That Which Rips Your Heart with Joy: An Afternoon Masterclass on Food Writing

“Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems are as ripe, funny, and fresh as a precious friendship. They’re the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve….Poems like these revive our souls.” —Naomi Shihab Nye

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live… So it has been since creation, and it will go on.” –from “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” Joy Harjo When reading about food or drink, the mind races and rushes for associations and/or remembrances. In most gastronomical writing, food often has a subtext, a layering, or, forgive me, a flavor—tinged with grief, joy, shame, desire, or nostalgia. What gets so often lost or overlooked is the contagious exuberance that can happen when one takes a bite of food and wants to be a student of that dish, even of a singular ingredient—to be curious about where it came from and what it means to have a bridge for people to connect or a place to provoke and reclaim, as poet Thomas Lux once wrote, “…that which rips your heart with joy.” This session will send you off with notes for several solid first drafts of food writing.