For the next ten days, I’m on a residency at the Nanning Literary House along with my Wind&Bones collaborator, Hannah Stevens. We aim to spend ten days thinking and writing about food, hospitality, stories, and the philosophy of everyday life, here in Taiwan’s food capital.
We’ve set up a small blog project to go with the residency. Nourishing Tainan, or 滋養台南 is a place to share some of the writing and thinking we are doing, as well as some of the writing that we are inviting other people to share. We’re interested in the idea of nourishment: the ways that food nourishes the body, the ways that stories nourish our spirit and our communities, and the ways that philosophy nourishes the mind. So it will be fun to think about this a bit more.
We want to make this residency interactive, to use the time not just to write and think, but also to make deeper connections with the city that is our new home. So tomorrow, we’ll be inviting members of the public over to the Literary House to share afternoon tea, and some stories of their own. Again, we’ll publish some of these on the project website. Between now and then, we’re putting together some posters to use as writing prompts, and I’ll also be in the kitchen, making piles of scones in our tiny box oven, ready for the event.
Alongside working on stories related to food, we’ll be finding time to work on our own writing projects as well. I have a proposal for the next big nonfiction project that is coming slowly into focus, and I’m feeling very excited by how it is looking. In addition, I’m finishing the text for a guide on storytelling in the liberal arts, commissioned by the Open Society University Network. So between all the tea-drinking and feasting, it’s going to be a busy time.
At the end of the project, we’ll be presenting a public lecture talking about our work, and inviting those who come along to get involved by sharing their own stories.
