My Food Writing Class

Monday nights have taken on a whole new meaning for me. Last week after thinking about it for sometime, I began my first, but certainly not my last, class at the Boston Center for Adult Education (BCAE). Located only a few blocks behind my office, the BCAE is a clean, contemporary space that offers classes in everything from yoga to cooking to Adobe Creative Suite. My class, Writing About Food, meets for three sessions for an hour and a half each time and is well worth the $97 fee. Comprised of only five students, the class is interactive and allows for active participation from all of the students. Our instructor is the Boston Sustainable Food Examiner, and she is interesting, passionate, and approachable. In our first class, we worked on rewriting the narrative piece from recipes. My piece was a hamburger recipe from M.F.K. Fisher, and to rewrite the narrative, I took the wordy but lovely narrative from the recipe and simplified it into numbered steps for today’s busy at home chef. I had never thought of doing something like this before, but this exercise is something that I want to repeat with a variety of different recipes. Our homework for the next week was to read three selections, one from Ruth Reichl, one from Calvin Trillin, and one from Elizabeth Gilbert. We were also to note our observations on food throughout the week. In tonight’s class, we discussed each of the selections and the concept of food memoir then each spent twenty minutes writing our own food memory. I wrote about a time in London several years ago where I had the pleasure of having a Middle Eastern dinner with my former, fabulous co-workers who I miss and love dearly. 🙁 Hearing the others’ food memories was so much fun; I feel like this is a great way to get an insight into who people are, especially foodie people. We tend to associate food with memory and memory with food 🙂 In our final week we will be looking at reviews, and I am really looking forward to it. Though my classwork right now is scrawled out in a notebook, I plan on finishing it and posting it here someday soon. This class has been an amazing start for me to learn more about food writing and to spend time with people who have a similar interest. As I prepare for the third and final class, I wonder what is next. BCAE offers a travel writing class, and I am thinking about signing up for that. Ultimately I would love to have more time to write and to get a better sense of where my job experience combined with my love of food, travel, and wine can take me. Have you/are you taking any classes at a local adult education school? Any recommendations? I would definitely recommend my Writing about Food class!