I AM ALWAYS EATING

I am eating my lunch.  Seems like I am always eating.  I am hungry when I get to work and I’m hungry when I get home from work and I’m hungry when I go to bed, and when I wake up.  It’s not as bad as it sounds, I don’t always eat when I’m hungry, and I’m only ten, okay fifteen pounds overweight, but if you imagine a bowling ball in my tummy, the rest of me looks kind of good—I’m not a kid anymore as the saying goes, though the new sixty is the old what?  Twenty? Okay thirty.  Okay, sometimes I eat when I’m not hungry.  And, no, I don’t eat what I should, I eat what I want.  I like comfort food.  And I like food that reminds me of childhood, which is interesting because we were poor—need I say more.  Okay, our neighbor worked for Wonder Bread so we had our fill of Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies.  Forget the Snowballs, none of us, my four siblings and I, liked coconut!

Where is this leading?  To storytelling.  Recently my friend Lori and I taught a storytelling/writing workshop.  We used various prompts to encourage the participants to write about women in their lives:  mothers, grandmothers, sisters, friends, mentors!  One of the storytelling prompts was food.  Who would have guessed that food would be the specialty of the day.  The hot lunch provided us provided all the sensory sensations we needed to get started:  taste, smell, sight, touch, sound!

We started by listing the foods we grew up with.  Amazing.  Naming.  What do the foods we listed tell us about who we are, about our families, about our race, our class, etc., etc.?  And yet, don’t try to assume who we are by the food we ate. We may have eaten Jell-O, but we may also have eaten drunken string bean chop suey!  Here’s my shout out:

Food Shout Out

Drunken string bean chop suey

Nankin Special Chow Mein

White Castle Hamburgers

Scrambled Hamburger

White rice

Hostess Cupcakes

Campbell Chicken Noodle Soup

Gingerbread

Swiss Steak

Goulash

Egg Fou Yung

Jell-O

Gov’t canned meat, powdered milk, and cheese

Salvation Army turkey at Thanksgiving

Have some fun, write your own list.  Have your friends write a list.  Pick something on the list and write a story about it.  See where that story meanders.  Discover a deeper meaning of White Castle Hamburgers!

And, to end where I should have started, I include here as reference, my intro to the hour presentation the participants and co-teacher guides gave, sharing our stories.  Food being one of them.

Also, check out these food Web sites.  They’re not just about food.

http://fairychef.blogspot.com/

http://tanglednoodle.blogspot.com/

http://www.lakitchenchicana.blogspot.com/

I would like to thank the UWOC council for inviting Lori and I to participate in today’s annual Fall Welcome and I would like to thank the women who participated in the workshop.  Lori and I met in a writing class in 1996, the year I graduated from the University of Minnesota’s MFA program.  I had never taught a class before, but Carolyn Holbrook gave me permission, and I taught my first class in a neighborhood coffee house.  Lori and I lost touch, but later reconnected at the first ever teleconference for Women in Education, organized by Dr. Nancy Barcelo.  Since, Lori and I have collaborated on a performance, Chinese Black White Women Got the Beat which we performed at several venues, including a reading sponsored by UWOC.  And we have been co-teaching interdisciplinary writing workshops for women of color.  Our workshops balance critical thinking and creative writing with in-person and online discussions.  Storytelling is the backbone of the workshop process as each participant recognizes the truth and substance of her stories, as well as the stories of other colorful women.    We examine the words/the lives of writers who have paved the way–wise women who have sorted through the muck, survived the muck, and risen above it:  Toni Morrison, Nikki Finney, Shay Youngblood, Edén Torres, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzuldúa, Wang Ping, Linda Hogan, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toi Derricotte, Joy Harjo, Evelina Galang, Michelle Cliff, Sandra Cisneros, and many others.

Our workshops incorporate a holistic mapping process, written and visual.  We embrace our stories in all of their complexity in order to understand and challenge social or cultural obstacles to living healthy and productive lives.  We look in a mirror and see beauty, strength, wit, and wisdom.  We look at each other and see the same.

Storytelling.  It’s monkey mind.  It’s conversation.  It’s crafting our lives by crafting our words.  It’s claiming the past and imagining the future with no rules of craft or politics except the ones we, individually, choose, the ones that work for us.  Stories that save our lives enter the world like angels flapping their wings, creating music, something like jazz.  Someone will be listening.

The goal of our workshops is to break silence and invisibility by reading, writing, contemplating, and conversing; and, to imagine a future by breaking through barriers that have shut us out and shut us up.  Participants look within and without–and shout out, bringing their stories of survival and growth to others.

The UWOC storytelling workshop focused on the colorful women in the lives of the participants.  Lori and I did our best to condense our usual 3-4 day/ 4-6 hour sessions into a one day, six hour session.  Lori will tell you how that process worked.

Thank you.