On Saturday, Half-Mile Farm hosted a Fireside Chat with food author John T. Edge and his wife, artist Blair Hobbs.
Residents of Half-Mile Farm were able to sit around the fire and talk with Edge and Hobbs about life, love, marriage, art, food and life in Oxford, Miss.
Edge writes about the American South. In 2017, Penguin published The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named as book of the year by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and a host of others. Now in paperback, Nashville selected the book as a citywide read for 2018. Edge is also the host of the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SEC Network and on ESPN.
Edge is an award-winning writer and the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he and his colleagues document, study, and explore the diverse food cultures of the American South.
His wife, Hobbs, is a senior lecturer at the University of Mississippi where she teaches Creative Writing. She is also an accomplished artist.
Hobbs likes to find weird surprises in the mundane world. Primarily, she finds bright oddities in plants, animals, and the human body. Each canvas is a box of assembled visual cues that form an imagined narrative, and those narratives range from bittersweet (or just bitter) to magical to eerie to humorous. Many pieces include written words that prompt or propel the narrative.
The couple said that most of their inspiration comes from traveling together.
“One way that my work plays off of Blair’s and her work plays off mine is travel,” Edge said. “Blair can talk about her paintings on the wall that were inspired by our trips to New Orleans. We spend our lives writing things down on scripts of paper. Usually when we travel, Blair is in the back seat of the car while I’m driving, with a sheet pan from our kitchen and some sketch paper. She is sketching out pieces as I’m driving down the road. In that way, I aid and abet her art.”
Growing up in the south, Edge and Hobbs both grew up only a couple of hours a part, often frequenting the same restaurant in Columbus, Ga.
“I don’t think I would have done my latest collection had John and I not started talking about our childhood similarities,” Hobbs said. “We were probably in the same spaces as children and never knew it. Madam Butterfly, a Japanese restaurant in Columbus, Ga., was both our family’s favorites.”
In her latest collection, Rural Mythologies, Hobbs pulled from the rural landscape of the South.
“To me those pieces are views from our driver’s side and passenger’s side windows,” Edge said. “I feel like we are both, in some way, digging into our past.”
Hobbs said when she was growing up, the roads were smaller, and her family would stop at rest stops to eat.
“We are both profoundly interested in that past and where we came from, but we are just as interested in the contemporary moment,” Hobbs said. “There is romance in the past, but there are also ghosts. The ghosts can be romantic too. In some of my artwork I am interested in exploring the menopausal body in my perspective, so I choose to explore those ghosts. Revisiting childhood is hard because my parents are gone, the house is gone, everything is gone and that makes for a hard pull when everything is gone.”
Edge said the point of his book was to write a book about the history of the South told through food, not a history of Southern food.
“I love the evolution of fried chicken, but I’m not really interested in that,” Edge said. “I’m interested in how humans, cooks, waiters in restaurants, farmers, chefs, have used food to define themselves and define the South. The research was a joy, but the writing was the hard part, for me.”
- By Christopher Smith