In this memoir-writing workshop, we’ll explore how the sensory details of food can help us unlock our most fertile memories. After all, food touches every aspect of life: people, places, the way we live, the meat and bones of who we are. Using food as an entrypoint to writing, we can return to past versions of ourselves: experiences we thought we’d forgotten, the thing our father said, the way a lover looked at us. “A single image can split open the hard seed of the past,” writes memoirist Mary Karr, “and soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory.”

Over the course of our week together, we’ll study the way that great writers like M. F. K. Fisher, Diana Abu-Jaber, Kiese Laymon, Francis Lam, and Gabrielle Hamilton use food as a tool for writing about life. We’ll spend our mornings in discussion, and in the afternoons, we’ll write, applying what we’ve been learning to our own work. Participants will also share work and receive constructive feedback from the instructor and the group. No particular experience is necessary; all you need is a love of writing and reading, and a sense of curiosity about your life.