A Literary Culinary Journal
Thinking about your food writing? As in, how to make it more real and vivid? Or how to improve the quality of your commitment to it?Contact us to set up a free consultation. We want to talk with you, and 20 of our minutes are yours for the asking.
We also offer free one-hour conference calls for students once a month. That’ll be a whole bunch of us on the phone together, and we will announce the topic far ahead of time. Contact us with topics that will be especially useful to you.
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by Elatia Harris
So many great writers need their writing rooms to meet precise specs. E.B. White preferred a rough-hewn, minimalist space, with nothing but a typewriter. Virginia Woolf needed lots of green around her, and took some serious kidding about it from her sister. I have noticed that a writing room is almost never gender-neutral, even when the writer is going for a low-key, orderly space that gives little away. There’s something I need, that I’ll give up things I like to get: a window. Looking at photos like the National Trust photo above, of Vita Sackville-West’s writing table at Sissinghurst, I always notice — does the writing table face a window, or a wall?
Which leads me to wonder — how much of a writing prompt is your desk itself? It has four corners, like the ancient Chinese idea of the Universe. Within that space, you can put anything you have that helps. When you look up from your work, are you still seeing with the mind’s eye? What could you arrange to see, physically, that would give you the most of what you needed to keep writing?
Elatia Harris is a writer and consulting editor in Cambridge, Mass. She is most often at work on books and articles about food, wine and travel. Contact her at elatiaharrisATgmailDOTcom or via text at 617-599-7159.
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How to Use a Food Writing Prompt
Schedule a minute or two with a prompt, whenever you feel stuck. Whether you sense the deep need of a new idea, or you want to feel more centered by clearing space around you before you write, using a prompt is the very opposite of procrastinating.
We have gathered a selection of prompts for your pleasure and productivity – some with stories of their own, some with an implicit demand that you write the story, some for clearing your mind, others for the experience of sheer marveling. We’ll keep adding to it, too.
To build your own collection of prompts, look around you differently — right now! Are there photos, sea shells, paperweights, bottles of perfume, spiritual symbols, or even baseball cards that are special to you? Maybe you walk by them every day, and they’ve been in the same place long enough to be invisible to you unless you look for them. Gather a few of these things onto a little tray. Handle them. Sniff them. If you feel a little less bogged down now, and sense a re-set, then you have been prompted.
That’s how it works. It’s tiny, but powerful.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
