All you need is a recipe.

Kim will guide us as we use personally meaningful recipes as prompts to craft short food memoir essays with potential for publication. We will also consider salmon, a food that is deeply evocative for Alaskans, and its connection to family, community and place.

Writers will work alongside chef and food writer Kirsten Dixon aboard The Widgeon II, Tutka Bay Lodge’s re-purposed crabbing boat turned cooking school.

Aside from writing, participants will enjoy cooking demonstrations, foraging and a seafood-related Kachemak Bay boat tour. Hiking and yoga optional.

About Kim:

Kim Severson is a New York Times domestic correspondent covering food trends and news across the United States. She was previously the New York Times Atlanta bureau chief and, before that, a staff writer for the Dining section of The Times. Since she arrived at the Times in 2004, she has pushed the food beat in interesting directions and onto Page One. She previously wrote about cooking and the culture of food for the San Francisco Chronicle, after a seven-year stint as an editor and reporter at the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska.

Ms. Severson has won several regional and national awards for news and feature writing, including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for her work on childhood obesity in 2002 and four James Beard awards for food writing.

She has written four books, “The Trans Fat Solution,” “The New Alaska Cookbook,” a memoir called “Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life,” and, in 2012, “Cook Fight!” a collaborative cookbook with fellow New York Times food writer Julia Moskin.

About Tutka Bay Lodge: 

One of National Geographic’s Unique Lodges of the World, Tutka Bay Lodge is located at the end of a 7-mile fjord off the southwest coast of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula near the seaside community of Homer.

The main lodge and six guest cabins are set on a piece of remote coastline and connected by a wooden boardwalk raised above the beach and ocean. Guests feel completely immersed in the Alaska wilderness, yet they have all the comforts of home around them and five-star service in addition to the thrilling soft adventures of Alaska (fishing, kayaking, hiking, bear viewing and more). Tutka Bay Lodge is owned by Within the Wild Adventure Company, run in partnership by Carl and Kirsten Dixon and their daughters, Carly Potgieter and Mandy Dixon.

Details:

Workshop dates are July 21-23. Cost for food, lodging and instruction is $875 and includes water taxi transportation to and from Homer.

Rooms are double-occupancy. Payment in full is required at time of registration and is refundable up to 30 days prior. To reserve a spot or ask questions, email me.

There are two subsidized spots available for enrolled, degree-seeking university students. To apply for one of these, please send an email with a bio, a writing sample and a paragraph that describes your recipe and why it is meaningful to you by May 15.

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Anyway, here’s what I brought back from the trip on my phone, mainly food photos, from one of America’s most northern communities.

The post Point Hope (food) in iPhone snaps appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

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KOTZEBUE, Alaska—In this Far North village, no animal provides more protein to fill freezers than the bearded seal. A single seal can supply hundreds of pounds of meat, enough to feed a large, extended family for a winter.

The post For National Geographic: With changing Arctic ice, a short window for a traditional hunt appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Julia O’Malley, a third-generation Alaskan, is a freelance journalist, teacher, editor and cook who lives in Anchorage. Her work in newsrooms, classrooms and kitchens explores Alaska’s cultures, politics, climate and food.

She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at Anchorage Museum, researching Alaskans’ relationship to salmon at a time of historic, climate-related volatility. She teaches culinary arts and journalism at University of Alaska, Anchorage. She also develops recipes and writes a newsletter about Alaska food. 

Her book about Alaska’s foodways, “The Whale and The Cupcake: Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska,” created in collaboration with the Anchorage Museum and published by University of Washington Press, came out in December 2019. (Order it here!) (Listen to it on Audible here!) Her work has been anthologized in “Made of Salmon,” “America’s Best Food Writing 2018,” “Writing on the Edge,” and “How to Survive.” 

Julia received a James Beard Award in 2024 for a story about the cultural implications of the climate-related crash of snow crab on Saint Paul Island, a place where Russian colonists and the federal government coerced Indigenous people into hunting seal for furs well into the 20th Century. She also received a James Beard Award in 2018 for a story about a young whale hunter, Chris Apassingok, who was cyber-bullied by environmentalists after he took a whale in the village of Gambell.

Julia has worked as an editor at Alaska Public Media and as a reporter, columnist and editor at the Anchorage Daily News. She’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, High Country News, The Nation, The Guardian, National Geographic News and Eater,  among other publications. (Find her all her latest work here.) She writes recipes for the Anchorage Daily News and Edible Alaska. She also teaches and organizes independent workshops around Alaska on memoir and food journalism. She is board president of the Alaska Press Club.

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Other publications and experience:

Julia was the visiting Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage from 2015-2017, where she taught food writing, social media, community reporting and digital journalism.

Julia wrote a twice-weekly metro column about Alaska life and politics for the Anchorage Daily News from 2009 to 2014. Her work has been recognized with some of country’s most prestigious feature-writing prizes.

In 2014, she won a Berger Award from Columbia Journalism School for a series of stories, “The things that happen: two boys and cancer” about the spiritual worlds of two teenage boys, best friends, one of them Lao and one of them Hmong, who were diagnosed with cancer at the same time. (Click here for her Journalism Day speech at Columbia). 

In 2011, her series on opiate addiction in Anchorage, “Hooked: One Addict’s Story,” which she worked on with photographer Marc Lester, won the Darrell Sifford Memorial Prize from the Missouri School of Journalism, a Blethen Award, first place in the Society of Professional Journalists Pacific Northwest Excellence in Journalism contest for social issues reporting. That same year, her columns won first place for general commentary from the Society for Features Journalists.

In 2008, a body of her work won the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Ernie Pyle award for the best human-interest writing in America.

She is a graduate of Smith College and the mother of two boys.

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