Food Writing Class

I love to eat, shoot, and write.  I am getting picky on what I eat, how to shoot, but I still have a hard time to write.  Writing is hard for me.  How to make readers feel the same way I feel through words?  It is hard to writing in my native Chinese language and even harder in English.  Since I was born and educated in Chinese, I think it is easier for me to write in Chinese than English even though I have studied in American college for four years.  I can write research papers and legal real estate contracts which are required for my job, but writing for food is still hard.

I have always wanted to improve my English writing skills, especially for food and travel.  Recently I received a Continuing Studies catalog from Stanford University, and one of the classes is the Online Food Writing, 10 weeks from 1/14-3/23, limited to 17 students, registration starts on 12/3.  I am really interested in this class, but not sure my schedule would fit.  I post it here in case someone would be interested.

Food Writing: The Literary Gourmet (Online Course) (EGL 243 W)

If you love to eat, cook and read about great food, and you'd like to learn more about the many different forms of food writing, then this is the course for you. In this course, you will read a wide variety of food writing by some the most successful practitioners at work today, including former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, food blogger and bestselling author Julie Powell, chef Anthony Bourdain, science and food writer Michael Pollan, and Vogue contributor Jeffrey Steingarten. Using their work as models, you will learn how to write restaurant reviews, how to test and develop written recipes, and how to write travel stories focused on food. You will also each write one personal essay and one magazine article in which food—either dining out or dining in—takes center stage. We will discuss practical aspects of the business as well, such as how to submit your short pieces to publications and how to write book proposals. This is an online writing workshop, so be prepared to respond to other students' writing in an editorial capacity, and to receive great feedback on your own.

Created in close partnership with the Stanford Creative Writing Program, this online course will be useful for students looking to improve their craft. Because this course can be taken anywhere, anytime, it is designed to be attractive to those students who live far from campus, or who lead busy lives and can benefit from the flexibility of the online format.

Malena Watrous
Former Stegner Fellow
Malena Watrous is a fiction and nonfiction writer based in San Francisco. She has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Iowa. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a Truman Capote fellow. Her fiction has been published in such literary journals as Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and The Massachussetts Review, and her nonfiction has appeared on Salon.com, and in The Believer, Real Simple, Organic Style, and other magazines.

For other online writing classes, please click HERE.