Life Writing: On Food & Drink with Rosie Schaap
Info
Date: May 20, 2025
Time: 5.30 pm - 7.30 pm
Duration: 6 weeks
Level: Beginner |
Cost: €190 (€171)
This course will take place online on Tuesdays for 6 weeks.
Course Summary
When is a dinner more than a dinner? When it’s also a lens through which to see a world, a framework within which to consider ideas and relationships, even a platform from which to advocate for justice. When we write personal essays about food and drink, we are also telling the stories of our lives, and the lives of others. This is a creative nonfiction course, appropriate for essayists, memoirists, journalists— any writer who has ever considered the meaning of a meal.
Course Outline
In this six-week course, we will read and discuss works by Ciaran Carson, Jessica B. Harris, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead and others, which, taken together, convey some sense of the breadth, depth, and creative range possible in writing about food and drink. Workshop discussions of students’ writing will be at the core of our two-hour sessions.
Course Outcomes
Students will write one short piece (250-500 words) and one longer essay (1000-2000 words), each with a dish, a drink, a dining experience, or another food memory at its heart.
Rosie Schaap is the author of The Slow Road North, Becoming a Sommelier, and Drinking With Men. From 2011 to 2017, she was a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, and she has also written about food and drink for Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, The Irish Times, among other publications. Her essays appear in anthologies including Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers, and she was a finalist for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award in the personal essay category. A native New Yorker, she has lived in the Glens of Antrim since 2019.
Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.
