenly Pies,” while Steve Almond takes the innocent suggestion of a long-married couple prepping desserts for a parental function and heats it into a dirty interlude . . . with a rhubarb twist.
“What we couldn't anticipate was what came out of the pairing,” Ligon said. “Kate talks about that play, which absolutely comes out of the pairing of pie and whiskey, but the other thing that comes out of it is a kind of transgression. The writers tend to go kind of transgressive, playful and dark places. Because whiskey is Saturday night, pie is Sunday morning.”
Now that we have officially entered the season of sweets and indulgence, of naughty and nice, of red and green presented as complementary colors, “Pie & Whiskey” reads as validation and, perhaps, catharsis. As our initial mania for turkey subsides, baking takes center stage with stress as its sideman, and as holiday chefs crank out artistic creations that demonstrate their love, whiskey is often nearby, frequently disguised in Irish creams or Southern-style eggnog. Rest assured it is there, never far away from the butter and flour that may eventually take the form of pie.
Pie crowns holiday feasts. Savory pies are the feasts in some households. Others give pies as gifts, evidence to loved ones of the exalted position they hold in our circle of caring. Those are people we care enough to nourish with additional extravagance.
As for the family and acquaintances we’re forced to tolerate, they are the reason why whiskey is king at Christmas, and even earlier. In Jess Walter’s “Whiskey Pie,” the writer casts the liquor as a silent main player role in a disastrous Thanksgiving, a story that inspires a pie recipe that also appear in the book. Lebo partners several stories with a recipe that evokes their themes. Ligon contributes a series of cocktail recipes that are actually just variations on a classic drink that serves as both a refrain and the backbone of a repetitive joke.
Within this context, “Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze” feels as subversive — Ligon refers to it as a conspiracy the editors and writers share with the reader — as it does seasonally appropriate.
This is true even though “Pie & Whiskey” hit bookshelves in late October, in the midst of apple harvest season — too late to score fresh berries, but in time to cater to the whims of bakers ready to bring their ovens humming to life again. Whether that date was chosen with such intent on the part of Sasquatch Books I cannot say. Actually, to be accurate, I did not ask. But such data matters far less than the origins of a tradition that began in Spokane, Washington, in response to a simple truth about literary gatherings: “We were very much aware that readings are often bad and boring,” Ligon recalled.
Though the first “Pie & Whiskey” event occurred in Spokane, Ligon and Lebo trace its origins to a time before 2012, when the pair taught together at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. “It really started there, with us just baking together and serving writers whiskey with pie that we made, just as a way to bring writers together at a place we were teaching.”
At the time, Lebo had debuted “A Commonplace Book of Pie” and was strategizing ways to promote it. “This was a time when I was really using pie as a kind of social currency,” she said before correcting herself: “Actually, no — as actual currency. I was baking it and selling it to make my rent.”
Ligon, in the meantime, had been to a Pittsburgh reading that attracted around 300 people by offering food and beer. “So we thought, ‘Let's do a reading that is actually really fun,’” he recalled. “We were like, ‘Let's make pie,’ because we'd been making pies together, ‘and let's serve whiskey, and let's get writers who we love but who also know how to read, to perform their work.’"
Ligon and Lebo recruited 12 writers to create five-minute pieces of original work inspired by the dessert and libation. The hosts baked 10 pies and persuaded a liquor producer, Spokane’s Dry Fly Distilling, to donate six fifths -- more than enough for the 50 people they thought would attend.
They vastly underestimated the appeal of the dessert world’s most tempting bribe and America’s favorite social lubricant: more than 300 people showed up to the reading, far more than they could feed. The crowd’s hunger created another buzz the pair hadn’t anticipated, that the combination of sweetness and booze created an edge in the room they soon feared they wouldn’t be able to completely control. “There was kind of a frenzy or intensity among the writers to hold on to the room,” Ligon said. “That's maintained to this day.”
Subsequent readings gave the pair a sense of the idea’s popularity as well as an appropriate scale. Lebo and Ligon still bake the goods for their events, with the help of volunteers, although now they know to make sheet pies (“square pie has more usable surface area than round pie, and serves more people faster,” Lebo explains) with an appropriate number of servings.
A recent Seattle reading called for 350 servings of pie, including chocolate pecan pie whiskey shots inspired by Walter’s piece, funeral pie based on Lebo’s contribution about judging desserts at the Iowa state fair, and a blueberry pie because, why not? They washed it down with 48 fifths of Dry Fly whiskey, while listening to readings from the anthology as well as new work by local poets and writers. All told they estimate that over five years and eight readings, audiences have guzzled 500 gallons of whiskey and 30,000 square feet of pie. Feel free to question their math, but if you really want to quibble with such a lovely picture of contentment and inebriation, reconsider your life priorities.
Anyway, along with the production lessons, Lebo said she learned quite a bit about pie’s power to bring communities together.
Ligon agreed. “Ranchers like pie and ranchers like whiskey, and farmers like pie and so do hipsters,” he said.
“Atheists and Christians,” Lebo added.
“Cowboys and circus clowns,” Ligon offered.
“If you bake pie and you serve whiskey, they will come and they will like each other,” Lebo finished. “People let down their guard, and you know writers — we're weird.”
Nothing a heaping helping of buttery crusts and booze can’t smooth out.
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