Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Kristin Hannah

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Award winning, best-selling author Kristin Hannah recounts her outdoorsy childhood living in farmhouses and campsites built by her adventurous dad. We get a glimpse into what inspired Hannah to venture into historical fiction and what her mom managed to cook for her and her siblings with a wood fire stove. Plus we hear how to make her mama’s buttermilk cornbread.Kristin Hannah is an American historical fiction author. She’s written over twenty novels, many of them securing spots in the New York Times Best Seller List including The Four Winds and The Nightingale, which sold over 4.5 million copies. Her novel Firefly Lane was made into a Netflix Original Series in 2021.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Available in select locations. See app for details. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMAGE, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction I'm Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious, and this is Dinner SOS, a new podcast from Bon Appetit.

On each episode, we'll take a call from a home cook facing a real dinner emergency. Then, I'll work with one of our editors or someone from our amazing test kitchen to try and solve it. Because cooking for the people you love should inspire joy, without a side of stress. Make sure you're following Dinner S.O.S. wherever you're listening now. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and the world was changing around her and she'd never really lived long enough to do whatever her second act was going to be. That's why when she was ill, I was in law school at the time, and she said, you know, honey, don't worry about it. You're going to be a writer anyway.

It was a shocking comment because I really believe it was her dream for herself. That and, of course, the fact that we as mothers know our children so well. Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how the kitchens we grew up in as kids shape who we become as adults. I'm Michelle Norris. Today we're joined by the award-winning bestselling author, Kristin Hannah. She's written over 20 novels, several of them securing a spot on the New York Times bestseller list, including The Four Winds, The Winter Garden, and Firefly Lane.

Maybe you've seen the Netflix show adaptation of that last one. She has a knack for writing historical fiction, highlighting lesser-known stories of women who rose to the occasion. That's exactly what Hannah does in one of her mega hits, The Nightingale, that was inspired by the true story of a woman who helped allied pilots escape Nazi territory during World War II. It sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. When Kristen is not drawing from history,

she takes inspiration from her own, perhaps unconventional upbringing in the Pacific Northwest. That shows up in some of her works, novels like Firefly Lane and The Great Alone. On this episode, an acclaimed novelist tells her own origin story. We hear how her adventure-seeking father moved her family around the country in a Volkswagen bus, how home was sometimes a campsite, and how, for a stretch, her mama's kitchen was essentially

a wood-burning stove. Nothing fancy, but sturdy enough to cook her mom's signature buttermilk cornbread. And for all those people who love Kristin Hannah's writing, we will hear about the moment Kristin changed course and left a career in law to start writing novels and how it all began with a conversation with her mom. That's coming up. Kristin, Hannah, I am so happy that we have a chance to talk. I met you earlier this year.

I was hoping that you would come on this program because you have such an interesting background and childhood. And I thought it would be a wonderful way to learn about your mama's kitchen. Well thank you. It is just lovely to be here and it's so nice to see you again. So you are an author of several bestselling books. People know you that way, but they don't perhaps know much about your upbringing, which is unusual.

You moved around a whole lot. And it sounds like it started on a day where your dad came home, you were living in Southern California, and he said he just couldn't handle the traffic anymore and decided to pack everybody up and put them in a VW bus. Is that about right? That's pretty much the way it went from my perspective. We were in Huntington Beach and it was a pretty idyllic childhood back then, you know, it was Huntington Beach was lemon groves and little stores and and riding our bike to the beach and you know just spending beautiful sunny days down here and my

father who I guess an adventurer, a wanderer, a seeker just decided one day that's it. We are done here. The traffic is terrible. I don't know what he would say about today. And so he took all of us, piled us into the Volkswagen bus with flower decals on the side. This was 1968.

I got to bring a friend. My brother got to bring a friend. So five kids, a dog, and we left for about six weeks. And what the point was that we were supposed to raise our hands when we found home. That was the thing. So we just journeyed from state to state looking for the place that spoke to all of us. This sounds like Travels with Charlie. This sounds like travels with Charlie. It sounds like the makings of a book or a movie of some kind.

First of all, what did your mom think of that? You know, my mom was a gal who really thought in a perfect world that camping was not having room service in a hotel. So how it was, she put up with all of these travels and the way we traveled. It was always camping. It was always on the side of the road around a fire pit somewhere. But I think she just loved my dad. And it was a time, the late 60s, where everything was changing. Of course, we didn't recognize that, but I think my dad was kind of at the forefront of believing that you needed to live an authentic life and that

you didn't have to follow the path that had been provided for you by a previous generation. And so she just went along with it. And we all pretty much raised our hand in the Pacific Northwest. And I think it was the trees, the mountains, the blue sky. We all just said, you know, this is the place. And we have remained, all of us, a very active and mobile family. We're very non-traditional. But we all, except for my sister who lives in Southern California still, we are all still in the Pacific Northwest at least a big part of the year.

And that is still home for most of us. So when everyone raised their hand, was that an egalitarian exercise where everyone, you know, do we like it here? Let's raise our hands. Or was it more spontaneous than that? Let's put it this way, whatever the truth was, they made us believe that our opinion mattered. So then it was a question of once we hit the Northwest, it was where are we going to settle?

Where is our place in here? And my father who is Canadian, came from a very small town in Saskatchewan, considered Canada as well. So they took their life savings and they bought a piece of land in Port Angeles, Washington, which was really, to my mind, kind of the middle of nowhere. And then they acquired some land in Victoria, BC on the water. And his dream was to build campgrounds. And so the first campground that we built

was in Port Angeles. It was called wagon train in the beginning. And there we were chopping trees and creating campsites. So we're gonna learn more about how your father moved around the country and eventually the world and created these campsites. But I wanna ask you the core question at the center of these episodes.

Tell me about your mama's kitchen. And when I ask you that question, where does your mind go? Because you had physical spaces with kitchens, but it sounds like the kitchen in many cases was a little cook stove over a wood fire. Yeah. The first thing that comes to my mind when you say my mama's kitchen, and I was trying to rack my mind to find traditional recipes that I could pass along that were not her concoctions.

But when we first moved to Port Angeles, which would have been, I guess, about 1969, they bought this land to build the campground on, and there was a small farmhouse attached to the land. And so we went from a block from the beach in Huntington Beach to this small 100 year old farmhouse in Port Angeles. And the biggest room in this farmhouse was the kitchen.

And it had one of those old wood burning stoves, you know, the ones where you actually build a fire in the stove and then you have to use that little iron thing to lift the burner open like from the 19th century. Like a pot bellied stove. Yeah, except, you know, it had four burners and an oven. And so suddenly here's my mom who was, gosh, what, 30 years old or something, 32, is suddenly building fires to cook dinner at night and learning how to cook like a pioneer wife. So for whatever reason, that's the first thing that comes to my mind because even I at nine

said, this is not normal. People don't live like this. We need to do something. This sounds like it would either be the beginning of a really interesting reality show or there would be a woman just muttering under her breath all the time. Ressom fessom, I can't believe that I got to start this fire. What's going on here? I can tell you which one I would have been. That would be the muttering under your breath woman who said, come on, get me a stove. I'm willing to live rugged, but this is just going too far.

So beyond that wood fired cook stove, can you take me inside that room and describe it the largest room in the house and that 100 year farmhouse? Well, okay. So I remember walking in for the first time and this was a stunning piece of land. I think it was 45 or 50 acres close to the Olympic Mountains, not too far from the water. And it was just beautiful, rolling fields and everything. And we drive up the dirt driveway. And again, we're coming from Southern California. We lived in a cul-de-sac. and so we pulled up into this white clapboard farmhouse, which needed some work and had next to it a barn that was still standing, but could have stopped

standing at any moment, and walked up the steps and opened this house, which had not been inhabited for quite some time. And I remember all of us walking in and just our footsteps crunching on dead insects because the whole thing was just like covered with it. And it was the beginning of, I guess, a kind of life that all of us ended up gravitating to. And I think really left a mark on my fiction as well. It was just a very different kind of life and I think we all loved it.

My mom loved it particularly. She made a lot of friends there. She had always been into horses. And so we just kind of settled in. And, you know, as far as cooking and all of that, my mom was an eat to live human being. Hmm. What's that mean? It means food wasn't the most important thing on her agenda. So if she was going to, let's

say, have a dinner party, which frankly, I can't ever really remember us having, but I'm sure we had to have, it would have been about fun and music and cocktails and conversation. And if there was food there to hand out to people, I'm sure it would have been simple food. One thing I remember was, you probably don't know anything about this, but they used to have like a wooden pineapple that had little steaks sticking out of it. You would put little food. You remember this. Yes, and you would stick the little hors d'oeuvres. Yes, and it would come out of that. It was during the era of fondue,

where there was a lot of food on a stick. We had a lot of fondue. Yes. I mean, you got sterno, you got some cheese, you have dinner. Now I can picture that little pineapple thing. You put cheese cubes or olives on it. Cheese cubes and olives. Well, I'm glad that your mom settled into the space and learned to love it and made friends and found ways to entertain. When you watched your mom make her way in a foreign land in her own country, what habits and discipline and outlook did you pick up from her that maybe has found its way

into your own habits and discipline and outlook as a writer? Wow, what a really interesting question. I don't know that I've ever actually considered that. I mean, from my dad, we learned to value adventure and nonconformity and going your own way. From my mom, we learned to value home in perhaps it's a non-traditional understanding in that it's not necessarily about place, but that it is very much about people, about experiences. I mean, I was always very aware coming of age when I did.

Like I said, it's the late 60s, early 70s. My mom was a stay at home mom and the world was changing around her. And so she was constantly talking to me about being change, about changing, about fighting for what you want, making a path for yourself. And it took me a long time to understand that I think she was giving me a lot of that encouragement and pushing me down that road because that had not been available to her. I mean, she had me, I think when she was about 23, she had three kids by the time she was 27 or 28, whatever, and she'd never really lived long enough to

do whatever her second act was going to be. She never quite had it. And I think that's why when she was ill with breast cancer and we were talking about my future, I was in law school at the time and she said, you know, honey, don't worry about it. You're going to be a writer anyway. It was a shocking comment because I showed no interest in that. I had no interest in that. And one of the things I've learned in retrospect as I've gotten older is I really believe it was her dream for herself. I think that was a big part of why she said that. That and of course the fact that we as mothers, and you know this, we know our children so

well. We know them better than they know themselves. Not that they're interested in that necessarily, but we see it. So I think she did see that this was something that I should move towards. And it just took me a while to do it. But you did. It took you a while to become an international bestselling author, but you did start writing when she put that seed in your head. I read something about you that you wanted to write something together with your mom. That was the thing, you know. So she was in the hospital and it was very obvious that she was terminal, that we were coming to the end of this.

And I was too young to really understand this moment and the things that we could have been talking about and the things that I think we should have been talking about, I think she didn't want to talk about them. She said, let's write a book together. And like I said, it was such a left field comment. But I thought, okay, this would be great. This would give us kind of a project to do together. And of course, we immediately started arguing about what kind of book to write, being mother and daughter. I wanted

to write horror. And she wanted to write historical romance. Ultimately she said, look, I'm sick, I pick, we're writing historical romance. And that's what we did. So for the last like few months of her life, I would go to the library after law school and pick up all of this research information. This is pre-internet, of course. And I'd have to Xerox all the pages, and then I would go to her room,

and we would just brainstorm this book and talk about it. I think it allowed both of us to imagine this future that was going on instead of ending. But after she passed away, and I actually wrote, I should say, I wrote the first nine pages the day she died. And I had just finished them when my dad called and said, you need to get to the hospital.

And so I was able to lean down and whisper to her, I started the book. It meant a lot to me to be able to do that. But after she was gone, I didn't want to be a writer. I was going to be a lawyer. So I just put that all in a box. I didn't know that it would come back to me, but it did. And I guess that was the very, very beginning, my origin story. I love that image of you leaning in and whispering to her. I got started.

It was powerful for me. It really was. And I feel her with me all the time. It took me a long time to write about her cancer and her death. I wrote a book called Firefly Lane years later. And what was interesting to me about that book that I did not realize, I started the book at the very age she was when she was diagnosed and I finished the book at exactly the age she was when she passed away. I mean, I just felt her that entire

two year period. I just felt her beside me all the time. That's what we writers do is, you know, it looks like we're out telling a story, but in a lot of instances, we're mining and discovering our own story. And so I went in search of my mother and I found her the way I find everything of value really, which is through writing about it, imagining it. I actually want to reach back because I'm curious about the plot of the historical romance novel that you started with your mom. It was terrible, terrible, terrible and in fact when I moved recently I found the manuscript in a box and I had written across the top of the box not to be published even in the event of my

death. Oh! Because it was so bad. We thought we were geniuses. Are you sure it was that bad? I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. That's the problem when you decide to write a genre that you don't read.

So we thought we were geniuses, both of us, but it turns out there had been a lot of geniuses prior to us who had had the exact same idea. Are you sure you parked over here? Do you see it anywhere? I think it's back this way. Come on. Hey, you're going the wrong way. Feeling distracted? You're not alone. Whether renting, considering buying a home, or renewing a mortgage, many Canadians are finding it hard to focus with housing costs on their minds. For free tools and

resources to help you manage your home finances and clear your head, visit Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to support life-saving progress in mental health care.

From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. In your later works, in Firefly Lane, in The Great Alone, you write about women who have been flung out into the world, who are trying to figure it out and often experiencing a

moment of change where everything is changing all around them. There is a certain consistency with women dealing with something in history that they're trying to figure out. And then the reader is able to sort of understand history from a woman's perspective, which is often not the way history is told or understood. We don't usually get to write our history. It's history and not her story. Is that in part an homage to your mom?

It's hard to say because first of all, this whole idea of writing about strong women, which clearly I do, and I'm very much known for now, I didn't even notice that for a decade. I mean, I didn't really realize that that's what I was doing. I started as a young mother, then in Firefly Lane, that was my empty nest year pretty much. I kind of broke free and decided to write about the issues that were facing my friends, the women I knew myself, something that I knew and felt strongly about, which tended to be the travails of motherhood, wifehood, working, the issues between working women and stay-at-home moms,

and the way that women are sometimes sort of constrained by society and our own choices. Then I reached a certain age, probably 50, and I realized that I wanted to sort of look out more broadly. I wanted to write about women whom I didn't know and challenges that they were facing. And that led me to historical fiction, which started with Winter Garden. And I remember distinctly when I was researching that novel, I came to this sentence in the research that talked about the troops and the storms and the cutting off of Leningrad,

now St. Petersburg in Russia. And the sentence was, Leningrad became a city of women. That was such a powerful moment for me, because here I am, I've got seven years of college, I went to a lot of high schools, and I realized at that moment that what was happening with women in history was not something that I had been taught. And that was the beginning to say, wait a second, we are not being told the whole story here. And I have an opportunity as a novelist to both share this information, to

make sure that it's out there and that it's known, but then also to go the extra step and to fictionalize it and make it emotional so that hopefully I can create what is, I think, one of the most important parts of fiction, and that is empathy. I feel that if I can, as a novelist, as a woman, as a writer, make someone feel empathy and concern and a sense of community with people that have lives very different to their own, then maybe we can all understand each other a little bit better.

And so those are sort of my twin goals, and they have been for the past decade, to teach you something about women's history and To in some small way make people feel More connected to each other through a sense of empathy You know I understand that because you also in writing about characters that are not very likable you wind up understanding their motivations And that's part of empathy also, right? Is that people who do bad things are not necessarily

boogeymen or boogeywoman. I mean, they're people who just took a left turn. They got lost. They lost connection with their own moral compass. And so the research is evident. But there's also something since we talk about food in kitchens, and you're writing about women, it's clear you also do a lot of culinary research because Wintergarden in particular has just got long, beautiful passages about the food or the lack of it. And there are book clubs that read your work through a culinary lens that do the dinners, that try to do historic reenactments of what you would cook in that period and in that region. Is that something that you took on also?

Were you also doing the culinary research, not in the stacks, but in your own kitchen? Did your family benefit from that? Actually, yes. One of the things that's been most interesting for me is my own culinary journey in the sense that I grew up in a home where food was not as important. My mother wasn't in the kitchen for a great deal of time making all of these wonderful concoctions.

And I think part of that is she was right at the age where the advertisers came out and said, look, if you want to be a good mother, if you want to put good food on the table, get a Swanson TV dinner. That'll save you time. That'll be wonderful. There was this thrust for a time to make a housewife's life easier by buying these products. And so we did eat a lot of that. And as I sort of came of age,

I did study abroad in London and traveled in Europe for quite a while. I went by myself at 19. And that was my first introduction to the food of the world, to French food, to Italian food, to German food. And that made a huge impact on me. And so I would say that what has mattered the most in terms of my own kitchen is travel.

Part of that travel is book research. Where are the foods that my characters would have been eating? And then I would make them. So here, family, we're having borscht tonight. We're having whatever it is. And it's been really, you know, we're having whatever it is. And it's been really, I guess, exciting. And now I'm really actually a foodie. I mean, I cook a lot. I love cooking. I love experimenting. And part of that is I love traveling as well.

When I think about your mom and having to set up in Washington state, and then again, and then again, because your family kept moving, they stayed there, but then they didn't necessarily put down deep roots there. So she was having to reestablish everybody because it often fell to her to get you comfortable in a new school, meet new friends, set up a new household. How did she do that? And just paint a picture of the sort of geographic pins on the map of where your family wound up moving as your dad was setting up these campgrounds all over the place. Well, so Port Angeles was a small farming and fishing community in Washington state.

But while we were building the campgrounds, of course, it took several years to actually small farming and fishing community in Washington state. But while we were building the campgrounds, of course, it took several years to actually build the campground. So in those years that we were building, he also had to make a living. So he also had to have a job and there were no jobs there. So we would go back and forth between an area outside of Seattle. We had a place there and we would move back and forth. So we'd be in school here for a couple of months and then in school there for a couple of months. And the place near the city was

a very upscale bedroom community. And so I was 13 going between farm community and upscale bedroom community, back and forth, back and forth, trying to figure out my place. And of course, at 13, I thought it was the worst thing that could happen to a person, having to constantly be uprooted, constantly changing friend groups and all of that. And my mom and dad were just very sanguine about the social ramifications of all of this. They just simply said, this is who we are, this is what we do. You are a smart girl, you will figure it out. Interestingly enough, of course, I'm kind of an introvert by nature. And what this taught me

was such a valuable life lesson in that you can drop me into anywhere now. And I will speak to people and make friends. And it has given me a necessary chameleon-like quality. You had to learn how to switch jeans, switch shoes, switch haircut, do all these things, move in, how to make friends with the people that you wanted to be friends with quickly. And I think it's that chameleon ability that has probably more than anything impacted my writing. I can step in other people's

shoes and that's what I do as a writer all the time. There was something you said just in passing that was so relatable, switch jeans. I mean, you're probably wearing like Wranglers. Oh yeah. And Port Angeles and then you got to dress it up. You got to have something that has what were the same made bell bottoms. Exactly. Or something that was a little bit more hip. Yeah, you couldn't be wearing those Sears granimals when you were, you know. It is sequoia.

It just didn't fly. It was interesting. And it's also interesting that because there's six years between me and my sister and my brothers in between. So in a way, we did not all have this childhood because by the time I was getting older, the campgrounds were making money now and so now we were able to settle more. So my sister, for example, really remembers her whole life at one school, one town. So it's interesting sort of in talking about the differences we feel among ourselves.

And then there was a point when I was, I guess, 18 or 19, right after I'd gone to college, my dad apparently came home and said, "'Yeah, okay, so Washington is now filling up. "'The traffic here is getting pretty bad. I think we're going to Alaska. He took my mom, she must have been 44, 45, whatever, and they went to Alaska for the summer and lived in their truck and looked for the perfect ground for what would become

really my father's and mother's life's work, the great Alaska Adventure Lodge. They lived in their truck. Yes, and took showers at the YMCA. And at this point, you're old enough to argue with them about these lifestyle choices? Did you just roll with that or try to talk them into something else? No judgment in asking this question. No, no. I was old enough to be at the University of Washington to say bummer for my siblings.

Oh wait, the siblings were living in the truck too. Just my youngest sister, I think. Okay. And I'm not exactly sure. That's one of those things because my first year of college, things are kind of hazy on the home front. My brother and sister might have stayed with friends for that first summer or that first period. And then they built what became really just this stunning, stunning location on the Kenai River. And this is the lodge, I think, that shaped the whole family that led to the novel, The Great Alone.

Yeah. I was going to say in that novel, it's clear that Alaska put its charms on you too. Alaska in the summer, yes. There is a difference. I visited Alaska both in the winter and the summer and there is a significant difference. It really is a beautiful place in the summer that never gets dark. Yes. I mean, it's just stunning. And the view and the people are unique. We always ask people to share a taste of home for them.

What is a recipe that makes you think about your mama's kitchen? And the recipe that you shared with us sounds delicious. It sounds like it could be made in a kitchen, but it also sounds like campfire food also. Buttermelt cornbread. Well, that's of course when I sent it to you, what I didn't say was, yes, you can make this in a cast iron pan on the fire. That's what we did lots of times when we were out and about and traveling. I mean, I can give you lots of things that we ate

and that we loved, but something that was interesting enough to pass along that has sort of stayed in my kitchen was a little bit more difficult. Well, wait, what did you eat and you love that you don't have a recipe for? Oh, well, I mean, I'm sorry. We loved Kraft macaroni and cheese with hot dogs. There's no shame in that.

And did you ever eat fried bologna? Oh, who hasn't eaten fried bologna? Where the edges curl up, like you watch them kind of like curl up on the edge. I mean, maybe if you're vegetarian or if you're come from maybe a fancy background, you wouldn't have had fried bologna, but that was kind of a staple. It was a staple. And one of the tips that my mother taught me cooking wise was, hey, if you clip the bologna, then it doesn't like turn into the little umbrella and it stays

flat. Right, right. You make the little widgets in it. Yes. You make a little divot in the side of the bologna and it stays flat. Yep. I watch all these food network programs and travel and I see the Southern kitchens and you know, my husband's mother came from Texas and the recipes she passed on like Texas chili and these wonderful rich meals. That was just not us.

But the recipe you did pass on to listeners, it sounds delicious. And I love that you suggest it with two tablespoons of honey because I love cornbread with honey. I don't like sweet cornbread necessarily, but I love cornbread with butter and honey. Is your mom's buttermilk cornbread, what do you remember about this dish? When did she make it?

What do you remember about eating it? Was it something that was really special for you and your siblings? Yeah, it was special. It was Thanksgiving, it was Christmas. It was Thanksgiving, it was Christmas, it was maybe if my grandparents were coming over, there was just like regular cornbread and then there was this buttermilk cornbread.

And it just had more of like a cakey texture, I guess. So it was thicker and she would cook it over the fire and then just cut it right up in the pan and we would scoop it out with our big spoons. And you could eat it as cornbread with butter and jam, but you could also sort of mix it in with something else almost kind of like a polenta-ish feel today. So crumble it and put it in a soup if you're having chili or something like that. Just mix it right in there. Did your mom have buttermilk?

Because buttermilk is not always easy to come by or was she making buttermilk? There's a secret if you do it, you mix milk with, I think it's a little lemon, you can do that. Yes, you can make buttermilk. Was she doing that? Yes. And there was a time, again, this is so pioneer, like makes me sound so old and I'm not, I don't think. But we would get milk delivered and the cream would rise to the top, right? So you bring it in and you'd take the cream out and we would actually make butter from the cream.

And then she would make buttermilk for these biscuits as well. Well, I'm going to try this version of buttermilk cornbread and I look forward to it and I'm going to have it. I have to decide if I'm going to want it with butter and jam or butter and honey or maybe make a big pot of winter chili and crumble it up and put it on top of my chili. Well, it makes enough for both. So you can do like you can have one one night and then you can crumble it up the next night. I've loved talking to you.

Thank you so much. It's so good to talk to you again. Thank you so much for having me. What a treat to learn about Kristin Hannah's writing journey and how it was so deeply influenced by her father's wanderlust and those treks across America in a crowded minibus. What a novel concept to ask the family to raise their hands when they felt like they were home. The kitchen is always the heart of the home, but this episode reminds us that the feeling of home isn't always about a traditional house with a roof and a picket fence.

It's about a feeling that combines some magical cocktail of belonging and comfort and the prospect for adventure. It was inspiring to hear how her mother was so instrumental in her path to becoming a writer. As Kristin said, mothers know their children so well, sometimes maybe even more than they know themselves. It can take a lifetime for some of us to admit that. Anybody else, by the way, have a hankering for a big slab of hot buttered cornbread after listening to this episode? I know I do.

If you want to learn how to make Kristin's mama's buttermilk cornbread straight out of the skillet, you can find it on my Instagram page at michelle underscore underscore norris. That's two underscores. And you can also find it at our website, your mamaskitchen.com. You'll find all the recipes from all the episodes there. And remember now, we want to hear from you. We are opening up our inbox for you to record yourself and tell us about your mama's recipes, some memories from your kitchen growing up, or your thoughts on some of the stories you've heard on this podcast. Make sure to send us a voice memo at ymk at highergroundproductions.com for a chance to be featured in a future episode.

You can tell all your friends about that. Thanks so much again to Kristin and to all of you for joining me today. Make sure to come back next week. And until then, please stay bautiful. This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original produced by Higher Ground Studios. Senior producer Natalie Wren, producer Sonia Tunn. Additional production support by Misha Jones. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen

and Ryan Kozlowski. Higher Ground Audios editorial assistant is Camilla Thurdukos. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fearman, and me, Michelle Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Nick D'Angelo and Anne Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. Editorial and web support from Melissa Baer and Say What Media.

Talent Booker, Angela Paluso. Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giazza. And that's it. Goodbye, everybody. LLC. Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Higher Ground. Higher Ground Are you sure you parked over here? Do you see it anywhere? I think it's back this way. Come on. Hey, you're going the wrong way.

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