Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Eating and Flying: A Food and Travel Writing Seminar
Department
Writing
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2010-2011
Abstract
Both food and travel offer writers myriad inspiration and as subjects, demand fresh imagery, description, and leaps of language. Oftentimes, writing about the sense of new taste in an unfamiliar setting leads to a blurring of genre lines in order to roundly interrogate human experiences that unite us, voyages both actual and gustatory. Matthew Gavin Frank, food and travel writer, nonfictioneer and poet, and author of the food-and-wine memoir, BAROLO, discusses such intersections and inspirations, as well as the notions of sense-memory, emotional memory, immersion, reflection, and larding the edible with the language of the lyric. I will also be part of a second panel entitled: BAROLO: A Craft Reading from the Food-and-Wine Memoir Description: Matthew Gavin Frank, a fifteen-year veteran of the food-and-wine industry, researched BAROLO by spending six months in Barolo, Italy (pop. 646), living out of a tent in the garden of the local Pittatore farmhouse. Through the Pittatore family, he was able to secure work picking wine grapes for famed vintner Luciano Sandrone. Through Sandrone, Frank developed relationships with the region's families, restaurateurs, butchers, vintners, local foodstuffs, odd markets, and circus-like atmosphere in experiences both gustatory and flamboyant. Frank will read from his book, and discuss the inspiration and stories behind certain scenes, why certain portions were written in a certain way, and the strange process by which he pieced the manuscript together.
Conference Name
Eating and Flying: A Food and Travel Writing Seminar
Conference Location
Clarksville, Tennessee
ScholarWorks Citation
Frank, Matthew, "Eating and Flying: A Food and Travel Writing Seminar" (2010). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 43.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/43
