Events

Beyond Crispy and Crunchy: Cliché-Busting Food & Drink Writing for Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction
June 23 to June 28, 2024 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Nonfiction Open To: All
 

Everyone eats three times a day, food is a core project of childhood and families, and when it goes away you die, or you get revolutions or the collapse of the state. So why has food writing been marginalized as trivial? Unless of course you’re Anne Sexton, Charles Dickens, Maya Angelou, Marcel Proust, Isak Denison, or August Wilson. And why is it so infernally difficult to describe a chocolate-chip cookie—surely they’re not all merely crispy and crunchy? In this workshop we’ll work through a series of cliché-breaking exercises to get you to a place where you can reliably generate original, arresting, and illuminating ways to express your personal—or your fictional character’s—unique experience of food. These experiments both in the classroom and offsite at coffee-shops and restaurants will allow you to go forth and incorporate food, drink, and food-spaces such as restaurants and kitchens in all the dimensions of taste, smell, memory, and touch in your work as a poet, fiction writer, memoirist, critic, or nonfiction writer. In this workshop there will be eating and drinking. (Food and drink will be provided, but there will always be the opportunity for people with dietary restrictions or preferences to provide their own.) 

(We will make an on-site visit to a restaurant where students will each be expected to pay their own tabs.)

Register here! 

Or go explore the gorgeous Fine Arts Work Center site.

Details to come!