REWRITING WELLNESS: CREATING FOOD STORIES FOR A MORE RELATIONAL WELLBEING with Carter Umhau at Lost Origins Gallery
REWRITING WELLNESS: CREATING FOOD STORIES FOR A MORE RELATIONAL WELLBEING with Carter Umhau at Lost Origins Gallery
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March 31, 2026 @ 06:30pm
REWRITING WELLNESS will meet on four consecutive Tuesdays March 31st-April -21st at Lost Origins Gallery.
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
This class is a generative writing workshop that looks to great food writing as a way to reimagine your relationship to wellness.
The discourse around wellness is full of “shoulds”: “you should take better care of yourself”, “you should eat better”, “you should move more”. While any of these things might be true, when we relate to ourselves and our lives as if we’re projects to take on rather than people to relate to, we miss the point--and especially when you’re a foodie—you also miss the potential for a lot of deeply connecting experiences around food.
This workshop-based class looks to outstanding food writing and media as inspiration to reimagine your relationship to food and wellness more holistically—in a relationally-centered way that includes your personal origins, your values, and that which delights you. Each week, excerpts from books and articles (pulled from Bold Fork Books’ shelves and beyond!) will be offered as an inspiration point for group conversation, with ample time to creatively write in response to generative writing prompts offered to deepen your relationship with food, your body, and yourself.
This class is the second Rewriting Wellness class Carter has offered at Bold Fork Books. While the foundations are similar, this year’s class will offer new texts and new writing prompts and is welcome to new and returning students alike!
Week 1: ORIGINS
Food’s relational roots in your life. How would you describe your origin story through food? Why do you love the foods you love and how do memory, identity, culture, and your familial history play a role in this?
Week 2: BODY
Messaging about food and the impact on your relationship to your body. An exploration of how messages from both the mainstream and loved ones may have impacted our view of our bodies and shaped the way we relate to them, primarily as objects. How do we reconcile the conflicting messages mainstream culture offers us around food intake as both a vehicle of pleasure and a method of control?
Week 3: SYSTEMS
Thinking about your relationship to food within the systems we’re a part of, whether we see them or not. How do the communities we’re in and the larger systems at play impact our personal experience of wellness? How do we stay in relationship to these systems (or not) in order to eat in a way that feels holistically nourishing and in alignment with our values?
Week 4: SELFHOOD
Creating a vision of wellness that is yours alone. How do you create a holistic approach to food that considers your body as deeply relational, rather than an object to exert your will upon? What is it about food that speaks to your soul? What does all of this reveal about how you want to inhabit your own food story?
ABOUT CARTER
Carter Umhau, MA, LMHC (she/her) is a therapist, writer, and artist who has worked at the intersection of healing, food, and creativity throughout her career. She has hosted creative writing workshops in various settings since 2009, with a special focus on looking at craft, content, and personal narrative as a way to bring people more deeply into relationship with themselves. She has a BA in Creative Writing, a MA in Counseling Psychology, and over ten years of experience directly exploring people’s food stories through her specialization as a therapist in eating disorders and body image, her work in podcasting (The Appetite; How to Be Alive), and in her own writing practice. Carter approaches the topic of food with an anti-diet, pro-pleasure, intersectional, and relational lens. She believes that finding wellness within one’s relationship to food and body is deeply personal and never one-size-fits-all. Also, she is obsessed with chocolate chip cookies—hunting down the best ones, baking them, and eating them.
