Sarah Southern
Rise
I. Mother
Thousands of feet above sea level, I shapeshift. Hair brittles, skin cracks. Geography alters my microbiota—a community of bacteria, microorganisms, and viruses housed within my gut. I am depressed, though I do not know it. Soon, I will lose my last client whose constant texts and emails raise my blood pressure, spike my anxiety. I am (virtually) unemployed in this mile-high city. Friendship evades, contingent (it seems) on the dreaded question, “What do you do?” Proof of doing is the litmus test for relevancy, for mattering. I am thirty years old and childless, careerless. The day I lose my last client is the day I realize I have nothing left to do. Harsh, self-directed words settle in my soul. Sobs echo from those altering depths.
I cannot tell you why self-deprecation drives me to the kitchen junk drawer. There’s no clear correlation between subsiding sobs and a misplaced envelope. All I know is a final death of purpose ignites my hunger for cultivation. If I can’t breathe life into my vocation, perhaps I can breathe life into something else. I dig through Sexy Pizza and Sushi Den menus for the wrinkled envelope lodged between them. Inside is a plastic sandwich bag and handwritten instructions: “Hydrate with water, feed with flour. Should be ready in a week—Kacey.”
I examine the curious bag, half full of crusty, brown flakes. Kacey, a dear friend, says they can be revived, that flavor and crumb will erupt, eventually, from the brittle material. I transfer the contents into an old mason jar, add flour, add water, and place on the windowsill in indirect sunlight. Every day, I visit the milky concoction to feed, water, and watch time transform it. One week later, the flakes have shapeshifted into an undulating, foaming, living mass. A mother.
II. Levain
My mother wasn’t a natural baker, preferring Nature’s Own 100% whole wheat loaves to anything requiring strong hands and active dry yeast. Within our Christian fundamentalist community, household skills—especially bread making—and childrearing were elevated above professional pursuits. My mother scrubbed toilets, mopped the yellowing kitchen linoleum, and fed us Welsh Rarebit with Nature’s Own toast and Campbell’s tomato soup. We were the strange hybrid family within our fundamentalist community of natural home remedies and unprocessed ingredients. In my childhood North Carolina church, the men preached, and the women supplied the potluck tables with hearty soups and crusty loaves, passed out delicately wrapped boules during holidays, and packed peanut butter sandwiches for extra-long Sundays. These homemaking women were silent servants, deferring to men as their prophets, priests, protectors, and providers.
At ten years old, I had no voice beyond mimicry. I repeated beliefs that trickled down from the pulpit, chafing beneath the rigid confines of my sex. In quiet resistance, I began baking cookies and letting them burn, distancing myself from the cultural expectation to feed and serve. Still, there was no denying the delight of a fully stocked potluck table, the permeating aroma of fried chicken and biscuits wafting through the sanctuary toward the tail end of a sermon. My quiet resistance faltered at those potlucks with every dip of buttered rolls into layered soups. In unspoken rebellion, my appetency for the kneaded and handcrafted swelled. Pleasure dripped like butter into bowls, awakened a curiosity for complementary flavors. I didn’t want to bake while men preached. I didn’t want the words scrubbed from my soul, buried beneath submissive silence. Deep down, I wanted both: to be heard and to feed.
I was fifteen when I first encountered an ungendered kitchen. Deep in the Carolina mountains, high on an indigo ridgeline, my sister and I joined a small teenage cohort for a weeklong cooking camp. The details of how I ended up at such a place are lost to time. Every morning, after waking to birdsong and sipping coffee on the lodge’s wraparound patio, we gathered in the kitchen to work with Stu—a male chef, the only man I’d ever met who seemed at ease with women’s work.
I had recently entered a Food Network phase after aging out of PBS. Most evenings, I watched Bobby Flay throw down with cooks across America or Iron Chefs compete over bizarre ingredients. The church potluck table introduced me to food beyond my family’s unimaginative pantry. But from the Food Network, I learned about ingredients like edamame, uni, and yuzu. I watched skilled hands create unfamiliar yet exquisite dishes. Stu’s kitchen mirrored the professional kitchens I’d seen on TV with stainless steel appliances and countertops. He introduced us to basic kitchen etiquette, taught us how to prep and pickle. Every morning, we learned a new skill. Every evening, we cooked and ate together. Our meals weren’t as posh as the Iron Chef dishes, but still complex in their layered flavors and techniques. At the end of the week, Stu released the kitchen into our inexperienced hands. Now, it was our turn to throw down like Bobby Flay. We created a seasonal menu, sourced beefsteak tomatoes and southern peaches from the farmstand down the mountain; we roasted herbed chicken and potatoes. I baked the dessert: a tender peach cobbler topped with crumbly brown sugar and oats, removed from the oven perfectly crisp and bubbling. Unburned. That week with Stu was the first time I recognized food preparation as a communal act based on love, not role.
Without consistent work, I slink further into the sofa. The apartment swarms with accumulating clutter: dirty laundry, haphazard stacks of unread books, and blank journals. I should read. I should write. Instead, I watch 24 seasons of America’s Next Top Model. I tell myself: tomorrow, I will log into Indeed. To- morrow, I will update my resume. But tomorrow comes and I delay. I watch Tyra Banks’s infamous rant, “I WAS ROOTING FOR YOU, WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU!!!” And I wonder—who is rooting for me?
I struggle to feed myself, but I feed her. Slowly, the mother swells in the sunlit warmth, gaining mass with each spoonful of flour, evolving from a dingy lump to a yeasty, billowy creation. Within a week, she has expanded beyond her original source, chemically altered by the new climate and elevation, city water, and existing bacteria circulating our Denver apartment. Google tells me the process happening in the mason jar is called levain—the transition between unfed mother to full activation. The bubbled rising means this well-fed mother is ready to join a larger batch of flour and water, to shapeshift into a dough. Even in despair, my body craves the fermented, storied notes of time-infused flavor. It yearns for the comfort of sour bread and salted butter, the companionship of intoxicating cabernet.
According to blog posts and subreddits, sourdough thrives best when fed top-tier flour. Everyone recommends King Arthur and so I wander the small city Whole Foods, past the hot food bar and pumpkin-themed end caps, to the flour aisle, brimming with dozens of options from rye to whole to bread to semolina to buckwheat. I imagine buying one of each and creating concoctive doughs with various ratios. I imagine my tiny kitchen overrun with fermenting bowls of every kind of dough. I imagine what it would feel like to be surrounded by multitudes.
My childhood haunts me so many years removed from fundamentalism. No matter the steps I make toward feminine empowerment in the fifteen years since cooking camp, I remain unempowered and unemployed. Against my will, I am reduced to homemaking in this intermittent space between losing my last client and finding future work. I nearly neglect the mother, nearly abandon the flour on the counter in favor of a heavy pour and more yelling Tyra. But something beckons, tugs at my tender core. I am hungry, and that’s enough to stall my procrastination, scour Pinterest for a recipe, and pray that my fermenting levain can summon a future loaf.
III. Fermentation
Michelle, my new therapist, sits in front of a glass wall overlooking an outdoor water feature that’s slowly freezing over. I’d settled on Michelle after my initial consultation with Cindy who talked over me and said, “Men are like cavemen. They need to provide and women need to let them.” Michelle offers a calm presence; she’s soft-spoken and gentle. I’d filled out a lengthy questionnaire preceding the session, and Michelle moves through my responses, pausing on the question about employment.
“It says here you recently lost your last client,” says Michelle.
I shift on the loveseat facing the picture window. Outside, it’s gusty—the sort of chilled late October day I’ll soon learn pulls winter over the front range into the lower plains, blanketing still-golden leaves with early snow.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say, pulling my sweater tighter. “The truth is, I’ve been lost for a long time.”
“What does being lost feel like for you?” asks Michelle.
If I learned anything from fundamentalism, it’s repression. I’ve never given much credence to the feeling of feelings or the spaces they occupy. But Michelle’s question provokes long-buried words, invites contemplation for my stalled progression. Did job loss trigger my despair or compound it? I watch the golden leaves whip around the courtyard outside. Inside, I am barren like the bent aspens, bereft of ideas and inspiration, uncertain how to rise from this concaved identity.
“It feels like . . . worthlessness,” I whisper through tears.
I glance up at Michelle, the virtual stranger I’ll eventually spend countless days with and never learn much about.
“What makes you feel worthy?” asks Michelle.
I laugh through burgeoning sobs because it’s silly that the only sense of worthiness I’ve known lately is in a kitchen. In the ensuing months since reviving the mother, I’ve made dozens of boules, feeding and refeeding her in an ongoing cycle of revival, fermentation, baking, and eating. While the dough rises, I sit at my secondhand table and write as wind whips and snow flurries beyond the foggy apartment windows. I write to the cadence of time ticking between multiple rounds of stretching, folding, and resting the dough. I slice into homemade bread smeared with honey butter and scribble words into the margins of newly cracked open books. Baking bread has become my enduring ritual.
So I tell Michelle about this newfound “hobby,” about Kacey sending dried flakes halfway across the country, about the resurrection of a mother, about her transformation, about the dough rising on my countertop. I tell her that I’ve been writing again, though trepidatiously. That I don’t know what I’m doing, that I don’t trust my words, that I feel untethered from purpose, from belonging.
“Keep at it,” says Michelle. “This matters.”
In her memoir Take This Bread, Sara Miles writes of her absurd conversion that began with a bite of bread and a sip of wine. One Sunday, while walking past her neighborhood Episcopal church, she felt a mysterious compulsion to enter and receive her first communion. Even Miles didn’t know what it was about that bite and sip that ignited spiritual hunger and desire to belong and, eventually, to feed others. Weekly, she returned to the church for more nourishment and connection. The hunger eventually compelled her to open a food pantry to serve the broader community, to participate in the sort of feeding that had been salvific to her own body and soul. Miles quotes Bill Swing, the now-retired Episcopal bishop of California, “There’s a hunger beyond food that’s expressed in food, and that’s why feeding is always a kind of miracle.”
Perhaps I’ve always been hungry for the communal power of a potluck. Internally, I damned the projections of “proper roles,” the old-fashioned allegiance to male power and female submission. Role failure haunted me into adulthood when I struggled to acclimate in marriage, to adhere to a particular standard of womanhood where bread doesn’t burn and wombs don’t close. But my happiest memories, when I’ve felt the most connected to and equal with every gathered person, are at the table, passing dishes, breaking bread. Always, I’ve been compelled by the miraculous nature of stalled time between full plates and diminished ones, made even more enjoyable when flavors connect and pair and elevate.
In a glass Pyrex dish, illuminated by the filtered late afternoon light, a dough ferments. Bacteria metabolizes flour, develops flavor, texture, structure. This dough looks nothing like it did six hours before when it was still tacky and rigid. Now, it shines and rises, almost pulsing with expanding carbon dioxide. I cradle the dough, gently deflate the bubbled mass, and fold it into itself. I smooth it and soothe it, work it into a reflective ball, and let it rest.
IV. Rest
Sourdough endures. In 2019, a team of scientists resurrected the hardened remains of a 4,500-year-old mother unearthed from Egyptian clay pots. They coaxed and fed the long dormant bacterial colony until it awakened, then baked a loaf sweeter and richer than any crumb they’d ever tasted. This is the wonder of wild yeast. An immortal substance with haunting, enduring flavor.
For centuries, sourdough has traversed the globe, shapeshifting and dying and resurrecting. Feeding the masses. From Egypt to Rome, Greece to France, and eventually, to California, when French bakers journeyed with their sour- dough mothers to feed gold-mining prospectors.
I wade into ancient territory. I taste flavors that transcend millennia. I imag- ine the Israelites fleeing Egypt for the Promised Land, carrying their own earthen jars of Egyptian starter, baking desert bread until the flour runs out. I imagine Christ summoning wild yeast from the heavens, miraculously feeding hungry people with ethereal wonder loaves. A preacher and a baker. Not too holy or too manly to sit amongst the people and offer sustenance.
I begin to discover the prevalence of sourdough in Colorado. Next door, the Japanese bakery lures Pearl Street customers with the yeasty, tangy promise of Hokkaido, a decadently fermented bread made soft with a water roux called Tangzhong. In Nederland, a tiny mountain town just over the front range, bakers grind local wheat and maintain enough levain for daily sourdough pizza. A restaurant in Breckenridge specializes in sourdough snickerdoodle and chocolate chip cookies. The allure of flavor draws me out, summons me into fresh, thin air. Weekly, I meet with Michelle. The compounded shame I felt in our first session lessens on this safe loveseat where a kind presence meets my sunken heart and slowly dismantles the stigma attached to my being. We venture deep into the recesses of memory to identify dogma-informed ontology. She guides me toward internal safety, clearing a path to self-trust through embodied contemplative practices. Together, we find a relational rhythm as the snow falls and melts and the days lengthen as the earth tilts. Some days, we talk of little. On other days, I cannot stop my mind or mouth from self-deprecating condemnation. My emotions ebb and shift according to the weather and my own sense of worth so attached, still, to output. Michelle is my constant witness, an enduring presence. On the low days, she reminds me of my progress. On the hopeful days, she affirms my ability. I still do not fully trust my worth or words, but I am beginning to see that Michelle does. I am beginning to see that she is rooting for me.
I lift the gaseous mass from the proofing basket and delicately place it on the countertop. The floured dough bears the imprint of the basket’s ridges, which I slice across like a surgeon cutting into exposed skin. Google tells me this technique is called scoring, which allows for moisture to release from the slow-baking boule. With this intentional cut, a dough can reach its full potential, and form upwards instead of collapsing outwards. I lift the lid from the steaming Dutch oven, and place the final dough inside, ready for firing.
V. Fire
Thousands of feet above sea level, I shapeshift. Late afternoon sunlight caresses every cracked skin cell, warms my dormant body. I am sitting with my husband on the patio of a mountain café in Evergreen, Colorado, where the atmosphere radiates spring. We thaw together amidst the echoes of fading winter, surrounded by cracking trees, trickling water, dripping icicles. Tulips emerge from shadowed snowbanks, thrashers flit and sing. We sit in short sleeves and eat smeared avocado on sour toast. I want to try every sourdough variety, cultivate my palette like a gluten sommelier. I am talking about my love for the craft, about this impulse I now have to bake and to taste. I’ve become obsessed with the particularities of a proper rise, the artistry of a score. I am talking about the mother, about the levain, about the fermentation, and the jolt of joy I felt when I pulled that first loaf from the oven all those months ago. Rough and malformed but wondrous. Delicious.
A woman at the next table coughs awkwardly, interrupts my ode to wild yeast with a question. “I’m so sorry,” she says, “but are you talking about sourdough?”
“Umm . . . yes,” I say, embarrassed by the rise of my eager voice.
“This is strange, but I’ve been trying to find a starter and I know I’m a total stranger but . . . would you be willing to share yours with me?”
There’s an Amish version of sourdough called friendship bread, meant to be shared along with the starter used in its formation. In this tradition, the baking and giving of bread transcends unfamiliarity, unifying strangers through the act of feeding and the continuation of feeding. I am beginning to see a way through my undoing that began with Kacey’s gift to me. This café stranger becomes a sort of pen pal for a few months. I mail her a dried version of the mother. She sends me a postcard about baking her first loaf in an outdoor pizza oven. My neighbor Todd asks for a bit of starter, which he trades for preserved vegetables he grew, harvested, and canned over the summer. I post on the Nextdoor app, offering free starter for anyone willing to pick it up from our front porch. I discover a cohort of local sourdough novices, drawn together by the craft and allure of homemade bread.
Sourdough connects me to a once breathless city. Words are my lifeline as I devour books on fermentation, scribble notes in once empty journals, and launch a Substack newsletter. Those crusty, brown flakes from months ago revived my creative dormancy, renewed my attachment to place. “What do you do?” is the question I’ve dreaded since graduating college, launched into a world of pro- fessional uncertainty. We are a culture of consolidation, condensing people into identities of action over identities of worth. Recently, I heard about an initiative that brings strangers together for a shared dinner where professional conversation is forbidden. No one can ask, “What do you do?” Instead, they are encouraged to connect beyond their nine-to-fives. The temptation to impress or evade is eliminated as hungry folks unite over flavor and humanity.
In sharing my starter, trading loaves for vegetables, and publishing my words, I find new tables. Ritual restored my sense of purpose, offered cultivation in place of depletion. What do I do? I am living.