What We Feed Ourselves: Food and Storytelling

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (WCDH) is pleased to present a workshop for young writers in collaboration with the Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library’s children’s summer program series. The workshop, What We Feed Ourselves: Food and Storytelling, will be instructed by Jami Nakamura Lin. She received a fully funded two-week residency at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow as the winner of the 2020 Real People, Real Struggles, Real Stories fellowship.

What We Feed Ourselves: Food and Storytelling will be held from 1:00 to 2:00 pm on Tuesday, June 29, in the garden at the Eureka Springs Carnegie Library located at 188 Spring Street (South of the Carnegie Library Gardens Building).  The workshop is free and appropriate for ages ten through high school. It will follow a free lunch provided to children 18 and under by the Flint Street Food Bank.

In this workshop, participants will write about (or illustrate!) the meals closest to their hearts. They will learn to use food writing as a way to describe their families, communities, and cultures. Through guided activities, the group will discover how the stories of the food we eat can tell the stories of our lives. All materials will be provided.

Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the memoir The Night Parade (Custom House/HarperCollins 2023). In 2019, she and her sister, artist Cori Nakamura Lin, produced the grant-funded multimedia project What We Feed Ourselves: Food, Culture, and Acculturation, which investigated food and narrative. Lin will be in residence at WCDH for a fully funded two-week residency.

Jami received her MFA in creative writing (nonfiction) from Penn State in 2013. Jami is a writer and editor at Anti-Racism Daily, a newsletter with over 90,000 subscribers and over 140,000 followers on Instagram. In May 2020, her piece "Does My Child's Name Erase My Identity?" was published in the New York Times, featured in the online NYT Parenting section, the print edition SundayStyles section, and on the front page of the website. In January 2020, Jami began writing “The Monster in the Mirror,” a bi-monthly essay column for Catapult, a website for writers. Jami was awarded a Creative Artists' Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Japan-US Friendship Commission in 2016. The grant allowed her to spend four months writing and researching myths and folklore in rural areas all over Japan in 2017. This research fueled her later writing.

WCDH Executive Director, Michelle Hannon, said, “It is an honor to be able to bring a professional writer with Jami’s talents, unique experiences, and potential to Eureka Springs, and to share her story with the community.”

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow would like to thank long-time supporter and board member Sharon Spurlin for generously funding the Real People, Real Struggles, Real Stories: Writing About Mental Illness fellowship.

Since opening its doors to writers in 2000, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow has made a lasting impact on the arts and literary communities providing uninterrupted residency time for writers of all genres, including culinary, composers, and artists, without discrimination. The WCDH has hosted over 1,500 writers from 48 states and 13 countries. For more information, please visit www.writerscolony.orgor call (479)253-7444.