Home From the Greenbrier: A Retrospective

 How do I sum up the Greenbrier experience?

I've perused the writings of my fellow attendees of the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier during the past few days. Their reflections are comprehensive, coherent and helpful, while I still don't know what to say. I'm not inclined to merely parrot their observations or roll out a series of photos of everything we ate, since the focus was on food writing and publishing, not simply on food. In fact, I was leery of paying too much attention to the food itself for fear I'd miss out on the meat (so to speak) of the Symposium.

Instead of blathering on about it, I'll let three photos speak for me:

 The attention to detail was striking, all the way down to the chocolates on our tables in our meeting room. Notice how each one is arranged just so, with the wrappers placed facing outward? No detail was too small to escape their attention. On my bed were four pillows: a soft one for stomach sleepers, a medium one for back sleepers, a firm one for side sleepers and a feather pillow for me! I built a fort out of them, burrowed in each night and slept the sleep of the happily overwhelmed.

Speaking of happily overwhelmed, breakfast on the final morning featured this knock-your-socks-off presentation of pork, a chunky and succulent homemade sausage wrapped in a perfect latticework of bacon. The ungenerous, antisocial part of me wanted to snatch it away and sit in the corner alone and eat it all.

I didn't do that, you'll be happy to know. The company was too good and the conversation too rich, to do such a thing. I have more friends and professional associates than I had before I went, people whose talent, work and opinions I value. People I can turn to for advice, and for whom I'll gladly provide the same. We writers do not exist in a bubble. We need each other's insights, generously given. At the Symposium, I hit the mother lode.

self portrait

I love this painting of a drooling pig, hung just outside the entrance to the main dining room at the Greenbrier. It pretty much sums up the way I feel about my experience there, both personally and professionally--happy, but hungry for more.

An Honor and An Opportunity

I've been awarded the Apicius Scholarship to attend the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier. This is a big deal, and I'm truly excited to be going--and receiving a scholarship to go!

According to the Symposium's website, the Apicius Scholarship is "awarded to a professional food writer whose prose rings with a clear voice and reflects the delicious joys of the table. In the spirit of Apicius, the first Roman to write cookbooks, the goal is to grant this award to that writer whose work will stand the test of time."

This profoundly gratifies and humbles me. I won for writing "Not Your Granny's Aspic," which appeared in the spring 2010 issue of Edible Memphis. As is often the case with my assignments, I had so much fun doing the work that I forgot it was supposed to be work! So this is icing on a really yummy cake.

The timing of the award is propitious, since I've just completed my "52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks" blogging project and begun work on a book proposal based on it. The Symposium is the perfect place to carry my ideas.

I just wanted to share this news with you. Tomorrow I head to West Virginia to the Greenbrier, a stunning estate set in the Allegeny Mountains. I look forward to hobnobbing with other professional food writers and with publishers, editors and agents. Who knows what will happen? I feel like this is the next step up the ladder of my career as a food writer.