An update from the twenty-second Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett
A summary of the workshop held on Saturday November 20
In preparation and celebration of Thanksgiving, this week we focused on the time honored tradition of eating. We began by looking at a couple different paintings: The Feast of Dives by Master of James IV of Scotland and The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh. Both paintings exalted the poor and therefore the hungry, while the former in particular represented the act of eating as a sort of monstrous excess, which was also found in Mound of Butter by Antoine Vollon, Vertumnus by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Hotdog in #NYC by Valery Jung. By way of literary examples, we looked at the poem "Eating Together" by Li-Young Lee and "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand. The former we found to display eating as communal and ritualistic, whereas the latter associated eating with animalistic and demonic traits.
The Challenge: Write a story/poem in which people are eating. Think about what food symbolizes in your story/poem.
The Participants: Penelope, Nova, Lina, Alice B, Audrey, Emma, Shilla, Josh, Ethan, Svitra
Leave a Reply