Food and travel writing class

Saturday was my half-day food and travel writing workshop. It was wonderful.

Actually, the day didn't start out that wonderful--I ended up being ten minutes late, which was mortifying. Mapquest said the trip would take 25 minutes. I allowed an hour--but then decided to take a quick detour to the local farmer's market (seemed appropriate, given the subject matter). After parking and walking and fruit and vegetable selecting, I had barely a half hour by the time I returned to my car.

I would have barely made it, too, but the street where the writing studio is located happens to have an elevated train running down the middle of it. The studio is on the east side of the tracks. I, unfortunately, approached from the west, saw the street sign immediately before the tracks, and turned. Then I spent five minutes driving around side streets (at least once going the wrong direction on a one-way) and dead-ending into--go figure--a farmer's market. Then I ditched my car and started wandering back and forth. Finally I noticed that the address numbers were all even and that I was looking for an odd number, and it occurred to me that there may be something beyond the elevated tracks. Voila. I also found the promised parking lot, which I had dismissed as a figment of someone's imagination.

So, short story long, I was late. But apparently Kate, the instructor, was too, and she was just finishing her opening remarks when I stumbled in and took the a seat by the door. She also didn't make me go first when we had to go around the room and introduce ourselves, because she said that'd be mean.

Kate was great--funny and self-deprecating and full of great travel stories about her time in Europe and elsewhere. Most of my fellow classmates had been to Europe as well, and several of them had traveled much more extensively, including one who had quit her job and embarked on a trip around the world. It was a little intimidating knowing they had so much more material.

Even though the title of the class was "Food and Travel Writing," Kate suggested that we focus on food as a lens through which to view our travel experiences, which was exactly what I was thinking.

The first thing we did (after some discussion of the 5Ws and the 5 senses) was a free writing assignment, which I hadn't done since the Morrison era. It was called "Sitting at the Table." She gave us a few prompts, one of which was "a table at a restaurant in a country where you don't speak the language." We had 12 minutes to write. I immediately thought of our dinner in Paris where the waiter was determined to speak to us in English and we used up both our Euros and our time and didn't get to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I hadn't thought about it in a while, but the more I wrote, the more I remembered.

Then we read a couple of passages from books by Bill Bryson and Peg Bracken and talked about why they worked. There were a couple more Xeroxed selections in our packets that we didn't get to as well, and I eventually read and loved them all and now I have several more books to add to my "to-read" list. Bill Bryson, in particular, sounds crabby and sarcastic--right up my alley.

The class was only four hours, and by that time it was more than half over. So Kate gave us the option of taking a short break (no lunch break in a food writing class--that was a little rough) or getting started. We had about 40 minutes and then we'd break up into workshop groups, do a quick read and critique, and then debrief.

Of course I started writing--I write horribly slow in longhand, and I wanted to get going right away. I decided to write about the dinner in Paris, since I'd already been thinking about it and had some ideas. Not to mention an opening line that I was very proud of: "Rick Steves must not eat."

The writing time flew by, and then she divided us up into workshop groups of 3 or 4. I was in the group of 3, along with the two people next to me--a children's book editor (very cool) and the woman who had introduced herself by saying that she was having some physical/emotional problems and her doctor had assigned her to write and submit an article to a magazine by next week as part of her therapy. She was completely panicked about this, and kept getting up and asking Kate breathless questions during the writing portion of the class.

Since we didn't have much time, we were just supposed to make general comments, rather than going into too much detail. The children's book editor read a funny little piece about a visit she and her husband had made to his parents' retirement community and how they'd gone to a party and no one had wanted to sit with them. The hyper magazine woman read a short sketch (she had apparently started over several times) about a dog at a Paris cafe who looked and acted just like the cafe owner. And I read mine. My group members were very nice and asked questions and wanted to know more about what happened. They both said that they liked how Rick Steves was almost like a character in the story.

Then we all got back together for a lightning-quick debriefing, a few tips from Kate about getting published, and it was all over. She did mention that the studio is thinking about offering an actual multi-week food and travel writing class, which I would sign up for in a heartbeat (although the $300 price tag would probably give M. Defarge a heart attack.

I left really excited about writing again. Hopefully it will last. Kate said that having a website or blog is a good way to "publish" your work so that if you're trying to get magazine work or whatever, you can point to it online. Regardless, I think it's a good outlet for giving myself little writing assignments and seeing where they take me.

This weekend's destination: beautiful, scenic Omaha, and my brother-in-law's wedding. I'm going to bring my notebook.