We recently connected with Lilah Juergens and have shared our conversation below.
Lilah , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is the one I’m working on right now. in 2024, I was in a deep transformational time in my life. Some would say it was because it was my saturn return, but I would say it was just a time when I was finally held by community enough to face the darkest parts of myself and my past head on. Throughout the year, I poured myself into my poetry, writing approximately one poem a month, allowing myself time to really chew on the deeper layers of my psyche. I ended up with 13 poems, a baker’s dozen (extremely suitable for a pastry chef), spanning topics from bipolar awareness to trans rights to the main theme of the collection which is “the hole where the love was supposed to be”, culminating in a vivid picture of my life that tells a story of resilience and transformation. I’m currently recording these 13 poems into an album, with music written by me. This album, top to bottom, only has transgender hands touching it – from me, my producer, and every featured musician on the album all being trans. The album is entitled “Carrie on Cocaine: confessions of a bipolar pastry chef: 10 poems, 2 letters, a manifesto, and several holes to be filled”. This has been the most meaningful work of my life, and I can’t wait for you all to be able to enjoy it.
Lilah , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m a person who wears a lot of hats, but at the core these days I offer two main things: cookies and poems.
I have always been into food my whole life, from a young age my dream was to be an iron chef. As I grew up, I poured myself into learning molecular gastronomy and modernist techniques for manipulating flavor and started working in kitchens ran by chefs of michelin pedigrees. Over time, I grew sick of the restaurant industry and wanted to offer something of my own on my own terms, so I started making cookies with unique seasonal flavors you can’t find elsewhere. Think chamomile lemon, marigold raspberry, tamarind chili pineapple, makrut lime thai curry, blueberry coriander, and more, all made with ancient grain flours and locally produced grass fed butter and heritage eggs. One day at the farmer’s market, while handing out samples of a recipe test for feedback on a new flavor, a 4 year old asked if she could have one of the “Tall Lady Cookies”, and my brand was born. As “Tall Lady Cookies”, I offer boutique and wholesome cookies you can’t find anywhere else, made with seasonal and locally produced ingredients.
As my poetic life goes – I was always into Andrea Gibson growing up; as a trans kid in a conservative area, I didn’t have a lot of queer influences in my life, so seeing Andrea’s vulnerability around their trans identity gave me a sense of belonging and freedom. As an adult, I eventually decided I had too much inside that needed to get expressed, I wrote a poem, and a friend dragged me to an open mic. I read my poem, and everyone thought I was an established professional poet. Suddenly, I started writing more and more, and now a year and a half later, I’m running my own open mic with the teahouse “Tea At Shiloh” and recording my first album. My work in poetry revolves around trying to bring awareness to things that are often left unsaid – activism for the crazy, the queer, and the broken, through the lens of my own experiences.
Sometimes, you find me combining the two, serving cookies to attendees at my poetry shows, which I often say is the only 4D cookie-poem experience in the city, and I stand by that.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
When I was younger I thought I had to master my craft before I ever started selling my work, and that I should only make art if I know it’s gonna be great. This ethos was drilled into me by the classical music world I was raised in as a child. I had this sense of perfectionism keeping me from ever producing anything. I had to deeply unlearn this to start creating – imperfect work is better than no work, and there’s no artist who doesn’t keep growing while making their art. The lesson replacing the unlearned perfectionism was simply to create – you can only make good art if you are comfortable making bad art. Make enough bad art, eventually you will be great.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Give us money, hands down. There’s nothing a creative can do without money. We need food to create. We need comfort to create. We can’t do anything long term without financial support. We can’t pay rent in exposure. And if you can’t give us money, connect us to people who have means to spend on us. Get your most well off friends hype about us, and signal boost like hell to get our names into as many people’s feeds as possible. Money and connections are, in the end, the defining factors that make and break artistic careers.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: fabfoodfairy
