We’ve been lucky enough to hang out with the Kitchen Sisters here in Austin during SXSW as they promote their new Blurb book “Hidden Kitchens: Texas.” It’s been received with great applause and it’s given the Blurb crew some good ideas on where to eat in Austin! This morning the Kitchen Sisters were interviewed on NPR about the book and one of the best BBQ joints in town - Stubb’s and its owner, Stubb Stubblefield. We decided to take a moment with Nikki and Davia too and see what kind of insight they could offer all of you bookmakers out there. Enjoy!
What was your favorite part of creating this book?
The most compelling part of creating this book was finding a new way to share the rich archive of material we’ve gathered in the process of producing our radio series—the stories, conversations, photographs, hand-drawn maps, resources recipes—that go far beyond what makes it to air. Our Hidden Kitchens radio stories on NPR’s Morning Edition are 6 minutes 30 seconds long. For each story we gather hours and hours of interviews, visit countless archives, and talk to dozens of experts and storytellers along the way. Editing down this material is excruciating and so many of our favorite things are never heard. It was great to be able to share some of this journey in book form.
It was also exciting and challenging to take a hands-on role in producing all aspects of the book, from the gathering of material and writing, to the layout and design. This is very much how we approach our radio storytelling and it was great to have that same involvement and creative control with a book project.
Once we spread the word around that we were doing a book, even more material started pouring in from our hidden kitchens Texas radio community. The design process was very flexible. We were able to quickly and easily incorporate new ideas and images into the book. This project was conceived, written, designed and offered online in less than 3 months. That’s some kind of turnaround.
Leigh Haber was our editor for our first Hidden Kitchens book with Rodale, and she was the one who introduced us to this new world of on-demand publishing. It was great to collaborate and contemplate with her and with Blurb, new publishing models for these new economic time.
What was different about the process of doing the book on Blurb, as opposed to publishing it with a traditional publisher?
Blurb is working from a very different model than a traditional publisher. There’s no advance, no official editors, no art director for the book. We did most all of this work ourselves, with occasional support from their staff and Leigh Haber.
Our first book took about nine months from start to finish. This is a very different process. We decided to just have fun with a book we thought our listeners would like, create more of a road-trip, scrapbook, story-telling kind of book. We learned how to use the Blurb software to design the book ourselves, which gave us a lot more control, and taught us a new skill. We like the idea that we are pioneering a new publishing model that is more do-it-yourself, that is a much faster and more agile process.
We can take charge of the timing–how long we will take to make the book, and when we will publish it. But there are trade-offs. The book is more expensive to produce on a per-unit basis, and the publisher takes a chunk up top. We want to keep the book affordable enough while still being able to support the ongoing mission of The Kitchen Sisters to bring seldom heard voices and perspectives to the air. We are still figuring out how viable this new publishing model is. It’s fast and evolving. Will it help support our public radio work and our mentoring of young people and enable us to keep building community through storytelling? We’ll soon find out.
How did you come up with the name The Kitchen Sisters?
How did we get the name The Kitchen Sisters? We took our name from two eccentric brothers, Kenneth and Raymond Kitchen, who were stonemasons in Santa Cruz in the 1940s. You can see traces of their work all over the county –fireplaces, chimneys, porches– not to mention the yogi temple and goat milk bar they built by the light of the moon. A mysterious Byzantine bungalow with brick turrets that looks like it fell of the back of a pack of Camels. Then there’s the abalone towers they built to intercept messages from enemy submarines they believed were lurking in Monterey Bay.
It was Saturday night in 1979. We were cooking a salmon dinner for 12 in the funky kitchen on the commune Nikki had just moved into. At the same time we were reading about The Kitchen Brothers in a book about Santa Cruz architecture, preparing for an interview with the author on our show on our weekly show on KUSP Community Radio in Santa Cruz, California. We were so caught up in the thrall of these legends of local masonry that we didn’t even notice dinner was a disaster. As the salmon lay in ruins, we started calling ourselves The Kitchen Sisters. The next day, on our radio show, when the author told the story of The Kitchen Brothers, we told the story of The Kitchen Sisters. And the name stuck.
Why did you write a book focused on food and Texas?
“Hidden Kitchens: Texas” was inspired by our NPR radio special of the same name that was narrated by Willie Nelson with Robin Wright Penn and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. When we opened up the Hidden Kitchens hotline on NPR and asked listeners to tell about the kitchen rituals and traditions in their lives, nearly a third of the calls came from Texas. These people like their stories, and they like their food. The place is so vast and so varied and eccentric and so are the people who grow it, cook with it and celebrate with it. We collaborated with the amazing public radio station in Austin, KUT, and opened up the Hidden Kitchen Texas hotline. Even more great stories and leads came boring in. The radio special was only the tip of the iceberg. And not everyone listens to public radio. So when Blurb heard the special and liked it and thought it would make a cool book, and we knew how much more material we had that had never heard the light of day, and we jumped in. Besides, we love being in Texas. The music, the food, the people, it’s got Kitchen Sisters written all over it.
If you could bestow one piece of bookmaking advice on the world, what would it be?
The one piece of advice we would offer on creating a book is this: Our favorite aspect of this project was further involving our community in storytelling. It’s at the core of what we do, building community through storytelling. Look around you, shop in your own storytelling closet. See what elements you have that you might not have included elsewhere, or have done in another medium and think about creating a book. Not every book is meant to be published this way, but the Blurb book model went well with our material and our process. Have fun working with material you are passionate about, and give your readers something they can learn from and enjoy.
To learn more about the Kitchen Sisters visit their site here, or listen to the NPR broadcast from today online here!
