at the table
Community read Books for 2021 event evoke thoughts on food and family Story and photo by Katherine Larson
W
hen I saw the title of one of the books chosen for this year’s Two Books, Two Communities program, I had to buy it. Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: surely that was right in the wheelhouse of Marquette Monthly’s renascent At the Table column. Two Books, Two Communities stems from a partnership between Marquette County, Alger County and Northern Michigan University, intended to bring these communities together through shared reading and shared conversations. There are some great events planned; see the list outlined later in this article. One of the book choices for 2021 is Teacher/Pizza Guy (Wayne State University Press 2019), a collection of autobiographical poems by Jeff Kass — an English teacher and director for an Ann Arbor literary arts program who supplemented his income by delivering pizza. The other book is Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie. Walleye! We have walleye here, and we fry it. Fresh from Alger County’s St. Mary’s River or Marquette County’s Lake Conway, it’s delectable. And cherry pie! While locally grown cherries are few and far between, we can get some good ones from lower Michigan, and it’s hard to beat a good cherry pie. I settled down to read,
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Marquette Monthly
September 2021
mouth watering. Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie bears the subtitle “Midwestern Writers on Food,” and that’s what the book is — 31 short pieces, many written for this book and some drawn from other sources, all collected and edited by Chicago food writer Peggy Wolff and published in 2013 by the University of Nebraska Press. I’m glad I read the book. I’m glad because I love the idea of a community read, of sharing a book with so many members of the community I’m so proud to be part of. I’m glad, too, because this book contains joyful moments of what it means to share food in community. But my gladness was, at first, tempered by a tinge of disappointment. To begin with: where the heck is the fried walleye? I read the book three times to confirm its absence. The closest that any of the articles or stories comes is Wolff ’s own engaging description of a Door County fish boil — boiled whitefish, which is neither fried nor walleye. For that matter, calling the book “Beef ” or “Pork” rather than anything fishy might have been more appropriate. When not writing about desserts, the authors skew heavily toward red meat; Stuart Dybek even contributes a difficult-to-read
