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Library

Floryn Honnet

June 11, 2021

|

Hudson, NY

Song

Recorded by

Jeanette Bruno

This interview is available in-person only. Please get in touch if you would like to listen.
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Summary:

This interview with Floryn Honnet was conducted remotely in Floryn’s car in a Hannaford parking lot in Meredith, New Hampshire on June 11, 2021. Floryn makes sculpture and has worked in many roles within food service. She grew up in Newton, MA and was a student at Bard College, where a friendship with the future founders of Lil' Debs Oasis began. Topics discussed include: Favorite domestic spaces; small liberal arts colleges; long relationships and what connections and life choices they allow us to make; the history of Lil' Debs Oasis, its basis in relationships; catering company work; pop-up restaurants; the genesis and evolution of desire to make a restaurant; different roles within food service and within Lil' Debs Oasis specifically; collaborative models of employer/employee relationships; working for and with friends; “when brunches were a thing”; the growth of a small business; pulling doubles; Latin fusion cuisine; the experience of being a server in a “really popular” restaurant; the emotional labor of serving restaurant patrons; place of work as literal and figurative home; playing the Superlative Game; Wheeler and the role of the General Manager and Wine Guy; management and ownership structures; restaurant as art project; what makes a restaurant a tourism destination; how organic forms gain structure over time; how to explain what a tamale is; leaving and returning to Hudson; Sonoma County wildfires; cross-country driving trips and disaster mode decision-making processing; gentrification of Hudson and its effects on desire to live there; the joys of a low-expectation lifestyle; radical self-acceptance; continuous core selfhood; self as defined by relation to other(s); love and relationship as ultimate motivation and reward; self as(not) defined by art-making; having fun making art; contact paper and other found materials for making sculpture; materiality of art vs. conceptualism; Marxist worldview; wood’s persistent memory of being a tree; wood’s “strong sense of self”; the untimeliness of art-making; an empathetic desire to hear from the interviewer.

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Themes:
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Interviewer Bio:
Jeanette Bruno

Jeannette Bruno: I am an Instructor Librarian and Library Department Chairperson at Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. While completing my MLIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign I served as a Mix IT Up! Fellow working with youth at the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Chicago. Before library school I worked as an Academic Advisor for high school students in Chicago-area high schools. I have worked as an advocate and educator for Chicago youth and students of all ages. I hope use what I learn at the Oral History Summer School to help preserve our cultural heritage and connect future generations to our shared culture.

Additional Info:
Interview language(s):
English
,
Audio quality:
Medium

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Permissions: 

This interview is hereby made available for research purposes only. For additional uses (radio and other media, music, internet), please click here to inquire about permissions.

Part of this interview may be played in a radio broadcast or podcast.

Oral history is an iterative process. In keeping with oral history values of anti-fixity, interviewees will have an opportunity to add, annotate and reflect upon their lives and interviews in perpetuity. Talking back to the archive is a form of “shared authority.”

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