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Soulfood Class

Memoir and Personal Essay Writing

This is your chance to write straight from the heart.

    • Discover where memory and imagination intersect
    • Learn how to re-enter your life and locate the stories that must be told
    • Develop techniques for finding the heart of a story
    • Shape each memory into an unforgettable tale
    • Aerobicize your imagination

Leave a legacy

In Soulfood, music, ancestor writing, photos, visualization, and the power of your senses guide you into unwittingly creating a portfolio of autobiographical writings that move the heart, engage the intelligence, and have a lasting impact on you, the author, and your audience. Students complete the workshop feeling like extended family!

This class culminates with a soulfood pot-luck celebration and intimate reading of your work.

Definition of Soul food: Soul food, a term coined in the 1960′s by African-Americans in the South and referring to traditional home-cooked foods such as chitterlings, hamhocks, and collard greens, reminds all of us, regardless of our ethnic roots, of the power of home, of feeling connected to our culture, and of the significance of passing down through family and friends over generations our wisdom and our stories: the soulful expressions of our people.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Throughout history, and at an accelerating rate worldwide, people have experienced extreme levels of dislocation and disorientation from their original landscapes both cultural and geographical. Today, this diaspora continues to intensify. The majority of people, if they stop long enough to think about it, feel a tremendous longing for connection with their roots, for a sense of belonging. Soulfood Writing workshops are a way for us to honor and integrate our lives and the lives of those who brought us here. We can only hope that by providing a virtual table around which we share our stories with compassionate strangers, that we will become, not just better writers, but also more open-minded, more inclusive, more tolerant people as we enter the new millenium.

Prerequisite: None required. Ripe Fruit 1 recommended.