Feed Your Fiction: Using Food & The Senses To Inspire Your Writing

Sundays, 1-3 PM

March 15-April 5

21c Museum Louisville

700 W. Main Street

$100 / $75 LLA Members (Members receive a discount code by email.)

Description:

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.

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 Kitchen and 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.