Lebo Kate - Pie & Whiskey: writers under the influence of butter & booze

Pie & Whiskey started in 2012 as a reading in Spokane, Washington. The idea was to serve good pie, good whiskey, and good writers reading prose or poetry about pie and whiskey. We thought there was something right about the combinationpie in your left hand, whiskey in your right. We thought there was something weirdly American about it, tooSaturday night debauch meets Sunday morning brunch. Cowboys dont walk into saloons and order gin. We dont say, American as motherhood and apple cake.

That first year, we lined up twelve writers to read for five minutes each, sent them a pie prompt and a whiskey prompt to inspire new work, and told them the whole thing was low stakes. Get Lit!, Spokanes literary festival, agreed to host us at the Spokane Womans Club. We asked Don Poffenroth, of Dry Fly Distilling, to donate the whiskey. He gave us six fifths, which we thought would be plenty. We baked ten pies and hoped fifty people would come, a pretty good audience for a reading.

The night of the show, over three hundred people piled into the Womans Club or waited in line outside. Thirty minutes after we opened the doors, we ran out of pie. Five minutes after that, we ran out of whiskey. People with pie and whiskey and people without pie and whiskey sat in pews, at banquet tables, on the stage, on the floor. People stood between the chairs and leaned on the walls. People were everywhere.

We worried that we wouldnt be able to hold the room. We worried that the people who hadnt been served would leave.

Then Steve Almond, our first reader, shouted for everyone to please shut up. People drank their whiskey and ate their pie quietly, then not so quietly because Steve was so funny. Eleven more writers read that night. Nobody left.

We did it again the next year, and four hundred people showed up. We poured two cases of whiskey, donated by Don and Dry Fly, and baked twenty pies.

We ran out of everything again, but everyone got serveda phenomenon Gary Copeland Lilley referred to in year three as some loaves-and-fishes shit.

Wed said from the beginning that Pie & Whiskey should be about the pie, the whiskey, and the readingin that order. Whiskey alone is no different from any gathering of writers. Pie alone is a family affair. And most readings put people to sleep. At Pie & Whiskey, there is no sleeping. Its not a family affair, either, or a drunken affair. The readings are by adults, for adults, but no one gets too out of hand. People have a good time with friends and strangers, and they let their guard down.

We think Pie & Whiskey works because it fulfills a craving for community and connection in a time when community is too often a Facebook feed and connection is a targeted ad. By serving up great writing and sugary, boozy treats, we create a social space where the audience engages in a kind of conspiracy with the writers, the writers are also audience members, and the writers and the audience feed off each other, all of us eating homemade pie and drinking good, local whiskey, with no kids in the place. This night is for adults only, which means we can be entirely adolescent as we read and listen to stories about bad breakups and bad sex and good sex and bad drugs and good drugs and church and politics and whiskey and pie and everything else that happens after the kiddies go to bed. The writers always deliver at this eventmaybe because the audience is right there with them, rooting for the readings, urging them to be funny, outrageous, and true.

But the power is not just in the air of the moment. You can feel it on the page, too, when you read the Pie & Whiskey zines we hand-bind for each reading. Because the writing prompts seem so unserious, theres a sense of play in the pieces thats all the more exciting because the writers are so good. We hope this anthology captures that pleasure and ache, that Pie-&-Whiskey spirit of sweetness tinged with something sharp.

The majority of these pieces were written for live Pie & Whiskey readings in either Spokane, Washington, or Missoula, Montana, but the long piecesone to anchor each of eight sectionsare new. Youll find recipes for pie inspired by these new pieces, and whiskey cocktails, too, plus instructions for how to throw your own Pie & Whiskey reading.

So bake some pies, pour some drinks, and enjoy these meditations on butter and booze. As the Irish say, What butter and whiskey wont cure, there is no cure for.

Yours in sweet corruption,

KATE LEBO & SAM LIGON

Spokane, Washington

November 15, 2016

Copyright 2017 by Kate Lebo and Samuel Ligon

The Law of Attraction 2017 Kim Addonizio

Pie and Whiskey 2017 Kim Barnes | Your Friends Wont

Visit You When You Move to the Country 2017 Devin Becker

Continued in

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN9781632171122

Ebook ISBN9781632171139

Sasquatch Books | 1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710, Seattle, WA 98101

(206) 467-4300 |

EDITOR: GARY LUKE | PRODUCTION EDITOR: BRIDGET SWEET

ILLUSTRATIONS: MIKE BAEHR | DESIGN: TONY ONG

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AUTHOR PHOTO: ADRIANA JANOVICH

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TO PIE EATERS AND WHISKEY DRINKERS EVERYWHERE

Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.

NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 3, 1902

Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake.

W. C. FIELDS

Whiskey is all right in its placebut its place is in hell.

BILLY SUNDAY

After Mother died her red dress continued baking pies

C. A. CONRAD, THE BOOK OF FRANK

Whiskey is by far the most popular of all remedies that wont cure a cold.

JERRY VALE

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy