Spring 2023 Showcase Feral

free feral
The Menu According to Big Mama

On my very first visit to her family’s compound in Waterford, Annie Hollowell’s cooking made Foxfire Ranch a home for me. Her salty greens and peach cobbler never fail to settle my nerves and acclimate me to the evening’s festivities. I had been living in the south for 6 years before I came to Foxfire, and still didn’t consider myself a southerner, partly because as a vegetarian I found it hard to eat traditional communal meals. Upon arrival, I was part of the family. By my next visit, Annie was making vegetarian adaptations to some of her side dishes to accommodate my diet. Within a year, I would adapt, too, succumbing to pescatarianism in order to welcome the Catfish she fried to crisp perfection, which reminded me of the best parts of my father’s cooking.
“The Menu According to Big Mama” features one of Annie Hollowell’s often extensive menus and evokes the sense of fun and merriment typical to an evening at Foxfire. The music is inspired by RL Burnside, a musician whose legacy could be considered dynastic in Hill Country. The backup vocals echo her announcement of each dish to suggest that the goodness of Annie’s cooking goes beyond the taste and nutrition to activate the heart and soul.

free feral plays with sound, song and story to curate multidimensional experiences which explore the spells and rituals that comprise our systems and selves and which enact new magic toward a kind, just and joyful future. As a musician and composer, they create scores for film, theatre, and dance using strings, loops, and vocals. As a writer, they like to explore non-fiction narratives through a poet’s eye view. In 2020, they co-founded Alphabet Sound Observatory offering a collection of sonic resources to women and gender-variant people of color in New Orleans to encourage empowerment and exploration. ASO is currently developing METEOR Resource Library with Girls Rock New Orleans. Their ongoing project, We Are the Promised Land is an altar to Black land legacies in North Mississippi that places a kaleidoscopic lens on inheritance and imagines how to channel reverberations of our ancestors’ actions into paths of generation and healing in the present. They are pursuing an MFA in Documentary Expression at the University of Mississippi.