F152.
When Do We Eat? Food & Feasts as Narrative Potential in Fiction
Friday, March 25, 2022
10:35 am to 11:50 am
In fiction, as in life, communal meals can be realms of possibility. Lavish holiday tables can be pivotal sites of magic, mess, or tension. Feasts convene characters both close and estranged, friendly and inimical. Dominant ideas of "family dinner: can be queered, bent, defamiliarized. And the food, vivid and specific, can be a character, too. This will be a conversation between fiction writers to whom food and meals are culturally significant in their lived lives, as well as in their stories.
Participants
Temim Fruchter
Gina Chung is a Korean American writer based in New York City. She is the communications manager at PEN America and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Catapult, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Find her at gina-chung.com.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly and a writer for Autostraddle. She previously was a restaurant reporter for Eater NY and recently held a fellowship with Lambda Literary.
Chelsey Johnson is the author of the novel Stray City, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, One Story, Ploughshares, NPR's Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from Iowa and a Stegner fellowship and now teaches at Northern Arizona University.
