Best-Selling Author Bret Lott on Food and Hope in the Holy Land

On this episode of Speaking Of…College of Charleston, we talk to Bret Lott, professor of English and New York Times Best-Selling author, about his latest book, his upcoming retirement after decades of teaching at the College and the importance of maintaining hope. Jesse Kunze, our sound engineer, is stepping into the host’s seat today because he is a former student of Lott’s and because the two spent a lot of time together in this very studio recording the audio version of Lott’s latest book, Gather the Olives, On Food and Hope and the Holy Land. 

Transcript

amy stockwell: 0:10

Brett on this episode of speaking of College of Charleston, we talk to Brett Lott, professor of English and New York Times, Best Selling Author. We're so grateful that Lott made time to come to the studio and talk to us about his latest book, upcoming retirement decades of teaching and the importance of maintaining hope. Jesse Kunz, our sound engineer, is stepping into the host seat today because he's a former student of lots and because the two spent a lot of time together in this very same studio recording the audio version of lot's latest book, gather the olives on food and hope in the Holy Land. Hi,

Unknown: 0:49

Britt, thanks for coming back to the studio to talk about your latest book. Gather the olives. So I had the privilege of working with you to record the audiobook version, which we'll hopefully be releasing in the near future. Let's talk about what it was like for you to record your first audio. Well, you had, you got it all wrong. I had the privilege of working with you. You were the brains behind the whole thing, and it was my first time reading it. And I give readings all the time, you know, going to different places and reading from my books over the years and but this was was very different to me. And I think we talked about this, how when you're standing in front of 50, 100 couple 100 people, there's a whole different feel for you're speaking to a crowd. But when, when I what I realized working with you was that when you're reading a book, it's like you're talking to one person. You're reading to a friend. And it was, it was different, you know, it was, there were times we had to redo things, and I would go too fast, and might, might not, have been as close to the mic as I needed to be, and sometimes it felt a little monotone, because I was sitting in a room with you and just, you know, reading this book. But we definitely had to go through our growing pains on learning how to do it, yeah, and then I think we figured out how to do it, and it sounded, I think it sounds great, and I'm looking forward to it coming up pretty soon. I'm it's the first time the publisher of Slant books has ever done an audiobook. So they are having to learn how to actually go through all that. And so it's not actually simultaneous with the publication of the book, which is usually what happens. But or go ahead, I'm in the same boat, because I have never edited a audiobook, and I have been having a time figuring out how to how to place every single track listing and get all the volume right. So I know it's a bit of a struggle. It was very interesting because something would happen, like we talked about, about, you know, motorcycle co pilot, oh yeah, we had a, we had a terrible motorcycle friend who would drive by about every 15 minutes, really, just circle every session, even, even though we were here in the studio, still, you know, that sound would come through, but then we'd have to stop and we'd have to pick up again, or I would really flub a line, and we both, you know, we just stopped, and I'm just still having listened to the whole thing the way that you were able to just edit in, you know, those pauses and those those places where I had to pick up again. I thought this guy's great. He's done a really cool job of editing and making everything smooth, and I look forward to it, and I'm very happy to have gotten to work with you. Well, thank you. Fun. It was a blast. It's a long time, six months, but I'm right. It was six months. We were both working professionals, so we had this work around schedules, right? All right, so you finished writing the book before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 after talking with your editor about possibly holding the book back from publication, you decided to add a note to readers. Can you read that passage for us and talk about why you felt it was important to include it in the book. Sure, it was very strange handing this in, because suddenly it was, there's our motorcycle, there's our motorcycle. Man right outside. It was very strange turning this, I turned it in, like six weeks before October 7. And at that time it was, it was a book about living in Israel and traveling, and it was about the food and everything. But then suddenly it was, it was going to go out into the world about a place that had just. Totally erupted on October 7, and then everything that has come since then to this day. And the publisher, Greg Wolfe, said, You know what, we need to put a kind of marker at the beginning of this thing, in order to give it a context, rather than just, oh, here's a book about traveling in Israel and eating food. So this is, this is what we ended up with. It's called simply a word. I turned this book into the publisher in the summer of 2023 then came the horrors of October 7, and after, immediately, these pages became missives from before. And now, as you read these words. They are operating in the after. There is no going back yet. Here is a book. It is about food and about communion. It is about taste and about people and place. It is about breaking bread and with whom we break it. My wife, Melanie, and I lived in Jerusalem for a while, five months, to be exact, and have stayed there for extended periods, for at last count, a half dozen times. We have traveled to the West Bank, to East Jerusalem and to Ramallah. We have been to one side and the other of the wall and found good and beautiful people on both. But let it be known that I am no expert on Israel, no professional guide or apologist or even dilettante. Please, don't imagine this will be anything like a cookbook or a list of suggested tours or a book on war, barbarity, retribution or response, measured or disproportionate. It is not a book on social justice or political stance or a solving of the Middle East situation one state or two, state or war or peace, protracted or paused. By the time you read these words, the world will have moved forward into realms unknown, and even these terms I've paraded about just now will seem antiquated because of whatever new news will have arrived via the predictable ways News of the World arrives. This is a book about another story to this place, one of people to people, and the way, when sharing a meal, whether cherries from a roadside stand or pork ribs sauced and grilled on the stoop of an Arabic apartment, there can be peace. We lived there and visited and have partaken in meals with more people through the years, Israeli and Palestinian alike than we can count, from falafel with newfound friends the best street corner shawarma stand in Jerusalem's German colony, the place set with maybe a dozen plastic chairs and a window out onto the street to a launch of innumerable fresh salads cluttered across a flower plastic tablecloth in a family's home at the border with Lebanon, the father seeking to restore the Aramaic language as far and wide as he can, to a food truck hamburger at a minor league baseball game the diamond settled in a field of sunflowers outside Beit Shemesh, where The Ark of the Covenant first came to rest after the Philistines had sent the tumor inducing thing back to Israel on a wooden cart pulled by those straight arrow milk cows. We've eaten in a lot of places, and we have met good people all along the way. This is a book about them. This is a book about their places. This is a book about their food. It is an account from before, yes, but it is an account of the way food and place and people inform and enlighten and broaden and magnify what it means to be human. Now that we are after, there is no going back, but now as forever, there is hope. With this book, I'm trying to give a glimpse of that hope, because hope still lives. And it was a, you know, the I had a little intro before that, you know, just kind of like, here's this book, and it was seemed to have a lot lighter heart to it. But after what had happened, really had to step back from it. It actually had recipes in the original version of the book, which we were happy to include. But once all this happened, it seemed silly, and, you know, precious to be putting recipes out there in the in the the midst of war, but it's still we still believed in it, having a place to speak to hope and peace at a time when hope and peace are what is necessary. Yeah, I think it establishes the book so well, because it really focuses on those, those themes, but it also kind of shows us the power of food, you know, and which I think you do so well in this, in your book, because I was just struck by your incredible descriptions of such mouth watering food and the connection we. And so often find through breaking bread with one another, you want to just talk about the power of food that you experienced. I remember recording with you, and one time you said, Man, I'm hungry. Yeah. And I thought, yes, yeah. No, you that you describe such amazing food. I mean, the, you know, cafe hafuq and and the coffee, the bagels, your search for pork, which I just found so funny, right? But you talk about the spice Zaatar in the book, and I was wondering maybe if you could read a little bit of that section, because I found it really powerful. Sure, Zaatar is this spice that's everywhere. And I knew of it. I probably had it before, but when we got there, we realized this is just everywhere. And so there's a whole essay that's dedicated to Zaatar, but here's a little passage about what it tastes like in its history. There's an eto. Eto. Okay, now let me start over. There's an etymological descriptor for the kind of word Zaatar. Zaatar is a loan word which means exactly what you think a word loan, loaned out from elsewhere and grown into another language. And though you don't hear the word Zaatar bandied about in American kitchens like you do mustard, French, an easy one, or ketchup, Chinese, or even coleslaw, Dutch. It's a pretty common, very common loan word in the Middle East, because it's everywhere. It's an Arabic word loaned out to Hebrew, and the spice mixture is used on pretty much anything, but it's also a valued element of a dish, not a throwaway spice sprinkled over something. For the sake of tradition, I've put it on chicken and steak and every roasted vegetable you can think of, on scrambled, fried and hard boiled eggs, on pizza and salad, and sometimes in the morning, simply on a piece of toast with olive oil. And every time it tastes like Zaatar, and everything tastes more for it. Whereas when you put salt in a dish that needs more salt, and you taste it, and provided you've added the right amount of salt, you'll say better. But when you add Zaatar, you'll say, there the taste, dark green, a little bitter, a forest lemon, an old taste, as in a taste past time, a harkening back to some other place, the earth. There's also a murkiness in its meaning and common usage, in that Zaatar is both an herb and the spice mixture. The herb itself, oreganum siriacum, lives throughout the Middle East and looks something a little like lavender, and then it grows on stalks with leaves that same pale, gray, green, though they are, broader, bigger, more like stubby sage than anything else, but Zaatar, the spice mixture doesn't always contain Zaatar the herb, sort of like how a Kleenex is always a tissue, but a tissue isn't always a Kleenex, yeah, like that. I think. How about this? Oftentimes you'll find in Zaatar the spice mixture dried marjoram and, or oregano and, or thyme. But know Zaatar the herb, sometimes there will be dried lemon or orange zest in there too, and dill, now and again, even caraway seeds and cumin. But the real thing is made simply of Zaatar the herb, those SES those toasted sesame seeds, ground sumac, with its gloriously rich burgundy hue, a little bit of sea salt and a dash of olive oil, things get even more involved the deeper you dig into that etymology. The classical Hebrew word for Zaatar in the Bible is ezov, which, when it was translated into the Greek, became the word hyssop. And now, in this moment of words on a page, zaatar's surprise in my triangular newsprint football that's a reference a little bit earlier dropped into my hands by a boy selling bread suddenly multiplies in manifold, in mysterious ways, its primary ingredient and namesake in the herb mixture, the tool for painting lamb's blood on door frames the first Passover. It becomes the means by which one is cleansed, whether from leprosy and Leviticus or the deepest reaches of sin. Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean. Wash me and I will be whiter than snow. David cries out in Psalm 51 in First Kings, it becomes an element of the wisdom of Solomon. He spoke 3000 Proverbs, and his songs numbered 1005 he spoke about plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. And the Gospel of John tells us of its role in quenching Christ's thirst as He hung there on the cross. The sour wine, one last moment of earthly relief before his work here is complete. After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfill the scripture, I thirst a jar full of sour wine stood there. So they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop ranch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, It is finished, and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Somehow, in this tablespoon full of green and bitter herbs mixed with other spices and seeds, I am partaking of the history of my faith, tasting time and place and salvation. It is a marvelous flavor. I just found it fun to write about how just, just thinking more deeply and deeply and deeply about what food I was eating back there, and just the ramifications and the, you know, the rock dropped in a pond and circles and go out from it was fun not to just sit there and eat the food, but like, oh, what's the story of this? Well, we can all relate. I mean, it's so powerful, because I think we can all relate to just the connection we find in food. I think anyone you know, regardless of where you're from, has had an experience where they have bonded with someone family or stranger over food. And I just think you're just such rich. Writing is is just phenomenal. I thank you for reading that. Well, you're right. You're right. Food is what brings us together. I mean, food is communion. Food is sitting with people and coming to know each other, whether it's family you've known your whole life, or, you know, new people. So, yeah, food is, is such a an inducer of memories and associations and and importance to anyway? Sorry, I'm just rambling. Oh no, you're, you are good. So speaking on memories and kind of shifting a little bit to to your, you know, broader writing career. In a previous interview, you quoted the writer, James Baldwin, a former teacher of yours, who said quote, once you've learned one thing, move on to the next end quote to explain your approach to writing in different genres. You've written both fiction and nonfiction, and are now working on a science fiction novel. What does that do to your writing process? Do you feel like you're starting all over again when you move on to the next thing? Every time, every time it's it feels like starting over again. But that's, that's fun, okay, when he told me that I was just young and I had written a few short stories, and I hadn't written my first novel yet, but when I got to the end of my first novel, I was like, I think I know what he means. I'm not going to write that book again. There's another one, and it's not the next book wasn't far, far afield. It was, it was it was about some of the same people, but it was from a distinctly different point of view and about different things. And it's really my first book was about the Manuel Vermont is about an RC Cola salesman lives in Western Massachusetts, and his wife leaves him. I was an RC Cola salesman and went to grad school in Western Massachusetts. My wife never left me. The fiction part was, what if my wife were to leave me, and where would that believe me? So that's that was as close to me that as of any book that I've written. The next book was from a female point of view at a place where my wife worked while we were in Western Mass. So there were some people who were there, but it was now from a female point of view, and it was trying to figure out, what does the world look like from her point of view, and but So my life has gone. Each book has gone farther afield, science fiction, exactly the science fiction book is. It's, it's the farthest to feel that you could be science fiction. It's still about, I'm still writing about family. I'm still writing about a husband and wife, because in science fiction, they'll still be husbands and wives. You know, it's about the concerns between them and their child and and, but also this sense of what is history, and being able to visit and understand history. But it is. It's been a great piece of advice, I would say, sort of, you know, foundational piece of advice that I received from Mr. Baldwin all those years ago, because it's allowed me to, like, start over every time I every semester, I use a book called A Giacometti portrait, which is by James Lord, and it's about James Lord was an art critic and writer back in 1965 he sat for Giacometti for 18 days to do a painting. Mm. And what he did is he just wrote down everything to Jocko, and he said, Who this time was at the pinnacle of his career as an artist. And he just kept saying, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to do this. And what, what he had to do was to begin again every time, and not rely on the successes that he's had before, because relying on prior successes makes you not encounter this news like, oh yeah, I got this in the bag. I've done this before every time you go at it. And this was the real value of that advice, was, every time you go to make something, you need to make a brand new thing and not just repeat the thing that you already know how to do. So that's what Giacometti says all the time that, you know, I don't know anything. I have to remember what I was like when I was 18 and doing my first painting every time he says about it. So I feel like I'm a punk kid every time for every book this one gather the hollows. It was I really had to think about. Now, I've never really written about food. What is food? How do you write about food? You put it in your mouth, you chew. It tastes good. This tastes good. You know, there's more to it. I think you got a little better at it than that, but I hope so. I hope so you're generous and you're very patient through all those hours that we recorded. Wow, it was, it was a blast. But, I mean, I think that's just fantastic advice. In my extremely limited writing experience in college, when I was here I am, I took three semesters of fiction, and every time I was what the hell was I thinking then, you know, each semester was an was a fresh me. So, success, yeah. So it's one of some of my favorite classes here at the college. So speaking of your illustrious, long teaching career, sadly for all of us, you're retiring this spring after teaching at the college for almost four decades. What are you going to do with all your free time? That's what my wife asks me. He says, You better have a plan. And I'm not sure what the plan is. It'll be to write. We love to travel, and so we'll be traveling more. And where are you going to be traveling? You think, anywhere? Fun. Oh yeah, we're going to Italy. Italy, beautiful. We are routinely going there, but we also, we also want to go anyway, Scotland. We we want to go to we want to go to Croatia. Have not been to Croatia, but Croatia is supposed to be beautiful. And Slovenia, so that's kind of in the dark end. Fantastic. Yeah, so in writing and mowing my lawn. I have an area. Well, so um, what will you I will you be missing students? What will you be missing about kind of your time teaching? Somebody asked me that the other day, and they said, What do you? What did you? What are you gonna miss most? And I said, I'm gonna miss most being actually in the classroom talking with students, that's what I'm going to miss most. You know, I majority of my my time is spent reading things and marking them up, and I'm, I'm happy to do that, but being with students and talking with them in this sometimes the look on a student's face when they understand what you're talking about and they're seeing the world in a different in a different way because of something you might have said, but also listening to them and understanding them is the best part. Just being in interaction with students in a classroom is coolest thing if I if the job would only be that, it'd be awesome. You know, that's not that. It's a bad job, but there's also some other things that go into being a professor that I probably won't miss, but the college has been very supportive all through the years, and last night, I gave probably my last reading here at the college. I read from gather the olives and and I not bragging. I'm not pregnant bragging, but I they gave me a standing ovation at the end. And that was I was like, Wow, this has never happened in my life where people give me standing ovation. I think they're feeling sorry for me, the old guys retiring. But I'm sure that's it. But I appreciate it. Oh, very good. We're kind of running low on time here, but I would be remiss if I didn't ask, what are you reading now? Do you have any book recommendations? Because I gotta pick your brain on what's good right now. I am reading right now. Okay, so I love the television series, slow horses on apple. Oh, I have been watching as well, very good. I'm reading. There's like six of these books. The author, I think his name is Mick or Nick Herron. And I'm reading the first one, slow horses. And it's, it's, it's, follows the series. But a book is, you realize reading. Book. It's like, oh, books are so much better. There's so much more that you did, so much deeper. So I'm reading that right now, and I'm not going high brown on you, but I'm also reading at the same time Ulysses. I mean, the Odyssey about Ulysses. I'm reading that and just so I'm going like, sort of the popular classic, both of those at the same time. Well, very good, yeah, not, not at once. I don't think they would quite mesh together. It's a small world, because I have, I got into a rabbit hole watching that, um, that show, yeah. And I'm not reading those books, but I am reading the John le Carre spy novels, I am in the middle of the second of the Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy trilogy. So in my car, on Audible, I'm listening to the honorable schoolboy. We are on the same book. That's crazy, people. We did not. We did not. We did not. I guess I would say I'm about 75% I am. I'm in the last, like, like, I'm mainly listening to it. I'm in the last, like, three or four hours. So we're probably on the same chapter. Five hours left is what I have. It's like, 22 hours long. Oh, it's, I love it. There's nothing better than nothing like a long audio I like, I'm into to the reading these really good spy novels now all of a sudden, well, I'm gonna take your tips and start reading the slow horses series. Then, okay, well, Brett, thank you so much for coming in here having this conversation. It's been a blast, and I cannot wait for you. Thank you. Thank you.

amy stockwell: 26:50

Thank you for listening to this episode of speaking of College of Charleston with today's guest, Brett Lott. If you liked this episode, please help us reach more listeners by sharing it with a friend or leaving a review for show notes and more episodes. Visit the College of Charleston's official news site, the college today@today.charleston.edu, you can find episodes on all major podcast platforms. This episode was produced by Amy Stockwell, with recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz from the Division of Information Technology. You.