Weekly Writing Workshops
Weekly intensive writing workshops that build upon lessons from week-to-week.
2020-2021 intensives will be held online until further notice.
Spring 2020 Workshop
Feed Your Fiction:
Using Food & the Senses to Inspire Your Writing
When: Sundays, March 15, 22, 29, and April 5
Time: 1:00-3:00 PM
Where: 21c Louisville, 700 West Main Street
(free street parking on Sundays)
Participant Reading:
TBD
Effective food writers know how to take a passion for all things edible and capture that wonder in words. This focus on the senses and the ensuing pleasures is what distinguishes food writing from other kinds of writing. Although many think food writing is limited to reviews and recipes, a penchant for the gastronomic can inspire a variety of formats including the novel and the short story. Food can highlight a theme, it can serve as a metaphor, it may develop a plot. “Food is the great equalizer,” says Louise Miller, author of The Late Bloomer’s Club, “and what we eat and how we eat it can be so emotional and can carry deep meaning.” What we eat can be very revealing as well. At the individual level, it can speak volumes about character, temperament, or state of mind; however, the broader topic of food can allow for observations about religion, class, ethnicity, gender, politics, and more.
Over the course of four consecutive Sundays, we’ll examine fiction—and some nonfiction—involving food and eating, and we’ll discuss what makes the authors’ work effective, how the implementation of food achieves certain goals, and then examine our own approaches to writing to see how food can enhance the narrative. Some of the authors—like Laura Esquivel, Joanne Harris, Muriel Barbery, and Karen Blixen—earned a certain degree of fame because of their tasty subject matters, however, we’ll examine other authors as well, writers who might not come to mind when you think of food and fiction. Suzanne Collins, Louisa May Alcott, and Agatha Christie, for example, all effectively use food in their narratives. Participants will leave the workshop with a reading list of food-centric novels and short stories, a draft of a new piece of food-inspired fiction, feedback on that work (or a piece of previously-drafted work), and suggestions of journals where they might submit their writing.
Postponed - Date TBD
Instructor:
David Dominé lives in Louisville, where he teaches foreign languages, translation, and food writing at Bellarmine University. From Victorian folklore to recipes with bourbon, Kentucky spirits often come alive in his narratives. His published books include memoirs, travel journals, historical sketches, photographic essays, and cook books. He has also published numerous articles, stories, poems, and translations—often with food as a theme. In addition to an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, he has an MA in Spanish Literature from the University of Louisville and an MA in German Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also completed studies in literary translation at the Karl-Franzens Universität in Graz, Austria. His current projects include the forthcoming novel Peter Paul's Kitchenand a true-crime book about the bizarre 2009 murder of drag queen Jamie Carroll and the subsequent trials of alleged killers Jeffery Mundt and Joseph Banis.