VD15 – The Netherlands

19 - 23 November 2015

Chestnut Farmhouse
Netherlands

Attendants: Bo Balder, Floris Kleijne, Grayson Bray Morris (organizer), Jeffrey Spock, Jeremy Sim, John Olsen, Stephen Gaskell, and Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

VD15groupshotLeft to right: John, Jeremy, Stephen, Grayson, Bo, SylviaFloris, and Jeff

John’s report:

Here’s where it all took place:

As we often say at Villa Diodati workshops: we write well, we work well and we eat well. On the first evening Jeff made a Mumbai street food dish called pav bajhi, served with nahn.

Of course, “dinner” also implies “after dinner” (you can tell by the empty bottle and glasses that there is yet one more thing that we generally do quite well):

All of this cooking implies another thing that we do very well: the actual activity of eating dinner all together. Here we are on the second evening, when I made pollo siciliana with pasta and green salad.

On the last evening Sylvia made a Middle Eastern dinner of spicy roast lamb shoulder, rice and tomato salad, preceded by several appetizers: cacik (yogurt and cucumber), hummus and a sublime feta and pistachio dip.

In addition to cooking and eating we actually did manage to get a lot of work done, both critiquing and writing exercises:

All in all it was a great workshop. Many thanks to Grayson for the organization and to Jeff for doing so much driving.

Grayson can now relax, reassured by a job well done.

Grayson can now relax, reassured by a job well done.

This is a list of the works that were either workshopped or brainstormed at this workshop and have since been sold or published.

Brag List