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 and critically acclaimed book Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of American food as a way to access stories of women, immigrants, and people of color, and to address issues of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Her work has been featured inTheWall Street Journal andThe New York Times, as well as onAll Things Considered; and she has presented across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC to The Culinary Historians of Southern California. She is also 1/2 of the Masters of Social Gastronomy, a monthly food science and history talk at Caveat NYC, with Brainery co-founder Jonathan Soma. 

 

 

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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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