Yesterday I had the profound experience of attending the “Deep Feast Writing Workshop,” conducted by the legendary writing instructor and cookbook author known as Crescent Dragonwagon. Born Ellen Zolotow in 1952, Dragonwagon assumed her name in the late 1960s when she was still in her teens, and her first husband discovered that their given names did not apply to their own sense of who they were at the time. “His old first name, Mark, meant ‘the warrior’; we were anti-war. My old first name, Ellen, meant ‘the Queen’; we were anti-authoritarian. It was the '60's; we didn't agree with much;” she explains on her website. 

Silly name or not, Dragonwagon has earned an unparalleled reputation for coaching food writers through the various challenges that we face in balancing the nuanced and evocative stories that we produce to prompt readers to consider our recipes at all, and the highly technical and precise kind of writing we must use to in the recipes themselves. Her own cookbooks including The Passionate Vegetarian and The Cornbread Gospels are perennial bestsellers with hundreds of recipes that serve as models of how to write about food, but her work as a writer transcends the genre; she is also a bestselling children’s author and a brilliant blogger. As a writing coach, she counts among her students the late great Julia Child. 

For me, having just turned in my sixth cookbook, taking a day off to learn about writing from a fellow food writer could be sort of like a busman’s holiday. But spending the day with Crescent and the other writers gathered at Camp Long in West Seattle was a genuine retreat; restorative, restful and invigorating. Seven hours of grappling with what makes food writing work, what makes it meaningful, and what makes it uniquely our own, gave me the second wind I didn’t know I needed to help me tackle the writing projects that lie ahead.

Part of what made the experience worthwhile was the location. Before I signed up for the class, I didn’t know that Camp Long existed. It’s an oasis of sylvan calm in the middle of urban West Seattle, right off 35^th street. I was blown away by this charming depression-era cottage, built by WPA workers, using granite pavers recycled from old Seattle roadways. Just seeing the lodge was reason enough to get over to West Seattle, and already I can’t wait to get back there and explore the rest of that cool park. Apparently there are cabins to rent and all sorts of good things going on. 

What made the writing workshop so great though was the opportunity to absorb some of Crescent’s amazing understanding of how this craft actually works. And from Dragon’s own unique perspective came one of the most valuable insights I have ever been given into why we write about what we eat. “Food, shelter, story,” she said, “These are the basic human needs. We go out, we gather food, we bring it back to the cave and then we tell the story of how we got the food.”

So writing about food, as the late M.F.K. Fisher was so fond of saying, is just “writing about life.” And that is especially true when the writing is at the “Deep Feast” level. Crescent makes a clear distinction between this type of food writing and two other types of food writing, known respectively as Comfort Food Writing and Fast Food Writing. 

Fast Food Writing is, like its namesake, somewhat lacking in substantive value. It’s quick, it’s easy and it might leave the writer feeling bored or slightly ashamed. Comfort Food Writing is “like macaroni and cheese;” it’s easy to turn to. It gives some context for the subject matter but not much. Done correctly, it can be fairly satisfying for both the writer and for the reader, but the voice of the writer might be indistinguishable from that of any other competent food writer. It is never entirely unique or particularly meaningful.

Deep Feast Food Writing is something else altogether. “The content takes you to a deeper place,” says Dragonwagon. “It always provides context and connection between the subject matter and the world. It is historical, personal, emotional,” sometimes all of these and more. Deep Feast Food Writing is likely to inform and surprise both the reader and the writer. It’s told in an original voice, one that only this particular writer could have written.

And to prove her point, Crescent actually led us through some exercises that allowed us to dabble in what really was some deep feast moments in food writing. The most valuable exercise for me was something called the Ira Progoff Dialoguing Technique. Known as The Stepping Stones, this journaling exercise allows one to isolate particular events that served as stepping stones along a path. In the exercise led by Dragonwagon, the same process allows a writer to consider a subject from new perspectives, ultimately dialoguing with the subject in the form of a conversation with the topic at hand.

If this sounds a little far out, it is; but so is the almost mystical connection the exercise affords us writers with the topics we want to write about. I chose to dialogue with cinnamon. I can’t say exactly why I chose cinnamon, it was simply the first topic that came to mind, and Crescent encouraged us to go with whatever came up first. (It occurred to me afterwards that even though I have been writing professionally about food for more than twenty years, I have never published anything about cinnamon.) Words flowed out of my pen and I was thrilled to discover how much I had to say about the topic. Now, I look forward to applying the same technique to other topics.

It’s amazing how a simple “trick” can open a floodgate of knowledge that we didn’t know we were carrying around. What’s more, the feelings I had about cinnamon as a topic were feelings that I now realize I have about any food related subject. Somehow, this apparently simple exercise, during which I managed to put about two thousand very meaningful words on the page in a period of less than an hour, helped me understand why I have been writing about food for more than a quarter century now, and how I could easily go on doing it – and perhaps doing it better – for another twenty-five. Now, I’m looking forward to a time when I might be able to enroll in one of Crescent’s more intensive three-day workshops, The Fearless Writing Workshops.