Creative Writing Lessons ~ Online writing class combines writing and healing

Writing for Life: Creating a Story of Your Own
The journaling and scrapbooking techniques taught in this online writing class provide a creative way to connect with the inner self and heal emotional wounds while documenting your story, your life, in a fun and unique way. This online writing class features innovative, interactive Web Tools and many journal writing topics.
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Write A Way: Journey to Creativity

Enroll in Sandra's online writing class with creative writing lessons

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt, US diplomat & reformer (1884 - 1962)

Exploring the World with Your Senses: Food as Muse
By Sandra Lee Schubert

Food, glorious food. We can't escape it. The taste, the texture the way sugar dissolves on the tongue. How salt brings out flavor in our meals. Food thrills us. It can torment us with desire. I don't know many of us who successfully live with out food. Without it we die. Some much of who we are is tied to food.

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.
~ James Beard

Taste. A good meal shared with friends is a sublime pleasure. We live in the best of times because we can taste so many different things. My neighborhood is a feast of tactile delights. The Korean store is next to the Turkish market and across the boulevard from a string of restaurants that include; Thai, Dominican, Mexican, Romanian and a McDonald's across from a Subway franchise. There is a taste delight for everyone. I am happy to live in a place where I can sample many different food and all the intricacies of taste.

It's amazing how pervasive food is. Every second commercial is for food. Every second TV episode takes place around a meal. In the city, you can't go ten feet without seeing or smelling a restaurant. There are 20 foot high hamburgers up on billboards. I am acutely aware of food, and its omnipresence is astounding.
~ Adam Scott, The Monkey Chow Diaries, June 2006

A recent issue of Gourmet magazine had a small anthology of food related stories. Food was the central character. Taste was paramount in each. The driving force was the sensuality, the texture, the pleasure of food. Taste is an early primal memory. So much of our memory is tied to it; maybe it was our mother's milk or the bottle that gave us that first visceral sensation that we live with all our lives.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.
~ Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 1825, French gourmet & lawyer (1755 - 1826)

In the book, Like Water for Chocolate, the main character took food to a new level when her emotions embodied the food she cooked. Her pain or pleasure translated into the food. Those who ate her dishes literally took in that emotion. There was a magic connected to the food, to the earth as well at to the history of recipes past down through the generations. The family history was told through these recipes. Each bite, each taste was eating history, full of all the emotions of the stories that were wrapped around each meal

Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits.
~ Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Taste stimulates all sorts of wonderful things. Our lives revolve around the memory of how things taste. The smell of apple pie can bring back us back to a time when we were happy. Or it can remind of us of what we have missed. These memories inform our creativity. Art reflects our need for food. Luscious fruits spill from paintings. Movies are full of scenes of eating. There is an entire TV network is devoted to just food!

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.
~ George Miller

We can't get away from it. Food, the taste of it, our memories around it will continue to feed our creativity.

Today's Creative Writing Prompts

Culinary exploration - Name a favorite food from your childhood, teenage and young adult years, and where you are now. It could be the same food or a different food for each period of time. What made that a favorite food? What are the good and bad memories associated with it? As an example I have a fondness for French fries. They remind me of the ones my father would bring home to us when I was little. They were slightly soggy, salty and wrapped in brown paper. These fries were a special treat we loved to eat.

Culinary reading - Find some food related poems, stories or books. What appeals to you about them? What scared or amazed you?

Taste is Sweet - The book Fruitflesh has some wonderful writing exercises centered on food. If you have a chance pick it up and use some of the suggestions in it. If not, pick some food of different tastes and textures. Feel it, touch it, smell it and taste it. See the food as if for the very first time. Write your impressions. Write a poem of short story around the food item or items you have selected.

Remember taste is sense that can inspire us. We have the unique advantage to experience it most of the time. Explore it and let food be your muse.

Sandra Schubert resides in New York City and is the creator and instructor for the Self-Healing Expressions online writing class Writing for Life: Creating a Story of Your Own. This online writing class features creative writing lessons and interactive Web Tools. To learn more about Sandra and her creative writing lessons, click here:

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Copyright © 2006 Sandra Lee Schubert. All rights reserved. If you are interested in publishing this article, please email .