We will do workshops in Italy again one day, once this awful pandemic recedes! Meanwhile, this post captures some of the spirit of our Italy-based Amherst Writers and Artists method workshops.–Cary T., April 2021 Surprise! A huge chocolate festival happens during our Tuscan Writing workshop. So we’re going there! Come on along! Coincidence, coincidence. While we are having our...
As I mentioned in a post from the other day, when I decided to create an Amherst Writers and Artists-style workshop centered on food, I started reading the Stories from the Kitchen collection and then someone sent me to this interesting and helpful piece in Poets and Writers. The writer attends a class about food writing, and Corrine, the instructor, says to describe a lemon. “Look again,” said...
This Nora Ephron story is about potatoes but the potatoes are about love, and so the Nora Ephron story is about love and at times it is about sex, and if you have a dirty mind you can imagine things that are not in the story but seem to be on the left side of the writer’s mind as she is writing it, and if you imagine that the writer is clever and aware of what she is doing it adds to the pleasure...
Each piece in the Stories from the Kitchen collection has something interesting to offer about craft. Take for instance the Virginia Woolf piece, the dinner scene from To The Lighthouse. It makes you think about the craft, the way she does things, the way she has her narrator move from inside one person to the next around the table, and how deftly and interestingly she does it, even at one point...
When Norma and I decided to do it, we had just had a really great meal. We were in that heightened state. We saw endless possibilities. I think that’s why it happened. As to the meal, it could have been at Muzzicone, or at Regiro, or Gallo Nero, or la Sfizieria, or Ristorante Rogi, or Il Passaggio, or Antica Pieve or La Piana or Pietro or Buon Gustaio or Il Ristoro di Via Dante or Le Bindi...