Home Ec Writer’s Workshop
Apparently adulthood is an exercise in feeling torn. Feeling torn between home and work. Between keeping up with the laundry and turning cartwheels in the park with the children. Between writing a poem and catching up on email. Between reading the news and listening to the songbirds in the eaves. Often it is hard to know where to focus our attention, even on a minute-by-minute basis.
But what I do know is that I am increasingly turning my imagination toward home, toward its tasks and its treasures, toward its heartbreaks and its joys, toward its lessons and its metaphors. And, maybe home is where we can start to mend some of the tears. Where we can bring cooking dinner and writing essays back together. Where we can solidify our connection to own little corner of earth while launching our stories and poems and memoirs out into the big, wide world. And maybe the lessons we’ve learned—or have yet to learn—at home can deepen and enrich our writing in ways that we have not yet let ourselves explore.
So that’s why, this fall over at the Attic Institute, we’re launching the Home Ec Writer’s Workshop. It is the place where we can bring the hospitality and practical know-how of our domestic lives directly to bear on our literary lives. It’ll be an occasional series, meeting on Sundays. Writers of all genres are invited to one or all of the sessions. There will always be a theme to spur us on, but we’ll go where the domestic goddess takes us. Of course, knitting and stitching and mending are always welcome. And there will be snacks. Oh yes, there will always be snacks.
Naturally, the first workshop will be on (what else?) food. There is nothing like food to trigger memory and spur the imagination, so we will take advantage of that richness, and use food as a prompt, a muse, and a foil throughout the day. We will read great food literature, rely on our senses, produce new work and break bread together. We will smell and taste and write hard and deep.
In October, we will turn to our ancestors. If your home is anything like mine, it is crammed with memories and customs and superstitions handed down from members of previous generations, some of whom we knew and some of whom we didn’t. At our second Home Ec Writer’s Workshop, we will invite our ancestors into the room and see what they bring to our work. Their lives—both documented and imagined—can add texture to our thinking and our writing, and I can’t wait to see what we learn from those who came before us.
And, if you participate and enjoy it and learn something . . . we’ll continue the workshop into the winter and beyond. I know we can think of all sorts of home ec topics to take on over the coming months.
I’m so excited to see where the Home Ec Writer’s Workshop takes us. I hope you will join us in either September or October and become a part of the community. You can sign up at over at the Attic Institute. And tell your friends. Because—really—there’s no place like home.
