Writing the Personal Food Essay

1. Introduction: My name is Larissa Rogers. I have been a writer and instructor and trainer for the last 40 years. I'm going to marry these two skill sets by teaching this class called Writing the Personal Food Essay. I come to this topic with a great deal of experience, some of it quite difficult because of my childhood. I grew up with a mother who is very anxious about her daughter's weight, and she put my sisters and me on diets at Young Ages. I was 10 years old when I went on my first diet, a metrical diet way back in the sixties, and I was 11 years old when I went on my first fast. So this caused, as you can imagine, a great deal of angst. But the good news is that I found a creative outlet, and that outlet was writing. Writing in many ways was my redeemer. So I've written a lot about the dark side of eating emotional eating, under eating over eating, dieting and solutions to dieting. However, in recent years I've been also able to write much more lightly, and I enjoy very much writing creative personal essays on very positive aspects of food and eating this. These are not the only themes I write about, but they certainly are a dominant theme. So if you have also a let's, say, a positive compulsion about this topic and you like to write your in the right place, so welcome and let's get going. 2. Why Write about food?: why I write about food and eating. For one thing, it is a rich, accessible topic for any level of writer. If you are raw, beginner or a seasoned professional or somewhere in the middle, there are many, many things to explore in the arena of eating, it is uniquely personal and yet also very universal. Everyone eats, and yet each of us has our own quirky, unique, eccentric relationship with food, especially in this era where there are so many identities and people define themselves in part based on how they eat. If part of your self definition is what you eat and how you eat that is provides huge material for writing. Another reason to write about food and eating is that there are so many topics, so many themes under the umbrella of food and eating. You could write about a particular food. Say why you like avocado. What is it in your family, your tradition in your culture, your history that intrigues you and attracts you to that particular vegetable? Or, for that matter, why you don't like, say, broccoli or why you didn't like it? And now, as in my case, I didn't like it now I love it. I didn't like it is a child now. I love it. So there's so many topics under the general umbrella of food and eating. If you are a woman and if you were raised in the last 30 years or so, it's quite possible that your relationship with eating is complicated. And that is because it has been a huge, powerful and in many ways a kind of a dark force in the in our culture over the last generation. Dark though it may be, it also provides a lot of material for writing. As I said in my own introduction, so you can turn that that difficult area into something to explore both for yourself and for the reader. And finally, if you are interested in publishing, you haven't an enormous market in front of you because everyone eats, everyone eats and everyone one is interested in food and eating. So I have a very simple project to start off this Siri's and that is, I want you to write down what motivates you to write about food and eating. This could be a simple, quick list of your 1st 1st thoughts about why you want to write. Or it could be an actual beginning of an essay. Perhaps a few paragraphs about what drives you drives you to write about this subject. If you choose a list, you could keep it as a running list, as I used to do when I wrote a column, I would constantly be brainstorming possible topics for future columns. Well, you could start this list. So whether you write a list form or you write a narrative form doesn't matter. Please write down your thoughts and put it up, out posted on the site, and I will take a look at them. 3. What to Write About: As I said in the first segment, there are endless themes within the general topic area of food and eating as you think about what you might want to write about. Be sure, though, that you care enough about that topic that you could stick with it to the duration because an essay could be a long process. Some essays are, in short, is 600 words, but some could be 3000 words or longer, and that will take a lot of time, a lot of revision and so on to perfect. So you want to be sure that you are deeply committed enough to this particular theme. So here are some of the examples of themes that I have explored in my own writing career. In Back in the eighties, I was a weight loss counselor and parallel to the counseling. I also wrote a lot of articles and essays related to the themes I explored in my counseling practice. I talked about the issues my clients faced, as well as the ones that I many times had also gone through because I had similar issues, especially in my younger life. So I wrote a lot about emotional eating. I wrote about all the different aspects of that kind of of syndrome, such as eating in secret, stealing, food, eating at night, eating alone, um, many things like that. You could also write about cultural influences people who influenced your eating, such as your parents or your grandparent's your ethnic traditions. Holiday eating There's endless supplies. There are endless ideas. So for your project, what I want you to do is to draw a picture just to sketch of your dining room table, what it looked like and who sat where you could just draw stick figures of where your parents or your parents sat and where your sibs sat around the table. Then, as you look at this picture of the dining room table, see if a conversation comes up, I could think of several conversations around the dining room table that my family had when I was in junior high school. Some of them I have written about some I haven't, and then I want you to write that conversation. I wouldn't I can't wait. I really want to read these. I think these are the heart of personal essay writing, so please write your description of a conversation that you recall sometime in your growing up years with your family members write it and posted on the site, and I look forward to reading it. 4. Shaping Your Essay: in this segment, we're going to be talking about shaping your essay, the organizational structure of your writing. And as with all writing, there are three parts. The beginning, the middle and the end. Now the bad news is, is that how to articles which I spent 20 years writing, have a beautiful and foolproof organizational flow? 123 Bullet bullet bullet Problem solution. Chronological flow. First you do this. Second, you do that, and so on. The essay, however, is a different animal. The essay is much more nuanced, which is both its challenge, and it's beauty. I love the challenge, and at times I find it quite difficult, so we'll talk about how to develop the essay. So starting with beginnings, you you want to grab the reader, you want to get them in so that they want to keep reading. It could be a funny story. It could be a sad anecdote. It could be poignant. It could be, ah, statistic, startling statistic. It could be a one liner. It could be a question. It could be a scene. Like many of The New Yorker essay start with a very rolling kind of evocative scene, something that will grab them. I'm going to share a few examples from my writing, which you can also read, cause I'll have a copy of these these beginnings in the materials here. But here are a few ah one Waas. A month after we married in the late seventies, my husband, Barry, and I decided to stop eating meat, which wasn't that difficult, because although I was raised on fried chicken, southern ham, pork chops and ribs, I never learned to cook meat myself as a single woman in my twenties. The closest I came to meet was ordering Chile at the corner diner. So that was a story about my favorite black bean recipe, and I used a bit of a narrative about being vegetarian to then go into the recipe. Okay, another one. The United States is one of the few ex British colonies that never claimed the venerated holiday Boxing Day Fools that we were The day after Christmas is the perfect time for munching on leftovers, embarking on a massive jigsaw puzzle and enjoying a leisurely stroll in the park. Wouldn't you prefer December 26 to be a nationally mandated day off rather than subject to the whims of a employer. And that story was about the Boxing Day party, which my husband and I always host every year to honor his British roots roots and the recipe that I always make, which is sherry trifle and which gets eaten within about 20 minutes. It's a delicious recipe, so I just started with a little bit of history there. Really? Okay. Another one, um, Malaysian start today with coconut rice wrapped in banana leaves. Egyptians prefer fava beans in olive oil, lemon juice and garlic. In Myanmar, the traditional breakfast is fried rice with peas. As this global snapshot attests. The active breakfast or breaking the fast after a night's sleep is universal, but the particulars are not. And in this one I was talking about how I don't like the traditional American breakfast of granola or yogurt or eggs. I have basically dinner for breakfast, and I gave one of my dinner breakfast recipes. So here you could see there are a whole variety of ways to start. I include all these in the materials. As I said, All right, then you get to the middle the middle. Now what do you do in the middle, you develop the point you were making through description through detail through dialogue through reflection. It's a kind of interweaving of different elements that build on what you began. Then you come to the close, the most satisfying closes or ones that in some way relate back to how you started. They circle back, or you could surprise the reader with a twist, or you can offer some kind of a promise, but they always provide some kind of closure. So those are the three elements of an essay. You have a beginning that grabs the reader. You have a middle that keeps them going, that keeps them engaged, and you have a close that invites a sense of closure and harmony for the entire essay. 5. Make Your Writing Sizzle!: in this segment, we're going to be discussing how to make your writing sizzle, to use a very good word for writing about food and cooking. And I'm going to discuss four aspects to this. The 1st 1 is voice. The 2nd 1 is sensory details. Third is emotional tone and forth is humor. So number one voice What is this word voice that we often hear to describe a writer's style . This ubiquitous word? Well, it means what makes that particular writers style unique, peculiar, eccentric, quirky, interesting. What is it that makes them sound like them? You might have a humorous voice, a poignant voice, a thoughtful voice, a serious voice, a very academic voice. For most of us, it's not so much a matter of developing a voice as it is uncovering the voice you already have. And the reason I say that is that many people develop bad writing habits in school. Let's say you had an assignment in college to write a report on the role of Lyme disease during the Korean War. I'm just making this up so you do your research, you do your writing and you come up with 3.5 pages. Well, you have to have five pages. So what do you do? You add, you elaborate. You discuss you, you add some descriptors. You don't really add any additional hard material, but you just elaborate more. This is called padding as you learn to pad and you do it repetitive. Lee, you lose your sense of whatever your unique style is because you're writing for someone else's go, not your own. So a lot about developing a voice is really undeveloped ing a voice. Now my husband is an interesting case. Barry is a science writer. His mission is to demystify science to the layperson, and therefore he uses a lot of very personable examples. He uses humor. He takes very a turgid academic prose and makes it understandable to the reader. He has a very interesting, an unusual voice because we don't usually associate science with lightness. So think about what kind of voice you have and try to identify what it is to reveal your voice. You have to show who you are in all your quirky eccentricities. The parts of you that are weird that are embarrassing, that are inappropriate. It's fine to bare your soul on the written page, with one caveat. As long as it serves the story. This is something I think we should have on top of our laptops. A sign that says is what I'm saying, serving the story. If it is great if it's gratuitous, if it's just for you because you feel like saying it, you take some pleasure in revealing this particular aspect of yourself. Nope, not good enough. Not a good reason. Now, in my case, I prefer to present myself on the page in such a way that what we call the narrator, the narrator is the expressed personality of the writer on the page. I like the narrator too closely approximate how I see myself, but that isn't actually essential. You don't have to do that. In fact, a friend of mine when writing her first book, which was about growing her first garden, found that the publisher actually wanted her to come across as a little more stupid. My friend is actually very knowledgeable about gardens, but the publisher had this desire to make her look a little bit more oven on so new, so she exaggerated the areas that showed her lack of information and knowledge. You could do that. You could do that. You can either stick closely to how you see yourself or you could play around and exaggerate and adapt your persona. So that's the first area voice the second area. We're going to discuss our sensory details, meaning all the senses obviously taste and smell immediately come to mind, but also auditory hearing touch and vision. So I'm going to discuss a list of words, and we were going toe. Analyze them for what kind of sensory details they offer. The word sticky. I love that word. Sticky. Obviously, it's touch. I think it's just touch. Yes, okay. Crunchy, Crunchy is audible. I can hear those little nuggets of granola as they slosh around in my mouth. Slush, meanwhile, was another one. It's also a bit visual because I could kind of see the three dimensionality of something that it's crunchy drizzle imagined, drizzling, some sort of condiment over your stir fry. That is a sound, and I can see it as well. Squishy. That's another good one. Ah, let's see. Where would squishy apply with marshmallows? I could see a squishy marshmallow, crumbly. I just had something delicious. I've never had it for lunch before I made it. It's called collie flower Steak. It was a combination of cauliflower, garlic, olive oil and Parmesan. And when I was after we'd eaten it. I was licking the frying pan, the roasting pan rather right on all the agencies. Crumbly little bits. I was delicious anyway, those air also a bit three dimensional and crumbly. I'm not sure I can hear them taste and see slurp. I could just hear a toddler. Slurpees. It's so on a mountain peak. So look for words that describe food or eating in different ways, perhaps using more than one modality. The more modalities, the better. So those air sensory details third will come to emotional tone on S A always has an emotional tone. It could be thoughtful. Could be academic. Could be wisecrack, split split. Funny humor. It could be more subtle. Humor dry like British humor. It could be melancholy. It could be very serious. Any of those air? Fine. You do want to stay away, though from tones that would annoy you in real life. Really, there's no difference between writing and life outside of writing. So, for example, a tone that is condescending would put off the reader. I have started many pieces of writing that, after a few moments of feeling condescended to, I just stopped reading was too irritating. So pay attention to your tone. Here is a place where you want to get feedback if you have any doubts, because if you're tone is going to be ambiguous or does put off the reader, you don't want that to happen. You want the reader toe, Want to keep reading and finally, humor. Humor is a great lubricant in life and in writing. Now there are some people are naturally funny. They're just they're naturally comics. I am not one of those. However. I have the ability to inject doses of humor into my writing. If you are trying to write with more humor, I would study people you think are funny. Try to figure out why are they funny or or writing? That is funny. Notice what you laugh at, and if you laugh at that, chances are you'll be able to adapt that to your own purposes. So once again, the four areas that will make your writing sizzle voice, sensory details, emotional tone and humor. Keep all those four in mind as you do your writing and I think you're writing will sizzle. 6. So What?: So what? Why should a person bothered to read your writing? This is a sign I think each of us should have up above our laptops. So what? The reader has many distractions, and you need to make your writing compelling enough that they will want to read your writing more than anything else in the world. Anything else in the world that's a pretty strong demand, but that's what we need to do with our writing. The writing may be of huge interest to you, but it is not necessarily of interest to your reader unless it's somehow make some kind of connection beyond just yourself. For example, I have a friend who's mother with schizophrenic, and she writes a great deal about growing up with a mentally ill mother. Now I am very interested in mental health. However, schizophrenia does not touch my life. I don't have friends or family members who have struggled with it. Therefore, my friend has to be able to be particularly eloquent, particularly poignant, particularly powerful. Something in her writing has to reach beyond a little bit of a chasm that would otherwise exist. Happily, I'm here to say that she is an excellent writer, and I am interested in spite of the fact that schizophrenia does not actually touch me. That's what you need to do. You may be writing about any all sorts of aspects of food. You could be writing about anorexia. You could be writing about obesity. You could be writing about Indian food, but if you don't reach the reader, it makes no difference, no matter how fascinating it is to you. So keep that sign, that sign that says So what? Why should they care up above your laptop so that it you always keep it in mind, and it's a guiding force in your writing. 7. Just Start!: Guess what? It's time to start. Yes, that moment has come. You've written your prompts. You've done your brainstorming. You've written in your journal. Now you have to just get that first sentence down onto the piece of paper or the computer screen. You need to start somewhere sometime on. The time is now. Many people struggle with that first moment, but half the time you're beginning is not gonna end up. You're beginning anyway, so you might as well just get in there and make a mess of it. You will be embarrassed. You will feel stupid. You will feel foolish. You do it anyway. You go ahead and write. What? Annie Lamont, that iconic Marin, Calif. Writer calls those shitty first drafts. You get all that junk out on the page. It is far easier toe work with something. Then nothing. You have something you could play with it. You could cook it. You can simmer it. But if you have nothing, you just have nothing. So go ahead and get started. Some writers coach themselves into writing with the ritual. They make a cup of tea. They put on music, they bow. Perhaps they actually vowed to the writing or to the universe. They do a little stretch. Perhaps they meditate beforehand. In fact, there's a whole book out on the rituals of artists, and among them are writers. Very interesting book. There are many, many ways that people invite themselves into the writing act, but everyone has to somehow get in there and do it. If you're paralyzed, I have found a particular assignment, really helps me. I will say to myself, All I have to do is write for five minutes, that's all. And then I give myself permission to stop. If that's all I could get myself to do. Great. Usually five minutes begets more five minutes, which in turn begets another 10 minutes. But if it doesn't, that's just fine. I make it OK. And then you say to yourself, Okay. And tomorrow I will write six minutes and you make that okay, I find that sense of permission giving gets me over the hump. Once you have started writing, I have a little trick. I learned decades ago that I would love to attribute, but I don't remember who I learned this from. The author of the book I read suggested that you stop your writing? Not at the end of a page. An end of a segment and end of a paragraph, but at the end of a sentence, or even sorry. Not at the end of a sentence in the middle of a sentence or even in the middle of a word. Suppose you're writing. She decided to continue. And instead you finished with. She decided to continue. Look how easy it would be in the next session. All you have to do is finish the N u e. She decided it would. She would continue to and you're off. How simple is that? This particular little trick has served me for over 30 years, and I'm sure it will serve you whatever strategies, whatever tricks, whatever rituals Now is the time. Just start. Get going. You're on your way. 8. Revision is Your Friend: in this segment, I'm going to talk about revision, which some people, including myself, used to consider a four letter word. But I have reframed my whole point of view about revision, thanks to a book I read called Living Revision. A writer's craft as spiritually Practice by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, who is also a memoir writer. And thanks to this book, I now really appreciate revision. I don't always love it, but I do recognise its necessity and its role, its important role in the writing process. My problem is, I'm incredibly impatient. I'm very Taipei I want that s a to go to the editor as soon as possible so that hopefully they will buy it. And therefore, I'm I'm willing at times too. Rush over it and not let it let it lie fallow for a little while. So don't do what I do. Do as I say and respect the role of revision in an essay. The first thing I suggest is to go do something completely different. For example, go take a walk. Go take a nice long walk, either by yourself or with a friend. Get out in the air, move your body. Don't think about it, or do you think about it? Sometimes I will take a walk with the draft in printed form and a pen. Ideas will pop up. I'll scribble them down, or I will sit down at a bench and read it in a completely different environment. It's funny how a different physical environment will help you see things. So either walk with it, walk with a friend or walk alone, but do something physically different for a least two hours, preferably overnight. Another thing I sometimes do is cook. I take a break by cooking, which is actually one of my favorite things to do. Anyway. That is why I write about it. But I do something completely different. As I mentioned about a different physical environment. Another way that I've revised is to put it in a different format, either in print. Or perhaps I will send it to pages on my iPad and look at it on pages, which is different from an 8.5 by 11 screen. It's interesting how a different format will change it, but the best thing to do the absolute best thing to do is to read it out loud. Now my husband and I serve as each other's critics, and he Barry is a very good editor. Sometimes he will say to me, He will come read my draft and it will come over to me and you will say you didn't You didn't read it aloud, did you? And I'll go No, I didn't feeling like a bad little girl and he will say, Well, it's obvious and he's right. It shows If you read it out loud, you will not only see the word, you'll hear the words and you will know at a deeper level if they work or if they don't work. As I mentioned, Barry and I are each other's editors. That can be helpful, but it also depends on the relationship. Earlier in our marriage, we weren't strong enough to service editors for each other. We were too defensive. We were sensitive. So if you want to consider something like that, be aware that you need to be a very strong relationship. We have, ah, 40 40 years and mawr of marriage together, so we have gone through it through the fires together. You can also ask a friend it could be another writer that would be ideal to service each other's editors or even a friend who reads a lot. Ah, friend who reads a great deal is probably gonna have good feedback. The other thing to do is to join a writer's group. I've been in several writers group the best one. The one that served me the longest was one that I was in for over 10 years in the Bay Area . We no longer meet because we're in different areas now. Although we still have reunions. I just love this group. I thought when I joined them, I wasn't quite sure it would work because there are very different genres than me. They I wrote at the time, simply nonfiction, and they wrote fiction and prose and poetry and memoir and all kinds of things. And I thought, No, those different Donner's. They're not going to know how to respond to my kind of writing. Boy, was I wrong? They were great, excellent, excellent writers. So look for a writer's group. You may be able to find one if you take a class through an adult ed or continuing education department. That's how the right and group that I was part of got started. They took classes at a community college called Foothill College. Or, you can ask it bookstores. You might be part of a reading group. There's so many reading group thes days and out of the reading group might come some writers. So those are some of the ways you might find a writer's group. Or I've known people who have just created writers route out of out of a small group of friends. There are many, many ways to revise, but the first thing you have to do is recognize the importance of revision. And don't be like me. Don't trivialize it and think it doesn't matter. It does matter. It matters enormously to your writing. 9. How to Find Markets: in this segment, we're going to talk about where to find markets for your writing. You certainly don't have to seek publication. Many writers enjoys sharing their memories that relate to food and eating with simply with their fun family members. However, if you want to get published, I'm going toe are for you some ideas for markets, preferably paid markets, but not always. So I would start with your local newspaper. Most newspapers have a tradition off offering something in the way of food and recipes, usually on a Wednesday. And sometimes you can offer a short story or a short narrative with a recipe. This is what I do for my local news magazine, which is a weekly called the North Coast Journal, based in Eureka, California And they have a column called Table Talk. I am one of the various contributors that I contribute a lot of different stories with a recipe, so that might be one way to start. Chances are, given the the current economics of the newspaper world, you will probably not get paid for it. However, you will have a chance to get in print, so that's one option. Then, of course, there are the national glossy cooking magazines like Rachel Ray bought a petite and other such publications. I think it's unlikely that a beginning beginner writer is going to get published in those. You could certainly take a look at them to study how other people are writing about food, but I think it's not very likely I have tried a few times that have been spectacularly unsuccessful. However, what I have been successful at is writing for magazines that are not themselves about food and eating, but that I think I have sold an article that had to do with that. For example, as a part time expat, I live in Mexico part of the year. I write for a magazine called International Living, and I've written a number of articles for them that have to do with food. One was how to be a vegetarian in Mexico, which is quite a challenge since it is a meat culture. Another one I've written is how to cook in Airbnb ease because my husband and I like to travel both in Mexico and beyond, and Airbnb is very according to the culture on what they offer in terms of tools and appliances, which I find very interesting. Culturally, I write about what kinds of things you might want to carry with you when you travel internationally and locally. I've also written for a magazine called Modern Bride, where I wrote about how Why is it that newlyweds often gain weight? I've written for several parenting magazines on how to feed your Children healthy food and keep them becoming just fast food and junk food eaters. So I've written for a variety of magazines and are not actually each or eating or culinary magazines, but which I do write about food. Another place to consider is the international Press. Now I've written for articles in Australia, Canada, Britain, South Africa and even Brazil. How would you find these? You would guru who you would Google Publications Australia, and you'll get a whole a lot of different websites. Once you find those websites go looking for publications, culinary or publications, food or maybe publications, Health, Australia and so on. These countries often do have what the U. S. Has, which is a digest called the Writers Market, which has their own publications. You may want to order that you may not. It's probably going to be expensive and heavyweight and all that, but you could certainly find some of this information online. Another option is to write for blog's. Now I've written several blog's blood posts for a block called Get Rich Slowly. Those were not specifically to do with food. They were more about international living. There was another reader who beat me to it, This reader wrote, Opposed, called How to Cook, focusing on how to save money by cooking. And I was very jealous because I thought I could have done a much better job than he, but he beat me to it, so I was I was too late, But I'm always looking for other places to do that. I have not yet had success, but there are lots of lots of bloggers who invite guest posts. Sometimes they pay, and you can look around and see if there might be some to do it in the area of food and eating. Now, I'm also going to mention some re sources that discuss where you confined markets. Some of these air paying some are not. First, the writers market, which I mentioned earlier The writers market, is available in every library and their versions of it online, the writers, magazines, there to the writer and Writers Digest, for which I'm kind of proud to tell you I just had an essay accepted, not on food. It's called a Room of my Own, about how having my own independent space for the last 45 years has helped me become a writer. Both of those magazines have a section called Markets, and each month they'll focus on a particular type of market, such as health or youth or something. So Writers Market Writer's Digest and writer. Then there is also a great website called Media Bistro. I'm gonna write all these down so you don't need to remember them. They'll be in the resource section. Media Bistro offers not just classes, but it also offers mastheads, which is the page in the magazine that lists who you send what to. And it also has a great column called Where to Pitch? Where to send your Proposals. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall. However, I'll tell you what I did. You could belong for a month without pain, so I belonged for a month and got the information I wanted on the site, the particular markets I wanted. And then I, um I d subscribed. Well, I'm probably not the first to do that. So media destro I also belong to a great freelance writers site called Freelance Success. And they have a weekly market that they focus on in particular. And as a result of that, I've gotten some assignments. So that was great. I will. I will include that in the resource list. Two. Plus, there's a crowd sourcing site called Who Pays Writers? And that gives current information offered by freelancers on how much different magazines pay or blog's or websites and so on. So there are lots of different opportunities. You have to do your research be committed. In fact, I would say I probably spend as much time marketing as I do writing, unfortunately, but a CS, as we say in Spanish, which means so it is. If you want to be a paid writer, that's part of the job. So I, uh, if you want to write, I hope to see you 10. Final Thoughts: we've come to the end. We've discussed the why. Why? To bother writing about food and writing. We've discussed the how what makes for an excellent food essay? We've discussed the wear. Where to submit All that's left is who and when Who is you, you the writer? And when is now if you haven't already begun to write or even to submit, now is the moment I have really enjoyed this process. I don't know you personally, but for some reason I feel ah connection with you even though we haven't met, and I thank you for being part of this process. For me, it was a way of internalizing what I know, but could always know better if you have enjoyed it as much as I have. I would appreciate it if you would leave a glowing review review that walks on water, as my old colleague friend used to say. And I look forward to seeing you buy one. I can't wait to see your byline. I want to see your real writing. I look forward to seeing you on the written page, take care and best of success with writing about food