Food for thought: Culinary arts, writing program free to vets

Culinary arts, writing program free to vets

Nate Walls founder of Secondhand Smoke (left) and Rebecca Liles, VP and Chief Operating Officer for Mount Sequoyah in the kitchen at Mount Sequoyah Monday July 25, 2022.  (NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. Wampler)
Nate Walls founder of Secondhand Smoke (left) and Rebecca Liles, VP and Chief Operating Officer for Mount Sequoyah in the kitchen at Mount Sequoyah Monday July 25, 2022. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. Wampler)

"Nourishing veterans in creative expression" means both practical kitchen knowledge and the ability to use food as a storytelling medium through a new program at Mount Sequoyah Center in Fayetteville.

The Culinary Arts Food Experience (CAFE) and Writing NOVICE (Nourishing Our Veterans In Creative Expression) Residency Program at Mount Sequoyah will be led by local chef Rebecca Liles and Nate Walls, who will teach veterans practical kitchen skills. Helping the vets harvest their writing talents will be author Crescent Dragonwagon, and photography and presentation skills will be taught by caterer, influencer and author Susan Billings.

"This world is an ever-changing landscape as far as navigating your personal life, let alone your professional life. With this we hope to just give our veterans the support that they want and need in a variety of different ways," explains Liles, vice president and chief operating officer for Mount Sequoyah Center.

"We felt confident that we could provide this at Mount Sequoyah, this support in learning the hands-on skills in the professional kitchen and then also getting into food writing, and how you can translate your skills to market yourself on social media and things like that," Liles explains. "We're trying to tackle this in a variety of different ways, whether they want to go work for somebody else or if they want to start their own business. Hopefully, we're giving them the foundation to at least explore what the different options are."

Liles says that when putting the program together, they knew "Mount Sequoyah really is the perfect location for something like this because we do have the expansive facilities. We have a commercial kitchen. We've got the grounds that are very calming and inspiring. And so we just really felt like it was the perfect location for these veterans to come in -- and to set them up for that success and that growth in their personal and hopefully, professional, lives as well."

Liles will rely on her more than 20 years of experience working in the food industry with stints in nearly every type of kitchen from fast food to bakeries to fine dining and, most importantly, teaching. She taught at Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville in the culinary and hospitality management department that later became Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food.

"We are going in assuming that these folks might not have ever worked in a professional kitchen," Liles says, adding that learning on the job can be "quite stressful." For this program, "I like to take that step back, and present the information, get people to understand the skills and practice their skills in a more calm, kind of controlled environment before they go out, potentially into the workforce."

She will oversee the daily culinary guidance, which will first include sanitation and safety, how to use kitchen equipment and how to communicate in a busy commercial kitchen to prevent injuries. Then they will go into basic cooking and food preparation techniques.

"If they were to go work in a professional kitchen [without this training], you can be shown the things on the job, but if you go in already knowing some of those technical terms and the skills, you can just move ahead so much quicker," Liles says. "I always told my students at NWACC there's no prize for cutting that up fastest, the prize is for making it as accurate as you can, and it takes time to build that accuracy and that skill.

"Then we'll move into things like making our own pasta, making sauces, and get into some meat preparation, which is where my good friend, Nate Walls, will come in," Liles says. "He's a veteran and has a local barbecue catering company and a nonprofit wing of that operation where he goes out in the community. And he is very well-versed in the meat preparation, much more so than I am, so he's going to come in and help with that."

Walls is the owner of Secondhand Smoke, and he will also help veterans learn about business planning.

"Culinary arts is exactly what the name implies -- art," says Walls. "Like any other art, it's a form of expression and can be therapeutic, especially through the lens of veterans who have become accustomed to structure and team -- the way things are involved and layered in can benefit veterans in numerous ways and points of view. Cooking imitates life sometimes the way it's built."

Crescent Dragonwagon of Fayetteville, a James Beard Award winner and author of more than 50 books across many genres, will guide the writing aspect of the program. She will pull from her "Deep Feast: Writing the World Through Food" workshop as part of this residency.

"Culinary writing is, on the one hand, the recipes. It's very technical. It's like coding almost," Dragonwagon explains. "So on the one hand, it's technical. But on the other hand, it's memoiristic." She relates a story shared by a veteran and author named Roman Coley Davis as an example.

"He did a story that was on StoryCorps about this great moment of realization for him when he was in Afghanistan, and he opened a pound cake that his grandmother had made and sent him and the meaning that it had to him, the connection that it had. It kind of changed his life," she says. "Most people that come into a writing class have a story that they are burning to tell that they're aware of, but they also have stories that want to be told that they're not aware of yet. So it's a great treat to me to help people tell the stories that they think they want to tell, but also discover the other stories that are within them."

Dragonwagon refers to her own traumas to illustrate how writing can help others process their experiences. For veterans "to be able to write things down allows you to integrate them into your life, in a life that otherwise would be pretty bifurcated -- peace, war, trauma, regular life. It allows you to give it meaning through your own interpretation.

"It will help them integrate, I believe, the experiences that they've had, and particularly integrating it with food, which is very life-affirming," she muses. "I hope that it will really wind up changing their lives, as well as the lives of those they cook for and or write for, if changing it is what they wish to do."

Suzanne Billings, owner of Noble Graze, a Fayetteville-based catering company, will guide classes centered on current expectations for presenting, documenting and sharing food experiences in the digital age. She is the author of the very popular book, "Jarcuterie," which translates the traditional charcuterie board into a small, portable hand-held snack in a jar. Her creations have been lauded by influencers across Instagram and featured in various national media outlets.

The CAFE and NOVICE program is a partnership between Mount Sequoyah and the Veterans Health Care System of the Ozarks (VHSO) Whole Health Service and is funded by a Creative Forces Community Engagement Grant through the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Mid-America Arts Alliance. There will be no cost to applicants who are accepted into the program. Applications will be accepted until Aug. 15.

  photo  To longtime Northwest Arkansans, Crescent Dragonwagon is remembered as founder of Dairy Hollow House, a popular country inn and restaurant that helped define the bed-and-breakfast concept in Eureka Springs in the 1980s and ’90s. She is also the author of books like “The Cornbread Gospels,” “Bean by Bean” and “Passionate Vegetarian,” a James Beard Award winner, and has taught at Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food. She’ll lead the Writing NOVICE (Nourishing Our Veterans In Creative Expression) portion of a new residency program at Mount Sequoyah. (Courtesy photo/Sweetie Berry)
 
 

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