A Conversation with Crescent Dragonwagon
Mystical musing on communes, Stevie Wonder, and sex-defying acts
Published in Compound Butter, Summer 2020.
I was nineteen years old when I moved into the Zü—it was a big, brick fortress on the outskirts of college where those of us who could no longer stomach the cafeteria food had opted to live (I never did tire of the misspelling of Pollack, as in a Polish person, for pollock on Fish Fridays in the cafeteria, but I did tire of eating steamed pollock). Every night, Sunday to Thursday, we ate dinner together, and every two weeks, I was partnered up and tasked with cooking for thirty housemates. Living in the Zü came with an inherited set of ideals, most prominently that we cook vegetarian food for communal meals; only a few of us were vegetarian, but those were the rules, written in stone. Generously, my mom mailed me a James Beard Award winning tome called The Passionate Vegetarian—as big as King James, with some 1,000 recipes in it. The cover featured the author holding a bowl of vegetables on her head, whose wide grin seemed to extend off the page. The author’s name: Crescent Dragonwagon.
I started cooking from Dragonwagon’s book (and invariably reading the headnotes) and it was like being transported directly into intimate conversation with her. She had just lost the love of her life, Ned, in a tragic bicycle accident. Most of the book was written while he was alive, and edited after he’d passed, so there was a feeling of fresh grief woven throughout.
Who was this woman who named herself Dragon- wagon and could confidently intermingle recipes with stories of love, longing, and tragedy? A friend looked up some of her other books and reported back that the titles included This Is the Bread I Baked For Ned and, more mysteriously, I Hate My Brother Harry (I later discovered these were both children’s books).
In the years since, I’ve never gotten her out of my mind, nor stopped making the occasional pie crust with sesame seeds and sesame oil. Slowly, more of her cook- books (seven in total) came across my path. Her recipes tend towards simplicity with hippie flair: wool sweater with bright necklace kinda style. They felt austere and crunchy when I was in college, craving mountains of melting cheese, but now seem prescient of L.A.’s vegetable focused restaurants—miso sauces on sweet potatoes, for example, carrot dips, and soups with swirls of cilantro salsa verde. When I started researching commune cookbooks, I discovered she had written The Commune Cookbook, published in 1972, when she was only 16. It was around that time that she and her then husband christened themselves the Dragonwagons; she Crescent, he Crispin.
Like her fantastical name suggests, Dragonwagon is a world builder. Her first marriage to Crispin and the rural commune were a bust, but several years after that marriage ended, she fell in love with Ned Shank. Ned was a historic preservationist, and together they founded a bed and breakfast in Arkansas. Called Dairy Hollow House, the small inn included an upscale restaurant doing farm to table before it was rote. It won innumerable awards locally and nationally, and was later converted into a writer’s colony. During these eras, she wrote more than twenty children’s books, including one which won the Coretta Scott King Award, two novels, and a biography of Stevie Wonder—yes, that Stevie Wonder.
Dragonwagon has spent the better part of her life creating, exploring, and describing spaces considered alternative and utopian. I wanted to learn about her life. What happens when you start as such an idealist? Does it stick as you age, or does it fade?
When we scheduled our call in early March, she was in Fayetteville, Arkansas. “Let’s shoot for around 7:10,” I texted from Portland, Oregon. “OK!” she responded. “9:10 Dragontime.”
Our conversation meandered wildly. Here are excerpts, edited and condensed.
