How to Have – And Stick to – A Writing Brand, With Laurie Wolf

Laurie Wolf lives what she believes and in that she know how to have a writing brand. She is the author of children’s books, cookbooks, and numerous cannabis cookbooks such as Marijuana Edibles, Herb, The Medical Marijuana Dispensary, and Cooking With Cannabis. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to have– and stick to — a writing brand.

Laurie Wolf is the founder of Laurie and Mary Jane, an edible company offering pretty much everything. Her recipes have been featured in High Times, Dope Magazine, Culture and more. And according to Leafly, she makes the “absolute best cannabis brownie recipe of all time.” We’ll get to that, of course. Laurie and I met when we were both young writers living in New York City.

Marion: Hi Laurie.

Laurie: Hi Marion. So nice to speak to you.

Marion: It’s just great to hear your voice again.

Laurie: It’s been so long.

Marion: So perhaps my least favorite word, and a word that’s gotten really worn out in the last few years is “authentic.” But I really kind of have to bring it back and use it here because a better word escapes me. You live, breathe, cook, eat and write about cannabis. And in that, you write what you know. You are the person to speak with about how to have a writing brand. And so you’re living and providing this authentic life that involves cannabis education. So let’s talk a little bit first, just set up for us your background. And I’m going to ask you more questions about that to give people a sense of how you get to write what you know.

Laurie: I was an English and sociology major at NYU, and graduated not knowing what I wanted to do. I kind of never found something that clicked, that felt like a passion. I had a friend, a close friend, who went to The Culinary Institute, my friend Marcy. And I visited her a bunch, and I worked with her. I helped her do catering, and I kind of fell in love with cooking and decided that I wanted to go to cooking school too. She graduated way earlier, but I went, and it was a bizarre experience, cooking school at that time. There weren’t a ton of women in the industry. I think out of our 73 students, two, maybe three were women. And chefs weren’t stars then. It was fun, but I think I graduated knowing how to do a bunch of things I never really was asked to do down the line. But I did work in restaurants in Manhattan. And it was good, I liked it.

But I was approached by someone I knew at a magazine to see if I wanted to learn how to do food styling because for photography, you need to have someone who knows how to make and present the food to make it look delicious. So I apprenticed for a year and learned how to food style. And during that time, people started asking me if I would write recipes, create little stories around the food, so that’s pretty much when I started writing recipes and writing the words that went with the recipes.

Marion: And thank goodness.

Laurie: Yeah. So it was sort of combination of styling. I was on staff at a magazine called Child Magazine.

Marion: And you wrote for a lot of places. You wrote for Self and New York, Mademoiselle and Child.

Laurie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Working Woman, Vogue, New York Magazine. Yeah, I was busy. I loved it. It was pretty easy for me, both the recipe writing and the writing about the recipes because I just do what I do. I’m not someone who agonizes over … I mean, I agonize plenty, but not when it comes to recipe writing and copy writing.

Marion: Right.

Laurie: So one of the things that I did during my experience at Child magazine, the parenting magazine, was put together parties for the magazine, getting a group of people together, photographing them, and I also did all the crafts. I would have to come up with 12 Fourth of July dishes that some kid couldn’t choke on. I had certain … You know.

Marion: That really does ruin a holiday.

Laurie: That’s a bummer, terrible. It takes most of the fun out of it.

Marion: So you learned to write on deadline, and that’s an important piece because my audience is mostly writers. It’s an important piece I think when I look at your biography because I want to get into you moved to Portland, Oregon, and you have an illness aspect to this tale too.

Laurie: Yeah.

Marion: But I want everyone to understand that you’ve got this basic skillset down of cooking and writing. And you understand how to write on deadline. And when I tell people what I’m about to tell them, I think they’ll begin to understand the point I’m trying to get at here, which is in the last six years alone, you’ve published The Food Lover’s Guide to Portland, Oregon. And you published the Herb, Cooking With Cannabis, and The Medical Marijuana Dispensary in 2016, then Edibles for Beginners in 2019. And you’ve got this book coming out in 2020, The Cannabis Apothecary. And I love to write, sister, but damn, that is some production.

So let’s just talk a little bit about work ethic. And it would be too easy to laugh this off and say, “What are you eating in that kitchen that keeps you writing so much?” And if that’s what it is, I’m whipping up a batch of your brownies right now to up my production. But let’s just talk about that kind of production. You’ve got to have a skillset to be able to write books. And I imagine you learned a lot about writing on deadline and getting the thing done.

Laurie: Yeah. I am the opposite of a procrastinator. I cannot stand having an assignment weighing on my head. It drives me crazy. It also drives everybody around me crazy because I want them to work at the same speed, and so it’s hard when shooting a book for example. I’m ready. Let’s do it. Let’s do 12 shots. I just want to keep moving. And I can sometimes put a little pressure. I work a lot with my husband, who’s a photographer. And I am most comfortable getting things done as soon as I’m given the assignment. Now obviously, with a book, we have six months hopefully. I guess some people have longer. We’ve had eight week deadlines, like two little books. That was completely insane. So I’m never late, I just can’t stand to be late in what I’m handing in.

Marion: That’s good advice. Don’t be late. Write on deadline.

Laurie: And people are kind of shocked particularly because now I write about cannabis. And the truth is the cannabis business runs kind of on a different kind of time, where if you leave someone a message, maybe two weeks, and that’s like, “Phew, it only took two weeks.” It’s a very pretty laid back area, getting less and less so as it becomes like business. But it’s not the same kind of pressure in this area.

Marion: Well, I suspect it’s going to pick up a lot as we’re projected to hit a $73 billion industry in the legal marijuana business worldwide in the next few years. There’ll be more people in it, and maybe the pace will pick up. But that’s what I’ve noticed, certainly. I visited a bunch of dispensaries, and people are very laid back, of course they are. It’s the nature of the substance. And so speaking of getting to the substance, you had an illness issue which led you. Is that the way I understand it?

Laurie: Yeah.

Marion: To be more interested in cannabis and what it could do.

Laurie: Yes. I have a seizure disorder, a form of epilepsy. And when I lived in New York and when my kids were growing up, I took a couple of different pharmaceuticals that were very rough on my body. They were the kind of pills that if you went on them, you went on them and added two grains per day. And then when you wanted to come off it, it took a year and a half to have your body adjust without a lot of discomfort. But I moved to Oregon not knowing that cannabis was legal. I don’t know how I missed that when I got here and I found out. I was like, “What? Shit, I would’ve moved here a long time ago.”

But I was at a Volvo station, and I was sitting next to this crazy looking old dude. And he introduced himself. He said, “I’m Dr. Phil.” And I was like, “Huh?” And he said, “No, no, not that Dr. Phil. I’m Dr. Phil,” and I can’t remember his name, thank you, cannabis. But he was adorable. And I talked to him while we were waiting for our cars. And I told him that I had epilepsy. And he asked me what medication I was taking. And he said, “That’s poison. You must stop taking it. Do you have to have liver tests and kidney … ” And I was like, “Yeah, all that.” He said, “This is what I’m going to give you a number. I want you to call this doctor, and you should try cannabis because you won’t get over it how much it will help your epilepsy.”

Then within a couple of weeks, I was at a dinner party, and I was sitting next to a guy who had the same kind of seizures that I had. And he told me he used cannabis. He never was on any pharmaceuticals any longer. So I got my marijuana license, which was pretty nothing, no physical exam, you just gave a list of things that were your issues, and they signed. It wasn’t hard to get. And I started going around and getting joints and things. And then I decided, I have had pneumonia, and I just didn’t want to really screw around with my lungs, so I started buying edibles. And I had had some experience making pot brownies and things over the years, but the edibles that were available were pretty dreadful. The dispensaries, which at that time were very sketchy, they had wire behind the cash register. You didn’t want to go when it was dark. Many of them had a bizarre vibe because at that time, it was a lot of black market people who were involved. Many of them are gone now.

But I got edibles. They tasted terrible. I’d say, “Oh, that looks good.” “Oh, my grandmother makes that. She’s been making that for years.” And they were wrapped in just a little bit of Saran Wrap. There was nothing. There was no testing. It was like a guess. So I came home one day and I said to my husband, “I think I’m going to go into the edible business.” I had been living in Portland for a while. I wrote a couple of books. I wrote The Food Lover’s Guide to Portland, The Food Lover’s Guide to Seattle, and The Portland, Oregon Chef’s Table. And it was wonderful. And I got to know the community, the food community in Portland very well, and it was great.

And a company reached out to me, asked me if I wanted to be part of the book, Herb, that was the first cannabis book I did. I did it with a chef in Colorado. And simultaneously, I started making edibles as professionally as I could.

Marion: Well, the trajectory from there to a 2017 New Yorker profile, which refers to you as the “Martha Stewart of marijuana edibles,” is a short trip, but a remarkable trajectory. And the thing that I find so rewarding about this is in journalism, we have an expression that you go with what you’ve got. And you had an illness, you looked into it, and you kept writing. And that’s one of the things that I like about this story so very much because the going with what you’ve got absolutely works for you.

And I see some similarities between you and Martha, I guess. But the thing that fascinates me and the thing that Martha strayed from is that you stick to your brand. I mean, obviously, you’ve written children’s books and Portland eating books. But it’s food all the way through. So talk just a little bit about when you know your topic is what you’re going to live with, when it is cooking, yes, we’re getting into the farm aspects of it. But you’re still making the product yourself. So I think a lot of writers think, “If I love something, I can only do one book on it.” You are the living example of endless amount of copy, never repeating yourself. And how do you get comfortable with that, knowing that this is where you’re going to stay as a writer?

Laurie: I think partly because now my subject is cannabis, there aren’t writers kind of flooding the market. Since I can kind of do everything involved in the books that I am writing, I love to cook, I love cannabis, and I’m just continually growing in my understanding of cannabis and food. I learned how to work with food and work with flavors to kind of get the best, I think I said best bang for your bong. I want to make the food the best it can be. And I want to deliver the results that I want in a certain recipe, that I want in a product.

Marion: So curiosity and excellence.

Laurie: Yeah. If someone had said to me, “You’re going to have a cannabis edibles business and you’re going to write,” of course, I never thought of it. And I don’t know where our government’s going, but the fact that there’s cannabis, and that there are big billboards around Portland with pot on them, and shatter and all the pipes and stuff, it’s wonderful. And I think because there aren’t that many people who have the group of skills that I have. There are a shit ton of people who smoke pot and make brownies, but there aren’t a ton of people who know how to write a recipe, know how to cook, and know how to cook with cannabis. So I think that what I bring to the table or to the dispensary in terms of our products and the books, I think I understand what people like to eat, what flavors draw people in, and what strains I want to use, so that people are getting the taste and the feeling that they want.

I think I just got lucky to have these things all come together at the right time. Here I was, I lived in Portland. I wrote some books about that. And now I have managed my epilepsy. I no longer need any medication but cannabis, so this is a miracle.

Marion: It is a miracle, and it’s a great story as a writer. And I think one of the questions I really want to ask you is how, along the way, when you choose a topic and you love the topic, there’s going to be somebody, maybe parents, maybe in-laws, maybe one of your children, who questions those choices. And so I read in one of the interviews with you that your son, for instance, was a non cannabis person at some point. And there’s a lot of judgment when we make these kinds of choices, and that your daughter-in-law, who’s now your business partner, was a little bit nervous to tell her parents when she went into the cannabis business.

Laurie: Yes, yes.

Marion: There was a very surprising twist in that story with her. Right? Isn’t there the family started asking about: What kind of symptoms can it treat?

Laurie: Absolutely, yes.

Marion: So I would say to people, “You’re going to have to be brave,” but this looks like there’s got to have been some people along the way who tried to talk you out of this. Was that the case?

Laurie: I wouldn’t say try to talk me out of it, but I would say there were people who were like, “You know, it’s probably better if you don’t mention what you do at our dinner party tonight.” Or our daughter, we picked her up when she was about to leave college. She went to college in Saint Paul, Minnesota. We picked her up and she had a bunch of friends come in the car. And I mentioned something about what I did, and Olivia looked at me. And I’m like, “What?” And Olivia said, “Oh, I never told anybody what you did.” So I think there was definitely a stigma, which I think has really diminished thanks to partially Sanjay Gupta, I think, who actually kind of did an about face and took back most of the bad things he said about cannabis. I think his only regret was the weight gain. But he said what he had thought about it, he didn’t feel like it was the evil drug. And the same with the writer who went to Colorado, ate the entire chocolate bar.

Marion: Oh, Maureen Dowd, that column that she wrote in The New York Times.

Laurie: Yes, yes. So I refer to that when I can remember the name because she really screwed things up for a little while. And there were all these people like, “You see, I knew that was bad, and look what happened.” And later she admitted that she didn’t follow the directions. She did not do what every person must know when they’re going to try cannabis. Start low, go high. Start with the littlest bit, and don’t do anything else that day or night. Don’t eat a little more because it’s not common but it can take two to three hours sometimes for the weed to kick in. And if you think it’s not kicking in and you eat a ton, you may have a very pleasant experience, or it may be a nightmare. But if you start low and just increase over the course of a week, you can find out what your potency is and be comfortable knowing that if you have a dispensary that you can go to, you can say, “My dose is 10 milligrams of THC.” And then you’ll be told what your options are.

Marion: Let’s talk a little bit about those famous brownies. And then I want to ask you about what I might be able to talk you into writing at some point because I think there’s a memoir in here. But those brownies, the very word, pot, the very phrase “pot brownies,” just conjures up for so many of us those awful things we tried to choke down in college, that gave us varying degrees of responses. And so you took it on like a chef would, and that recipe is famous. I mention your name to anyone and they say, “Pot brownies.” So apparently, the secret to cooking with cannabis is fat or so I learned from you. The THC, the main psychoactive ingredients bonds to fat molecules when heated. This is the beginning and end of what I know. So I will put the recipe up on the site when we put up the transcription. But what else does the home chef need to know to get these right?

Laurie: The most important thing is getting your hands on quality cannabis. And I don’t mean fancy cannabis. It doesn’t need to be purple, or have orange hairs, or whatever. Just cannabis that’s grown safely, pesticide free, grown with the kind of care and love that makes these plants thrive. And it’s crazy. I’ve been to farms, just amazing, just a forest of cannabis. So good cannabis, because if it isn’t good quality, it can have really off taste, and so you’re sort of starting with something you’re not going to ever get to the ideal of the recipe.

So if the brownie recipe calls for two tablespoons of infused butter, you need to know what the potency of the butter is, or at least as good a guess as you can make. Because I live in Oregon, everything is lab tested. I know what the potency is. I know exactly the numbers, so I know how to dose, whether I’m making things at home, or in the THC kitchen. So you need to know how to dose. You need to remember that heat will diminish a lot of important parts of each cannabis strain. So cannabis is a combination of cannabinoids and terpenes and flavanoids. And these are all the things that inform how you’ll feel, how it’ll taste. The terpene profile will really help people know what they can expect, or what they should go out and look for.

Marion: Well, that’s just some extra tips for people. And I think that they should go to the website and have a look at the recipe, and be very cognizant of the fact that these are well known to be the best brownies that are made. And speaking of the website, writers are notoriously bad at having platforms. Yours is gorgeous. And I know that your husband is a photographer, specifically a food stylist photographer. But writers of our generation somehow think these things, that books will sell themselves. I know that they don’t. You know that they don’t. So, as we wind up on how to have a writing brand just give us a minute on — or just a few seconds on — self-promotion and how you’ve just got to the point where you’re comfortable doing that?

Laurie: Yeah. I mean, I sort of can’t get over how sort of easy that has happened. I think I was extremely fortunate, right place, right time. And as I said earlier, there just aren’t a ton of people who know how to do the different things that need to be done to write a book about cannabis. First of all, the website, that’s all my daughter-in-law, Mary. She’s incredible.

Marion: That’s good.

Laurie: Turned it into just a stunning branding, so that is all Mary.

Marion: That leads me to my last question, which is: How and when are we going to get you to write a memoir? Because I would think the test kitchen alone would reap enough tales to make a whopper of a story. But I think if you go back to the beginning and start with the bloody fingers from the sock puppets from the children, you might find yourself in memoir territory. So I do want to encourage you. I wasn’t able to find enough story from you. There’s lots of interviews with you. But I think the story from you would be worth its weight in cannabis, so I hope you’ll consider doing that.

Laurie: I would love to do that. I think that my writing is kind of more storytelling than actual writing. As I was saying to my friend yesterday, I wouldn’t know a dangling participle from an elephant. I just don’t know. I don’t know if I ever learned. That’s not it. I write as I speak, and I feel like a memoir kind of would work with how I’m comfortable with writing.

Marion: Well, we will look forward to it. Thank you, Laurie. It’s really a joy to reconnect.

Laurie: Thank you. Same here.

Marion: Absolutely. The book is The Cannabis Apothecary: A Pharm to Table, and that’s P-H-A-R-M, A Pharm to Table Guide for using CBD and THC to promote Health, Wellness, and Beauty, Restoration and Relaxation. The author is Laurie Wolf. See everything she does at Laurie and Maryjane dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced at Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit Studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me, and thanks for listening.