Turning Research into Narrative (Online)

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Taught by Sarah Lohman

Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling books Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods and Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Endangered Eating was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast. It was a finalist for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship and winner of the Ohioana Library Book Prize for Nonfiction. Lohman’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC to The Culinary Historians of Southern California

 

 

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Every writer needs to research, whether you're building the world of a historical novel, writing your first nonfiction essay, or simply want to place your characters in a different city. In this workshop, food

historian and author Sarah Lohman will show you how to be a responsible researcher and how to turn that knowledge into a compelling narrative.

 The first half of the class will be a primer on researching. We'll cover:

  • Beyond the Google search: Google Books and Ngram viewer
  • How to find primary sources and when to trust secondary sources.
  • How to access academic articles and scientific studies (and why you should).
  • How to research historical figures using Ancestry.com and Newspaper databases.
  • When you need to go to the library/archive (and when you don't).
  • The importance of research experiences - go touch a thing, see a thing, and do a thing.

We’ll practice analyzing sources throughout class and there will be plenty of time for Q&A. 

Then, in the second half of class, you'll look at examples of Lohman's work to understand how to convert raw fact to narrative. We'll cover the do and don'ts of incorporating and citing research and you'll complete a short research project and convert it into a narrative piece. 

If we all write "what we know," the bookstore would be a pretty boring place. Come learn the rich detail good research adds to a novel and how sniffing out an untold story is a significant journalistic accomplishment.

 

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