Maine Media Workshops & College – Food Memoir Writing Workshop
A Sliver Of Life: The Art And Practice Of Writing Food Memoir
Event date/time: June 3 & 4, 2017
“In a literary world that demands our increasingly splintered attention and focus, it is the sensate that best anchors and grounds both the writer and the reader, and provides the necessary ingredients for a transportive story. It is food that strongly connects us to our humanity, history, and well-being, which is why readers have such a visceral response to narrative writing about the primal act of eating; whoever we are, wherever we come from, we all engage in it. To eat is to live; to not eat is to die. The successful food memoir, then, engages and engrosses the reader at the very place where the mundane — the simple, commonplace act — becomes a provocative and compelling narrative catalyst.
In this weekend class, learn how to create food writing that teems with life at the most basic and primitive level. Practice effective methods for writing with authenticity both gastronomical and beyond; develop your individual, unique voice that reaches out from the page and engages the reader; create a trustworthy narrative persona writing from the past; wrap personal narrative around the act of eating; and craft knife-sharp description using taste, olfactory sense, and reliable (and unreliable) memory.
The class will engage in active, short-form writing exercises, explorations of style, sharing of work, readings from and discussions of classic food memoir and narrative of other genres, and individual work review meetings with instructor. By the end of the course, transform your writing skills to create compelling writing for a personal essay, blog, magazine or longer book form in a way that will leave your readers hungry for more.”
Instructor: Elissa Altman
Location Address: Maine Media Workshop and College, Rockport, Maine
Contact Website: www.mainemedia.edu