Around the Table: Writing, Presence, and Community

[guest_blogger]

By Heather Martin

This post is part of a 2025 series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach founded in 2018. Heather Martin, a 2025 Bedford/Saint-Martin’s WIS Fellow, is a teaching professor at the University of Denver. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”

Each year, the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) brings teachers, scholars, and writers to Marquette University to share ideas about teaching writing in innovative and inclusive ways. In 2025, the WIS opened with a plenary roundtable, "Food as the First Ingredient," which was a conversation about place, food memories, and community activism. As an attendee, I was struck not just by the panelists’ stories, but by their presence. Moderated by Ashley Beardsley, the conversation between Caitlin Cullen, Gregory León, and Ryan Castelaz wasn’t just about food; it was about survival, mutual responsibility, and the invisible work of community care. Their reflections on the early days of COVID—how they scrambled to keep their restaurants open while feeding their neighbors—offered a moving example of what it means to show up for one another.

The panelists’ insights stayed with me this academic year, especially as I considered how presence fosters connection in my research-writing course, WRIT 1133: Food for Thought—and Writing. A research-writing course at the University of Denver, my sections of WRIT 1133 are both food themed and community engaged. Enrolled students explore food rhetorics through original research and collaboration with local food-justice and food-access organizations. Over the 10-week spring term, my students partnered with organizations including Café 180 (a pay-what-you-can restaurant), Slow Food Denver (which advocates for good, clean, and fair food), and We Don’t Waste (a food recovery and distribution nonprofit), among others. These partnerships grounded student research in real communities and real problems. But more than that, they modeled a way of learning that depends on care, responsiveness, and relational presence.

At Café 180, students worked shifts alongside staff, learning firsthand what it means to create a dignified space for people to eat—regardless of their ability to pay. With Slow Food Denver, they supported afterschool cooking classes that teach kids to prepare and enjoy healthy food, while gaining insight into the challenges of food education and access. Other students supported staff at We Don’t Waste, packing grocery items and accompanying food rescue trucks as they recovered and redistributed food across the city.

Again and again, my students found themselves returning to a central question: How can writing nourish a community?

Our classroom became a kind of test kitchen. As students drafted researcher positionality statements, interview questions, and policy briefs, they learned a kind of intellectual hospitality. They invited community voices into their writing, challenged their own assumptions, and began to see research not as a static product, but as a living conversation. In their final reflections, students reported changed relationships to food—but also to writing, activism, and each other.

This approach aligns with inspiring models of integrative learning I’ve found elsewhere. A compelling example is the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy (sometimes called Slow Food University). There, food is not merely a subject of study but a lens through which to tackle urgent questions of climate change, justice, and sustainability. The curriculum draws on anthropology, ecology, economics, and storytelling, among other disciplines. Students engage in fieldwork with producers and cooks, develop deep knowledge of place, and come to see the table not just as a cultural artifact but as a problem-solving space.

I find this model instructive, especially for community-engaged writing. Like the restaurateurs on the WIS panel, who showed up with care and commitment to their communities, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini reminds us that slow food balances pleasure with responsibility. This balance invites students to show up fully and engage with presence—a practice that shapes how we read, write, and connect.

I’ve come to think of my classroom as a place where students don’t just analyze food systems; they metabolize them. They digest the contradictions, the policy gaps, and the lived experiences of hunger and access. In so doing, they develop a capacity for empathy that is both intellectual and embodied. And, crucially, they begin to understand that writing is not a solitary act but a shared meal—one that sustains, connects, and calls us to action.

In a time when both students and instructors are reckoning with disconnection, burnout, and institutional precarity, we need pedagogies that nourish. Community-engaged writing offers one such path. It requires presence, humility, and a willingness to be changed by what we encounter. Like any good meal, it takes time. But it also feeds something essential.

The theme for WIS ‘26, artifact, invites colleagues to connect writing, art, and facts. Special features include a makerspace, an Artifact Exchange, and an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly publication. Proposals as well as applications for Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows are due 10/24; undergraduate contributions are due 11/21. Registration opens in November, and the event itself takes place onsite and online January 29th and 30th, 2026.