Course Spotlight- Reading and Writing the Food Memoir
MET ML615, Reading and Writing the Food Memoir will be taught this spring by Dr. Megan Elias and will meet Wednesdays from 6 to 8:45 PM
What is your food story? If we are what we eat, what foods made you who you are? Was it fruit from a country you no longer live in or a soup your best friend made when you visited him last week? Did it pour out of a box? Get toasted over open flames? Simmer for a day? And how do you explain its role in your life? Food can be a great connecting theme for a complicated story.
In this course we will ask what makes a food memoir different from other kinds of personal writing and we will work on our own unique food memoirs. Food memoir can take lots of forms, including visual narrative, comics, film, podcast, poetry, walking tour, and creative non-fiction. We will study some examples to learn about the form and workshop our memoirs while we write them. We will also spend some time in the kitchen together cooking from our projects to find out what we can learn by engaging with the material of food itself.
I come to this class with eight years of experience teaching Food Studies at BU and an active research agenda in food history. My recent scholarship focuses on stories about food. I have read a lot of food memoirs but have never written my own and am excited to try it out in community with the class.
Some of the works we will be sampling are:
Thomas Pecore Weso, Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir
Kwame Onwuachi, Notes from a Young Black Chef
Von Diaz, Coconuts and Collards
Yeon-sik Hong, Umma’s Table
Nigel Slater, Toast (movie version)
You will also have an opportunity to suggest material for us to discuss in class.