Crystal Wilkinson knows that cooking is intergenerational; it’s legacy and séance. The spirits haunting her delectable culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes From Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, Jan. 23), include fourth great-grandmother Grandma Aggy and great-grandmother Lillie Wilkinson. And then there’s her grandmother, Christine. Wilkinson’s mother, Dorsie, struggled with mental illness, so Granny Christine, along with her husband, Silas, raised Wilkinson on 64 acres of wooded land in Indian Creek, Kentucky, in Appalachia. Or Affrilachia, as poet Frank X Walker dubbed the loamy rural environs. Wilkinson was part of the Affrilachian Poets Collective that Walker founded in 1991 to celebrate the Black denizens of the storied region—but also to counter their erasure.

Wilkinson, former poet laureate of Kentucky, O. Henry Prize winner, and novelist, hopped on a video call to discuss how Praisesong came to be; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

OK, folks are coming over for dinner; they hail from West Virginia. What should I make?

Greens are always good.

Well, you do have a killer recipe for meatless greens. But chicken and dumplings has become a go-to dish for you, which is funny for a onetime vegetarian.

It’s not in the book, but I also used to do some really good, soulful cooking with tofu. I make chicken dumplings so much now because all those years, I tried my damnedest to make chicken and dumplings. I would make something that was…edible.

In many ways, the book defies a recipe. But you teach writing, so for someone interested in memoir, what would the recipe be?

Last spring I taught a class in fractured narrative, or hybridity. I think that’s kind of the way I’ve always written. I love the short story. I love a fragmented novel, or a novel in stories. There are ways that form can meet content. A way of stacking one thing on another for a cumulative effect versus thinking about a more linear narrative. So, I think the mosaic and the fractured narrative is a perfectly appropriate form for the memoir. My next book is going to be similarly fragmented.

Fiction or nonfiction?

Nonfiction. It’s about my mother. You know, I sort of resisted the cookbook part of [Praisesong]. My intention was to have the recipes appear as my grandmother spoke them, within the narrative of each chapter, and not pull them out. Coming from the food world, my editor said, “Don’t you want people to cook from the book, Crystal?” I said,“Mmm, if they want to.” “Well, wouldn’t it be great if we hired a food tester, tested these out, and turned them into more contemporary recipes that people can actually cook from? We’ll work with you on that.” And I was like, “Mmm, OK.”

It’s a gorgeous book.

We had such a creative team. They were all women of color that worked on the book—the photography, the props, everything. They had me in tears every five minutes. I had talked to the prop person, and she asked me what I felt were little random questions—Would your grandmother have done this or done that? She read the book, she took everything I said and went around to antique shops to find [things] like the yellow bowl that is an exact replica of my grandmother’s bowl. I brought my grandma’s dress with me to New York, and the way that they hung it up with lace behind it—it was amazing.

The production design really meets your prose, your poetry.

I felt like the kitchen ghosts were present even when they were cooking the food to take the pictures. It was work, yes, but it was such a spiritual experience, too.

You often mention your cousins in the book. What have been their reactions?

The highest compliment was when one of my older cousins said, basically—and this is my word—You are our griot. “You are the keeper. You keep Granny and Granddaddy alive. Even the ones beyond them, you kept them alive.”

This book inspires readers to come to you with their own family stories. Has there been a reaction you just know you’re never going to forget?

I’ve been on book tours before this one, but I don’t think that I’ve ever been so tired. Every stop, there were tears. People would come up and wouldn’t even be able to say anything. We would just hold hands. And that was every night for 30 days. It was really intense, but it also let me know that all things are possible. Meaning that I’ve always kind of felt isolated in this body—with this particular voice, with this particular twang, being from Appalachia, being Black in a mostly white area. But the reception as I went across the country let me know how really universal human experiences are. There was an understanding that this book and the research that I did, along with the genealogical part of it, the personal part of it, are very much in the conversation in this country, especially now with JD Vance and all that. Is that Appalachia, or is this Appalachia, or are they both Appalachia? I feel like this book helps us to be able to continue to have a conversation. There’s no monolith. There’s not a one-eyed region or a one-eyed people. We’re multitudes. We are multitudes.

You’ve described your childhood as “idyllic.” Which is striking because your mother struggled with mental illness, so your grandparents raised you. Some people, would read “idyllic” and think, Yeah, but….

I think we all have that Yeah, but….I wouldn’t be a writer, I don’t think, if I hadn’t been raised by my grandparents in that particular way. You know, mother loss was there. So, my mother—where she was and what was going on with her, which was a big secret—was always at the back of my mind. But in front of me was a creek and minnows and trees, and I would make a pilgrimage to go talk to the cows (my grandfather had milk cows) and go see the pigs. A lot of this helped fuel my imagination.

When did you know that you wanted to write?

Early on, I was curious. I either wanted to write or draw. I did both. I don’t think I tell many people this, but my scholarship to college was in visual arts. I changed to journalism because I wanted to be a writer. That was my primary love: books. And my grandmother read to me every night. She always told the story that after I had read all the books in the house, I started to write my own. I remember not even being able to write and her saying, “Well, what would happen next?” And me telling her the story and her writing it down.

So she’s a writer’s room ghost, too. OK, so which vegetable shortening do you use?

I probably use Crisco most often. I’ve used some shortenings from the health food store that I think are better for you. But they’re not better for the biscuits.

Lisa Kennedy writes for the New York Times, Variety, the Denver Post, and other publications.