Writing Prompts to Saveur's Picnic Photography

5/19/2021

Photo by Helen Rosner at Saveur.com

Introduction

All of the food photography in this post are from the article "36 Pretty and Portable Picnic Recipes to Elevate Your Next Outdoor Dining Experience" at saveur.com. I was enamored by the article because (a) the photography is delicious. (b) I'm really ready for the kind of break this indulgent picnic would offer. (c) The writing practice around reading the recipes and studying the photography made me appreciate the gardens and gardeners, the bakeries and bakers, and the harvesting and prepping of all this food, as well as the photographers, and all the earnest, magical-picnic seeking people who will lovingly attempt to make and pack these gastronomical delights in the next months!

And then, at the end of the session, we read "Glen Uig"?! I mean, people, welcome to the most "elemental" picnic experience of the century.

I earnestly try to credit each photographer below. You can find the picnic recipes [mmmm] at saveur.com!

5 Minute Warm Up Writes

Salad: Fava Bean, Herb, and Pomegranate Fattoush Photo: André Baranowski

See the bowl as only patches of colors and shapes; then, write.
Let taste, texture, or food groups inspire writing.
Mindfully imagine what it took -- from grower to chef -- for this bowl of food to appear. Write a poem that traces that journey. Or write about eating it.
Write about the bowl, the utensils, and the table.

Invent a drink recipe in poem form.
Write about drinking, all the way down the gullet.
Tell me about the last drink you had.

Drink photos: Todd Coleman and Helen Rosner

Photos: André Baranowski / Helen Rosner

Photos: Matt Taylor-Gross / Kyle Johnson

Which sandwich is a metaphor for your life right now?
Give each sandwich a fictional name, a Seussical name, a Saveur name, a metaphorical name, an ironic name.
Write a poem that includes all the types of imagery: visual, gustatory, tactile, auditory, olfactory.
Tell me about the best/worst picnic food you’ve ever had-in great detail.

Photo: Matt Taylor-Gross

Mentor Poem

The Picnic by the Ocean
GRACE CAVALIERI

The Octopus offers me one of his three hearts,
briar and holly for friendship the second and third
saved for times of longing, times of loss.
A strange romance, I admit--
Friends would never approve or believe,
yet he was untouched by human hands.
How can we say this is not a source of wonder--
“Who will sing my song, if not you?” he asked.
“Who will dream of me, as I lay under the stillness of water?”
Even an Octopus can be eloquent, and then again,
as we know, enormous need can become power.
What am I supposed to do now?
I stand by the water,
my woolen dress unraveling in the waves.

Source: poets.org

Writing Prompt

Adapt one of your warm-up writes into a magical poem.

For Discussion

This poem is so epic, beyond picnic food photography, beyond any picnic I've ever experienced, deserves its own blog post and critical analysis type of epic. "Elemental" is another word repeatedly used in our group's discussion of the poem. How it landed in us as we read and where it lands in the real world were not so at odds as you might think. And where Glen Uig sits in the real world, is apparently, at the outer edges of it -- the gateway to the Hebrides -- which is it's own epic-ness. And exactly where I'd like to "picnic," though that word sounds much too tame for where and how this poem happens.

Glen Uig
RICHARD HUGO

Believe in this couple this day who come
to picnic in the Faery Glen. They pay rain
no matter, or wind. They spread their picnic
under a gale-stunted rowan. Believe they grew tired
of giants and heroes and know they believe
in wise tiny creatures who live under the rocks.

Believe these odd mounds, the geologic joke
played by those wise tiny creatures far from
the world's pitiful demands: make money, stay sane.
Believe the couple, by now soaked to the skin,
sing their day as if dry, as if sheltered inside
Castle Ewen. Be glad Castle Ewen's only a rock
that looks like a castle. Be glad for no real king.

These wise tiny creatures, you'd better believe,
have lived through it all: the Viking occupation,
clan torturing clan, the Clearances, the World War
II bomber gone down, a fiery boom
on Beinn Edra. They saw it from here. They heard
the sobs of last century's crofters trail off below
where every day the Conon sets out determined for Uig.
They remember the Viking who wandered off course,
under the hazelnut tree hating aloud all he'd done.

Some days dance in the bracken. Some days go out
wide and warm on bad roads to collect the dispossessed
and offer them homes. Some days celebrate addicts
sweet in their dreams and hope to share with them
a personal spectrum. The loch here's only a pond,
the monster is in it small as a wren.

Believe the couple who have finished their picnic
and make wet love in the grass, the tiny wise creatures
cheering them on. Believe in milestones, the day
you left home forever and the cold open way
a world wouldn't let you come in. Believe you
and I are that couple. Believe you and I sing tiny
and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.

Source: Poets.org