Sauthors: Sometimes a Very Good Notion

When trying to explain Oregon to people in other parts of the country, I use Ken Kesey as a metaphor/synecdoche. The author's personal history and body of work is tied to the state’s history of transplants who came west to work the traditional industries of lumber, fishing, farming and dairy. But it is the iconoclastic Kesey who represents a new Oregon - known for creativity, intellect, a quality of life, and the confidence that you don’t need to go east for recognition. If you are good enough, you can stay home and the world will look to you. (Well, all those things. And it could also be argued Kesey is the flag bearer for the dirty hippie contingency that is still an alarmingly large population of the state.)

Mike McGriff has a Keseyian quality to him--energetic, intelligent, curious and an Oregonian through and through. He was born and raised in Coos Bay on the southern coast of the state. Missing out on the middle-class life that the timber industry afforded his parents and grandparents, McGriff’s path took him toward a new world, leading him first through community college, then, like Kesey, to U of Oregon, and eventually to Stanford University where he is currently a Jones Lecturer and holds a fellowship named after another iconic western writer (and Kesey teacher), Wallace Stegner. He is the author of Choke (Traprock Books, 2006) and the translator of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. His work has appeared all over, most notably on Slate and in The Missouri Review. His new book is Dismantling The Hills.

Using the internets, Mike and I talked about two of our favorite subjects – food and words. I asked what it was like growing up in an area of the state with a dying lumber and fishing economy, with people trying hard just to make it, and what part food played in his upbringing. Mike responded:

I grew up in a hand-to-mouth, working-class household. And the thing was is that I never knew I was growing up in a particularly dark economic period—I never knew that we were teetering on poverty, or that another sawmill closure was an apocalyptic event. Everyone around me was in the same boat, and that was that. I had a good and happy upbringing because my folks hid their stresses, fears, and social anxieties from my sister and me like two expert magicians. Year after year they sawed the lovely assistant in half, and we believed it every time. I had a 2-stroke dirt bike and tons of logging roads to tear around on, and my parents owned 5 acres of land, so I constantly felt like the explorer of some great frontier, a vast empire of clear-cuts and rain and endless summers. I never really had any sense of how other parts of the state—or the country, for that matter—had any correlation to the socioeconomic atmosphere I grew up in or the dinner table we sat around. We seldom traveled to Eugene or Portland. I think I can make a good stab at what I ate growing up: ground beef, seasonal fish, frozen peas and carrots, canned green beans, chicken, rice, turkey, spaghetti, broccoli, fish sticks, tater tots, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, instant ramen noodles, meat loaf, casseroles, grilled cheese sandwiches, salad, pancakes, and all the usual holiday eats. All of the food we ate came from Warehouse Foods, which was exactly what it sounds like.

We seldom ate out, and we hardly ever ate fast food. Like most families, we went to the pizza parlor for special occasions. I don’t think I could ever truly express how much I loved going to the pizza parlor. We lived outside the city limit, and I attended a rural elementary school (Sumner Elementary), so going out for pizza was to enter the world of soda fountains, pinball, Joust, Centipede, and Ms. Pac-Man. And it was a time I got to see kids from “the city,” which is to say, those who lived within the city limit and had cable TV, those who didn’t have to use a party-line when they needed to make a phone call, those who rode their BMX bikes in grocery store parking lots. To this day, I view eating a slice of pizza as a decadent and triumphant experience.

My first taste of food-as-class came in high-school when everyone suddenly became a strict partisan about the beer they drank. To drink anything more complicated or dark than a Budweiser was to grow horns and sympathize with hippies and yuppies, and one certainly wouldn’t want to cross the picket line of the soul. It so happens that my first beer romance was Sheaf Stout. Then I fell for a bold and mysterious IPA. Had I become un-American? That was my first encounter with food-as-cool, and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s amazing how food is branded, and how the makers, keepers, and loyalists of style (whether Coos Baynians or Napa Valley wine guzzlers) are ready to throw you off the island for having conflicting tastes.

I was 19 before I ever tried any “new” foods. There’s a little sushi place in Coos Bay and this girl I was dating dragged me there. And I ended up loving it. Raw fish, sweet sticky rice, wasabi, and pickled ginger—I had never tasted any of those things individually, nor had any idea of how they might work in concert. There’s something so simple and perfect about the combinations involved in sushi. It’s funny to think of sushi as a food belonging to the category of the exotic or esoteric, but there you have it. I think of sushi as the perfect symbol for the culinary sublime—just a few basic ingredients prepared simply and simply balanced. It’s the way metaphor works in poetry. You put two things side by side—you say this equals that—and it’s not the two things you taste, but some third ineffable thing borne of that convergence.

Just as sushi altered the way Mike thought about food that had always been around him growing up, I asked how words changed him, and which writer made him want to try writing himself:

After high-school I attended the local community college in Coos Bay, Southwestern Oregon Community College. By some miracle I was given a tuition waiver in return for taking on editorial responsibilities at the college’s regional literary journal. Of course I accepted, and of course I had never read a book in my life. I had started several books in high-school but never got around to finishing any of them. I almost finished Zorba the Greek—that was probably my first encounter with any book that got me going. My new editorial duties included taking a year-long course in creative writing, offered by legendary local author John Noland. Somehow, John got Pablo Neruda’s poems into my reluctant and pessimistic hands—and it was curtains. I had never encountered an artist whose work spoke to me so directly, so passionately, so personally. Neruda drives his poems with images of the ocean, of manual labor, of physical human beauty, of animals, of rocks and trees and sand—and he does so by smashing images together until they become so surreal that a sort of alchemy occurs; the result is the formation of a new language that speaks directly to the way we imagine and empathize. It’s simple and so beautiful. He belongs to the army of the mundane and impure, the uneducated, the fouled, the passionate, the human. He’s all of us. For me, Neruda is the Big Bang, with all poetry spreading out from that singular point.

I asked Mike in particular how his food tastes have changed, first leaving the coast and now currently residing in San Francisco, the land of food fetishists:

I’ve never pretended to be more sophisticated than I am, certainly not when it comes to food or art, two areas driven by vast amounts of diversity and subjectivity. I was 20 when I moved to Eugene, Oregon to attend the University of Oregon. Moving to the Willamette Valley was, for me, like moving to Paris or Amsterdam. My defining food moment there was going to a food co-op for the first time. I was some sort of hillbilly kneeling before the altar of diverse and organic foods. I was hungry and broke so decided to buy a banana. It was a sizzling, smoggy valley day in the summer. I walked outside, sat on one of the store’s parking curbs, and proceeded to peel my lunch. It was one stubborn bastard of a banana, impossible to peel and as stringy as semi-petrified celery. When I finally bit into it I became horrified. There I was, sitting on the ground, trying to eat an uncooked plantain and cursing my misfortune. That story is a metaphor for something…

[In California] As a result of its close proximity to the Central Valley, the Bay Area is teeming with farmers markets. It’s wonderful. After you do some digging you can figure out where the inexpensive food stands are, figure out which farms gouge you and which don’t. There are times when you can pull off to the side of a city street and buy an entire flat of strawberries for a few dollars. People here are spoiled and blessed in that they can literally eat the food from their backyards year-round. If you get creative you can feed yourself exclusively from local food stands on a writer’s budget. I’m not a prime example of this, but I try. There’s a lot of snobbery surrounding food in San Francisco—you have to put up with it because the benefits outweigh the annoyances. In this way, food is like the arts—in order to retain your sanity and dignity you have to seek out the good and reject the subcultures of snobbery and partisan politics. I love organic produce and I love Reese’s Pieces. I’ve plenty of room for both.

Tomorrow: An Interview Bonus - McGriff responds to a question about espresso and his love of Italian coffee machines – An answer so precise, so lyrical and so loving that you shouldn't be surprised if it eventually ends up in a slim volume titled 20 Demitasses and a Song for Pavoni. For those in or near Portland, Mike McGriff will be at Wordstock on Sunday, November 9th. For those of you far away, you can learn more about McGriff from University of Pittsburgh Press. His new book Dismantling The Hills is available at Powells.com.


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