Billy Renkl: A Breakfast Conversation

Love and Grits and the Clink of China Cups

For subscribers both free and paid:

In the coming months, Poor Man’s Feast will be featuring breakfast conversations with a wide variety of artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It will almost always include a recipe.

Each conversation will be released for paid subscribers only and live in the archives. Free subscribers will have access to a portion of the conversation, as always. A portion of the proceeds of every breakfast conversation will be donated to a number of organizations dedicated to feeding children at both the macro and micro levels, beginning with Save the Children.

Thank you - Elissa

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Photography by Susan Bryant

Back in the early days of Covid, when life felt like the first ten minutes of the movie The Andromeda Strain — none of us really knew what was going on, or what was going to happen, or the precise (or even vague) level of our danger with any accuracy — I found myself going inward.

By this I do not mean closing the front door and just moving my meetings to Zoom, which I did; we all did that. I felt, and continue to feel, that Covid was the great cosmic downshift, the great tap-on-the-shoulder from He/She/They/It who requested in some fashion that we stop already and look: look at what might be if only we ceased running and fighting and needing to be right and needing to get ahead. If nothing else, Covid showed me how profoundly connected we were and are, and how much beauty we are surrounded by, every minute of every day, if we’d only open our eyes for a few minutes.

I do know this: in my life and immediate community, the bees returned; the birds came back, and the world — amidst such death and abject sorrow — was beautiful. A light here requires a shadow there, said Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, and she was right. It was not limited to the natural world, though, that was suddenly no longer being sprayed to kill the weeds and invasives and everything else along with it; the beauty extended to music and art. I remember watching the clip of Italians in Siena stepping out onto their balconies to sing together, and I wept for us all, for the knowledge that, at core, humans retreat to the quietly divine even at the very worst of moments, and even if we do not want to admit it. We are the storytelling species, the art-makers, the beauty seekers. And one of the art-makers whose work I fell in love with during Covid — hook, line, and sinker — was Billy Renkl.

I knew of Billy’s work from his stunning collaborations with his sister, the extraordinary writer Margaret Renkl, whose writing has saved and continues to save me when I begin to lose hope for humanity. I didn’t put two and two together: Billy is married to my friend Susan Bryant, also a visual artist whose beautiful work I discovered in the early days of lockdown. All of which means: I surrounded myself with art during those days, and long after they were over, the need for it in my life has stuck. I fell hard for Billy’s illustrations for The Comfort of Crows, and I follow his work, which is ineffable, wherever it is possible to see it. And (almost) more than anything else, I awaken every morning to see what he has posted on social media: a daily photograph taken at dawn during a walk on, as Billy calls it, the most beautiful morning in the history of the world.

Billy is a Southerner; he and his siblings grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and he now teaches drawing and illustration at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. I had the sense that he might have something to say about breakfast, and I was right — even breakfast-for-dinner, which is one of my favorite things in the world. Here is what he shared:

“Plenty” - courtesy of Billy Renkl. Used by permission.

BR: First let me say this: I have no understanding of people who suffer through breakfast with their Sinners At The Hands Of An Angry God Brand Unsweetened Rye Flakes With Added Wheat Germ (Bought on sale. In bulk.) That's not the life I want for myself.

EA: Fair enough. I have eaten many breakfasts in the South, and they have never once involved unsweetened rye flakes with added wheat germ. Red-eye gravy, yes, but no wheat germ. But to the questions at hand: of all meals, breakfast seems to me to be the most personal and ritualistic. What is on your table every morning? Does it change on the weekends? Are you the weekend breakfast-maker?

BR: I still wake up hungry, every single morning. My wife does not. In this as in so many things, she is a mystery. The dog needs to go out when she hears me getting up, which means I'll have to get the sort of dressed that will do if I leave the porch light off. Then I stand in the cold, dark kitchen and think about what will be my pre-breakfast (the prekfast?): it's almost always three chocolate chip cookies. Unless it's four. You'd think I'd get tired of chocolate cookies in the dark every morning, but you'd be wrong.

After I walk, and shower, and the sun comes up, and I let the dog out again, and the day launches – then I eat actual breakfast. My breakfast is pretty straightforward, some combination of these few things: yogurt, granola, fruit, toast with butter and jam.

EA: I've found that the children of breakfast people tend to grow up to be breakfast people. Is this true in your case? Did you grow up in a breakfast-loving household? What was your childhood breakfast tradition like? 

BR: We were post-Vatican II Catholics, and my parents loved the Sunday evening "folk" service. The brilliance of this arrangement, not lost on my parents I'm sure, was that we got to sleep in before a big, loud family breakfast on Sunday morning and still go to mass that night.

Sunday breakfast was the only elaborate breakfast of the week, and by elaborate I'm referring to volume. My mom grew up on a solidly pragmatic cotton/peanut farm in south Alabama and my dad had no family food traditions at all. Sunday mornings they worked in tandem and with fierce intent: pancakes or waffles, grits, scrambled eggs, fruit, bacon, sausage, and the other sausage. Because this was Alabama and sugar maples don't make it that far south, we had Mrs. Butterworth's – which I am aware is amber-colored high fructose corn syrup – and she's in my cabinet right now and I am 235% fine with that.

EA: I suspect you’re right about Mrs. Butterworth. Also, is it odd to say that this Jewish New Yorker from Queens played guitar for four years of Catholic Newman House folk clubs while in college? The Sunday evening folk mass thing seemed to be very popular schedule-wise among my Catholic friends, even in New England. Given Mrs Butterworth but also the chocolate chip cookie situation, I suspect a sweet/salty sensibility. Which is why ham and syrup and biscuits work so well. Was your dad a breakfast guy?

BR: Sometimes, when breakfast was late or my dad was operating solo, he would make the perfect breakfast sandwich: a good salty ham with sharp cheddar cheese and mayo on cinnamon-raisin bread and butter used for grilling in a skillet. I stopped eating meat almost forty years ago, but if I slipped, it would be for that sandwich. It had the perfect breakfast taste trifecta: salty, sweet, fat. [EA: I am assuming the mayo was Duke’s?]

 That's pretty much what you would need to launch any day of the week, of course. As it happens, a slice of chocolate cake and some barbeque potato chips also have salty, sweet, and fat in spades. I'm not saying I had that for one hurried breakfast last week, and I'm not saying I didn't.