RETREATS

Lineage: Food Writing As Ceremony

May 24 – 25, 2024, Location To Be Announced

One of the most powerful ways to express love is through food. We grow our capacity for love from
hearing other’s stories. In this retreat we eat, write, and listen to each other’s stories about food as a
reclamation ceremony.

Food is culture and community, history and art, lineage and vision, medicine and ceremony, tradition
and experiment. Our stories sometimes lack an awareness of the politics of how food comes to the
table. This retreat will include talks about how we might change this pattern, including attention to
how writing about food has included erasure and appropriation, inattention to agricultural roots and
impacts, and the links with food to environmental justice. If you’re working in narrative nonfiction,
memoir, recipe forms, newsletter writing, literary food writing, or fiction, this will be a good place to
understand how food shapes character. Together, we will explore using the senses, and develop some
research strategies to explore the origins of foodways and our chosen subject. Through generative
writing exercises and sharing of our projects, we not only document impactful food experiences, but
also restore food narratives to a place of relationship and integrity.

You’ll have a chance to read short works of Monica Ali, Laurie Colwin, Barbara Kingsolver, Robin
Wall Kimmerer, and Kevin Young. We’ll read essays on farmers facing climate change, making
sorghum the right way, Houston hip-hop and Chinese chicken, beans and rice, historic lunch
counters, Tennessee tamales, lemon meringue pie, country music cookbooks, and our complicated
love affair with tomatoes. You’ll come away with a short piece about a pivotal food memory in your
life or your character’s life.

This is a retreat that’s focused on craft talks by the instructor and discussion of masterworks, as well
as generative writing. Every writer is welcome, including writers just beginning their practice and
those working on a specific project. You do not have to be a food writer to attend.
There will be material to read in preparation for the retreat. No one is required to share or receive
feedback. Sonya will provide comments for all those wishing to receive feedback.

Contact me for details and to register.