In this In-Program ILC entitled Eating the Past: A Food Memoir Anthology, this student has taken on the formidable task of contacting, editing, and compiling the work of herself and her peers into an anthology. Students in the program Comparative Eurasian Foodways wrote eating/tasting/food memoirs that were meant to encapsulate the foods, tastes, and eating habits of their ancestors, families, and selves. To do this, students reflected on their own lives, reached out to family members, and some even did DNA testing in order to access the pasts that had been forgotten or lost. They also kept tasting notebooks, and reflected on the different types of cuisines they tasted throughout the quarter. In winter quarter’s memoirs, students looked backwards in time to their ancestors and genetic origins, foraged for dishes passed, and discovered reasons for the way they are/eat today. This quarter, in Eating the Past: A Food Memoir Anthology this student will create two versions, online and print, of an anthology meant to showcase the hard work that she and her peers put into the memoirs of the previous quarter. The process of doing so will start by her contacting each student to see whether or not they want to submit their work, if they want to edit the piece, and if so where they are in the editorial process. After this she will engage one on one with each student to collaboratively edit their work in order to get the piece to a place where both the author and editor feel comfortable publishing the work. After she has gone through this process with each student, she will begin the compilation phase of the project.
This part will look like organizing all the files into a workable format, arranging (and re-re-rearranging if necessary) so that the book as a whole flows in a cohesive manner. After the student has everything in an order she feels confident in, she will begin working with InDesign. This part of the process will look like organizing each page of each memoir in terms of not only words, but also any images the authors want to include (which will necessitate another round of contacting each student), and also author bylines, headings, and all the other required bits and bobs that make an anthology a beautiful compilation of work. As the student does all of this, she will simultaneously be creating the online version via a WordPress ePortfolio. The online version will require the same work of organizing, ordering, inserting images, and publishing.
At some point in this process, the student will also have to work on securing funding for the print version. Provided everything goes swimmingly, the final product will be a physical manifestation of the hard work student put into creating their food memoirs over the course of the past quarter, as well as a free and easily-accessible online version.