The Literature of Food: Welcome

When Eve ate the apple and then told Adam about it, she launched a genre that we now call food writing. This genre today encompasses recipes, reviews, and articles of all kinds. In this course, I've narrowed the topic to nonfiction food literature - that is, food-based essays that attract writers and readers who see food as a universal binding agent and as a doorway to big themes such as love and longing. These readers may well appreciate what M.F.K. Fisher wrote in her foreword to The Gastronomical Me:

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?...The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied, and it is all one.

This course is a reading course and a writing course. In six weeks we'll cover three main food topics: portrait, memoir, and personal essay. You'll read sample pieces in each subgenre, discuss the pieces in class, write your own pieces in similar modes, and then share your work with each other and with me. Through reading and writing and steady practice, you'll begin to find your way in the world of creative food nonfiction.

-Evan Elliot