Food is a fact of life, a universal shared culture, and among our most intimate concerns, and our relationship to it is governed by our brain’s emotional centers. For writers, food can inspire a lifetime supply of evocative literature. Participants will be guided through an exercise in mindful eating using our five senses to conjure powerful memories that can propel our creative writing to new heights.  Both writers and nonwriters will find this workshop experience illuminating. As Marcel Proust wrote in Remembrance of Things Past:

“I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which a morsel of cake had softened. When the crumbs touched my palate, I shuddered, attentive to the extraordinary experience inside me. A delicious pleasure invaded me, turning the misfortunes of life into indifference, its disasters into harmlessness, its brevity an illusion, filling me with a precious essence … I had ceased to feel mediocre, uncertain, mortal.” 

Nancy Spiller is a critically acclaimed artist, writer, and teacher. She is the author of Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes), and she illustrated her food-centric memoir Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother’s Recipe Box, an Amazon bestseller featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Huffington Post, and the Hallmark Channel’s “Home and Family Show”.  She teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program and is currently working on a novel set in Los Angeles in the 1930s.

Bring pen and paper, and BRING SOME FOOD OR DRINK to share that has special emotional significance to you! It will be part of our experiential evening. And please RSVP if possible, so that we can have enough chairs:  markwaldman3@gmail.com. Bring a friend!  No writing experience is necessary!

WHERE: Studio Channel Islands Art Center

2222 Ventura Boulevard, Camarillo, CA 93010

TIME: 6:30 – 8pm

“Writers in the Gallery” meets on the first Wednesday of each month (from 6:30pm to 8pm) with different hosts conducting experiential workshops to inspire writers (and nonwriters) of all genres – fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, storytelling, etc. – to improve the quality of their work. Check out the prose, poetry, essays, and experiential writing exercises at www.WritersintheGallery.com.