August 13-17, 2025
Food is an essential part of the shared human experience and always tied to place whether we recognize it or not. Even the ingredients of a drive-thru hamburger come from somewhere. The climate, soil, and landscape of a place often impart unique character to food; if we are wine people, we call this terroir. If we aren’t, we’re still looking for a better word.
Writing about food becomes more than just food writing when it, too, is deeply tied to the places, ecosystems, cultures, and people who produce what we eat. When food is on the table in a particular place, what ideas can writers have, what worlds can they reveal, what relationships can they probe?
Food is also political. How might concepts like sustainability, environmental health and degradation, cultural repression and human exploitation shape our writing about food and place?
In this multi-genre workshop, writers will deepen their explorations of food through reading, writing, and discussing nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from writers such as Kevin Young, MFK Fisher, Jamaica Kincaid, Stuart Dybek, Paisley Rekdal, Nigel Slater, CMarie Fuhrman, Daniel Orozco, and Amy Thielen. This is a generative workshop for established and emerging writers. You will leave Quillisascut having started six new pieces.
In addition to quiet time for writing and plenty of interaction with fellow writers, participants can engage in a hands-on farm experience. We will visit the milking barn, make cheese, care for farm animals, work in the gardens, and prepare food together. All meals are sourced from the farm’s bounty and prepared by culinary professionals, from whom students can learn new culinary techniques. At the end of our time together, we’ll host a celebratory reading.
Tuition for this workshop is $1425 and includes food and lodging. The Quillisascut Education Fund has raised limited funds for tuition support. Applicants who need financial assistance can request to be considered for up to 50% tuition assistance. Funds will be awarded on a sliding scale. Please pay what you can.
Writing Portion of the workshop will be led by Kate Lebo and Sam Ligon
Kate Lebo’s first collection of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit, won the 2022 Washington State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. It was also named a best book of the year by NPR, The Atlantic, New York magazine, Electric Literature, and The Globe and Mail. She’s the author of the cookbook Pie School and the poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and coeditor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter & Booze. Her essays and poems have appeared or will appear soon in Best American Essays, Orion, Harper’s Magazine, Saveur, Cake Zine, The Inlander, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Spokane, Washington, where she is an apprentice cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm.
Samuel Ligon’s most recent novel—Miller Cane: A True & Exact History—was serialized for a year in Spokane’s weekly newspaper, The Inlander, as well as on Spokane Public Radio. The author of four previous books of fiction, including Wonderland and Safe in Heaven Dead, Ligon is also co-editor, with Kate Lebo, of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter & Booze. He teaches creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane and serves as EWU’s Faculty Legislative Liaison in Olympia.
