Write on: Zest for life

My interviews take longer since I moved to Louisiana.

What would’ve once been 30- or 45-minute conversations seem to stretch to an hour, sometimes two these days.

I’ll get to a story interview and end up spending the first 20 minutes chatting with the person before I’ll ever pull out my notebook and ask my first formal question.

I hung out with puppet-makers Clay Achee and Barton Gilley in Achee’s garage, taking in the intricate details of a puppet they’d made for a short film. Pat Shingleton showed me how his green screen works. And after the flood, oh man. I could’ve spent all day hearing those stories of sacrifice and selflessness.

More recently, I sat down with a couple who invited me to cook dinner with them after our interview. One minute I was talking with Jamjuree and Jo Mixon about their urban, artsy downtown apartment for our 225 Extra: Spaces & Places issue, and the next I was at the stove making soup. File that one under “things I never thought I’d do during an interview.”

Jamjuree moved here from Thailand, and her husband, Jo, is a Baton Rouge native. They cook every day, and their favorite thing to make is Thai soup with a Louisiana twist: tom kha served gumbo-style over rice. They handed me a knife bigger than my head to chop lemongrass and tomatoes for the soup.

The soup was creamy, savory and spicy as all get-out. The Mixons laughed sympathetically as I struggled to handle the heat, choking down water after each bite. But I couldn’t stop eating it. It might be one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

As a non-native of Baton Rouge, I can’t help but marvel at how different this place is than where I’m from. The food, the beads, the making of everything into a party. But these interview experiences are what I think about the most. I did a lot of interviews as a young journalist in Florida. No one ever invited me to stay over for dinner.

I’ve been chalking it up to a few things: that famous Southern hospitality, the slower pace of life here and maybe even a conversation/storytelling style that’s different. People tell stories here in detail—often answering my questions before I even have a chance to formally ask them.

I reflected on that as I was editing our cover story about why non-natives moved back here.

This is what I’m learning: When people talk about missing the Louisiana “culture” or the “people,” that’s what they mean—that here, you might end up cooking dinner with strangers, simply because they were nice enough to invite you.

Just like the people in our story, there are things I’ll always miss about my home in South Florida. My family, my favorite restaurants, the smell of the ocean, the swaying of the palm trees.

But I also look at Louisiana in wide-eyed wonder: the bayous, the crawfish boils, the pretty Garden District houses and spunky Spanish Town shotguns. That’s the “zest” for life that Sally Davis, the Eliza Restaurant and Bar owner in our cover story, told us about missing when she moved away from here.

But maybe what she really missed were those long, slow stories, too.

A few days after my interview with the Mixons, they asked me if I wanted to come cook again. This time, we made a pork dish and played cards.

And maybe it’s that easy. A story assignment turns into a conversation turns into a friendship. That’s Louisiana.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.