This is Denise Low, former Kansas Poet Laureate, for High Plains Public Radio Book Club.
It is with bitter-sweet pride that I share news that former Kansas resident and author Thomas Pecore Weso, my deceased husband, has won accolades for his 2023 Survival Food: Tales from a North Woods Cook. Like his other food memoir, Good Seeds: A Menominee Food Memoir, the new book has had great response. It was a Midwest Books Award Finalist, selected by Midwest Independent Publishers Association, and in August, 2024, the book is featured by the United States Library of Congress as a ‘Great Reads’ Title for the state of Wisconsin, for display at the National Book Festival’s “Roadmap to Reading” -– a vast space at the festival where every state has a table. Tom lived 25-plus years in Kansas, but he spent most of his life in Wisconsin, where he was born and enrolled in the Menominee Indian Tribe of Indians.
Tom enjoyed the High Plains region, especially times at the Cimarron Hotel. He grew up watching western films with his grandfather, who spoke Lakota and knew what those actors were really saying to John Wayne. A sense of humor is what makes his books easy to enjoy, even while readers find wisdom and historic perspectives. And yes, there are recipes.
Shared food made everyone relatives, in Tom’s mind. When we were courting, we had grocery store dates. So let me read a sample of this accreted food/story/humor/and love writing, based on a visit to a Lake Michigan shoreside tavern. The informants are knowledgeable locals of European descent:
Pan-Fried Smelt or Other Small Fish
“One fall, a couple of weeks after the tourist season ended, I was sitting in a tavern in Door County’s Baileys Harbor, just up the road from Green Bay, listening to local fishermen talk about smelt. They had been there awhile, as the empty beer bottles in front of them attested. The younger one said the easiest way to catch smelt was to stretch pantyhose around a coat hanger, walk along the shore, and scoop them up.
His companion, a grizzled old-timer, said his preferred method of fishing was to simply wade in the shallows, scoop the smelt out with his hands, and put them on the shore. He added that the easiest method for cleaning them was to bite off the heads. The entrails apparently came off with the heads. I presume he spit the heads out. His younger friend chuckled.
Cleaning these little fish is time consuming, even if you are just biting off their heads. If they are cleaned in the traditional way, removing the heads is optional. The entire smelt, including the bones, can be eaten. If the fish is served with the head attached, eat the head.”
The directions for pan-frying floured fish follows this passage.
Good Seeds focuses on Tom’s early days, and foodways, when he lived in his grandparents’ household on the reservation. Survival Food takes the leap to Tom’s teen years, in border towns, including learning how to eat frozen mescal worms with his cousin and how blue Jell-O is a way to keep his siblings from eating up his desserts. Tom Weso teaches us that food is more than survival—it is a spiritual medium that brings kinfolk of all backgrounds together to celebrate and to tell stories at the kitchen table.
Thomas Pecore Weso (1953–2023) was an author, educator, artist, and enrolled member of the Menominee Indian Nation of Wisconsin. His book Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2016, was reviewed widely and won a national Gourmand Award. He also wrote the children’s book Native American Stories for Kids (Rockridge Press, 2022), which was named a 2023 Kansas Notable Book. Weso was an alumnus of Haskell Indian Nations University and the University of Kansas, where he earned a master’s degree in Indigenous studies. He taught social science classes in KC area colleges for 20 years. He was a member of the First Congregational Church of Santa Rosa and a member of the Bear Clan. He died in Sonoma County, California, on July 14, 2023.
Former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low is author of over forty books of prose and poetry, including the memoir The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press), Jigsaw Puzzling: Essays (Meadowlark Press, Coffin Award), and Casino Bestiary: Poems (Spartan Press). Low is a founding board member of the national Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), and former board member of Associated Writing Programs. Forthcoming is House of Grace, House of Blood from the University of Arizona Press’s Sun Tracks series (2024). She and Thomas Weso founded Mammoth Publications, an independent press that specializes in Indigenous American and literary works. She resides in Sonoma County, California. www.deniselow.net
