Emily in France 🇫🇷 On Making Time to Write
A successful first workshop
I have just returned to Paris (which, as Chris O’Brien recently explored in excellent detail, is not exactly on fire) after a week of full writing immersion. The first Nantes Writers’ Workshop has officially come to a close, and it was, if I may be so bold, a resounding success.
The retreat, which I co-host with fellow writer Anna Polonyi, features a week punctuated by both generative writing exercises and an Iowa-style writers’ workshop. By the end of the week, participants will have flexed both their creative and critical muscles, returning home with new words of their own as well as letters and insight from their fellow participants.
Anna, who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, led the afternoon sessions; I, meanwhile, took the mornings, which saw us writing not only in the lovely AirBnb we rented in central Nantes, but also exploring écriture en plein air at the historic castle of the Dukes of Brittany, not to mention the small Japanese garden on an island in the river.
The women were a varied, lovely bunch traveling from as far as Spain and Germany. Some were professional writers looking to make more space to exercise their craft; others were just breaking into the writing world. I sincerely hope that they all came away from the experience with new inspiration, new passion, and a newfound writing community with whom to trade pages, ideas, craft theories, musings, and more.
After all… I did.
Cheese of the Week
The Crémeux du Mont Saint-Michel wears its name well. A creamy creation from Mont Saint-Michel, a sometimes-island officially part of Normandy despite being located on a bay shared with Brittany, this ultra-creamy bloomy-rinded cheese is made with the rich milk of Normande cows and toes the line between cheese and pure butter. The crémeux boasts three distinct textures: Rich and fluffy in the center, it has a runny layer just beneath the rind, and this is where the mushroomy, almost spicy flavors lie.
To discover more of my favorite cheeses, be sure to follow me on Instagram @emily_in_france, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and tune into the Terroir Podcast, where Caroline Conner and I delve into France's cheese, wine, and more one region at a time.
What I'm Eating
Franco-Japanese fusion is at its best when it skews less French at Ran, where a gorgeous dining room in the 8th arrondissement offers a super swanky ambiance in which to enjoy bites like toro tataki or creamy spicy tuna on fried bites of sticky rice. More on the blog.
Discover more of my foodie finds via Instagram @emily_in_france and on the blog.
Where I’m Going
1. To Epernay, for the inauguration of the Vign'art festival at the Maison de Champagne Gosset.
2. Back to Kubri for more delicious Lebanese small plates.
3. To the Conciergerie, to catch an expo on the history of Paris as a capital of gastronomy.
What I'm Writing
1. Cheese-loving visitors to the Loire Valley city of Tours are certain to cross paths, even tangentially, with Thierry Cartereau. The reedy cheesemonger holds court most often at his fromagerie in the central covered market, but the reality is that his influence permeates the entirety of the local cheesescape. For France Today.
2. Wagyu beef is all over restaurant menus these days, often with a very hefty price tag attached. To help keep you from forking out the expense in vain, I delved into the most common mistakes folks are making with this sought-after beef. For Mashed.
3. Clam chowder was a family-meal favorite at Charlie Trotter's iconic eatery, and I got the recipe from Chef Giuseppe Tentori, who brought it with him to his River North steakhouse. For InsideHook.
What I'm Saying
When you think of a Parisienne, do you imagine a temptress? A svelte fashionista? Well that narrow worldview is such a small part of the truth – something Lindsey Tramuta has sought to address head-on with her book The New Parisienne – and with me on this episode of Navigating the French.
What I'm Reading
1. I loved the way that that the soft-fantastic Thistlefoot managed to sew together brutal history and magic, and the sibling story at its heart filled me with so much love. GennaRose Nethercott has crafted an awfully beautiful/beautifully awful world that has rekindled my love of the genre after a long absence.
2. A former French teacher once told me Americans are afraid of chewing, and to that, I’d add, we’re afraid of chewiness, sliminess, and slipperiness. Our aversion is linked in a chicken-and-egg lockstep with our lack of words to describe the sheer variety of textures described by, say, Japanese. And this story delves into just some of that wide array of nearly untranslatable terms. In the New York Times.
3. "Changing your mind is hard because it’s easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake.” This is just one of many thought-provoking tidbits I gleaned from this exploration of the benefits of mental liquidity. In CollabFund.
A bientôt !