Articles
USA Today: Life of ‘Pie’: Writer finds poetry in the fruit of her labor
In Kate Lebo’s life, pie and poetry are inextricably linked, both professionally and personally. For amateurs, too, both are often called upon to fill a hole that is less physical than metaphysical, addressing, each in its way, our deepest desires and needs. And we believe that both hold some sweet and some sour truths between their covers, whether cloth and cardboard or butter and flour.
Seattle Times: Kate Lebo casts a spell with poems and pie
Her recipes are magic spells, just like her poems, which open up delight and self-recognition in equal measure.
City Arts Magazine: Eat Your Words
Kate Lebo lives in a state of self-discovery. Seated on a dark wood banquette at Bellingham’s busy Temple Bar, drenched in the steel-bright light of an early Northwest evening, she sips an Old Fashioned and peruses the menu. Lebo is on a cross-country tour promoting her first book, A Commonplace Book of Pie, and after three weeks on the East Coast she’s arrived at her undergraduate stomping grounds for a poetry reading. She’s also planning to eat—something she tends to forget when she’s on the road.
City Arts Magazine: Kate Lebo’s “The Pie Lady’s Manifesto” And More
On a bright Father’s Day at the Hedreen Gallery, poet and baker Kate Lebo read to a small crowd from her new zine, “The Pie Lady’s Manifesto.” But there was no pie served. Instead, photographers Natalie Shields and Timothy Rysdyke manned a table covered in strawberries, dipping sugar, champagne and jugs of orange juice. Lebo’s tiny, hand bound, oven-fresh zine was scattered about. On its cover, two illustrated women in full-skirted midcentury dresses open a refrigerator to reveal a naked female torso. A disembodied, perfectly coiffed female head floats above, black X’s over her eyes. The eight chapters inside address such non-saccharine topics as identity crisis, the Cult of Domesticity, sexism and suicide.
Capitol Hill Seattle Blog: Capitol Hill pie pro Kate Lebo wants you to get a Pie School degree”
For Lebo, pie isn’t simply crust and a filling. It is an artistic medium with endless opportunities for self-expression. In the bestselling zine Lebo put out “A Commonplace Book of Pie,” she begins with a quote from Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In Lebo’s world, pie is a folk art, a science, and a philosophy.
In Kate Lebo’s life, pie and poetry are inextricably linked, both professionally and personally. For amateurs, too, both are often called upon to fill a hole that is less physical than metaphysical, addressing, each in its way, our deepest desires and needs. And we believe that both hold some sweet and some sour truths between their covers, whether cloth and cardboard or butter and flour.
Her recipes are magic spells, just like her poems, which open up delight and self-recognition in equal measure.
City Arts Magazine: Eat Your Words
Kate Lebo lives in a state of self-discovery. Seated on a dark wood banquette at Bellingham’s busy Temple Bar, drenched in the steel-bright light of an early Northwest evening, she sips an Old Fashioned and peruses the menu. Lebo is on a cross-country tour promoting her first book, A Commonplace Book of Pie, and after three weeks on the East Coast she’s arrived at her undergraduate stomping grounds for a poetry reading. She’s also planning to eat—something she tends to forget when she’s on the road.
City Arts Magazine: Kate Lebo’s “The Pie Lady’s Manifesto” And More
On a bright Father’s Day at the Hedreen Gallery, poet and baker Kate Lebo read to a small crowd from her new zine, “The Pie Lady’s Manifesto.” But there was no pie served. Instead, photographers Natalie Shields and Timothy Rysdyke manned a table covered in strawberries, dipping sugar, champagne and jugs of orange juice. Lebo’s tiny, hand bound, oven-fresh zine was scattered about. On its cover, two illustrated women in full-skirted midcentury dresses open a refrigerator to reveal a naked female torso. A disembodied, perfectly coiffed female head floats above, black X’s over her eyes. The eight chapters inside address such non-saccharine topics as identity crisis, the Cult of Domesticity, sexism and suicide.
Capitol Hill Seattle Blog: Capitol Hill pie pro Kate Lebo wants you to get a Pie School degree”
For Lebo, pie isn’t simply crust and a filling. It is an artistic medium with endless opportunities for self-expression. In the bestselling zine Lebo put out “A Commonplace Book of Pie,” she begins with a quote from Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In Lebo’s world, pie is a folk art, a science, and a philosophy.
Kate Lebo lives in a state of self-discovery. Seated on a dark wood banquette at Bellingham’s busy Temple Bar, drenched in the steel-bright light of an early Northwest evening, she sips an Old Fashioned and peruses the menu. Lebo is on a cross-country tour promoting her first book, A Commonplace Book of Pie, and after three weeks on the East Coast she’s arrived at her undergraduate stomping grounds for a poetry reading. She’s also planning to eat—something she tends to forget when she’s on the road.
On a bright Father’s Day at the Hedreen Gallery, poet and baker Kate Lebo read to a small crowd from her new zine, “The Pie Lady’s Manifesto.” But there was no pie served. Instead, photographers Natalie Shields and Timothy Rysdyke manned a table covered in strawberries, dipping sugar, champagne and jugs of orange juice. Lebo’s tiny, hand bound, oven-fresh zine was scattered about. On its cover, two illustrated women in full-skirted midcentury dresses open a refrigerator to reveal a naked female torso. A disembodied, perfectly coiffed female head floats above, black X’s over her eyes. The eight chapters inside address such non-saccharine topics as identity crisis, the Cult of Domesticity, sexism and suicide.
For Lebo, pie isn’t simply crust and a filling. It is an artistic medium with endless opportunities for self-expression. In the bestselling zine Lebo put out “A Commonplace Book of Pie,” she begins with a quote from Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In Lebo’s world, pie is a folk art, a science, and a philosophy.
Interviews
Wisconsin Public Radio: Writer Discusses the Poetry of Pies with Anne Strainchamps for 45 North.
94.9 KUOW: Kate Lebo Serves Up Slices of Pie Horoscopes
Ploughshares Magazine: Cookbooks, Compost Heaps, and Poetry Booby Traps: A Conversation with Poet and Pie-maker Kate Lebo
I know that baking and writing both start, for me, with raw material. That’s why I like fruit pie—the fruit, the colors, the textures, the seasonality, the deadlines of rot and fridge decay, their consumability. When I’m done I get to have more, and for me hunger has always been something I experience, as I’m eating, for the thing I’m going to eat next.
