Class Description
What makes a good topic for a narrative personal essay? How do you focus your ideas, memories, and experiences into a coherent form and make sure your personal essay tells a story? In this six-hour seminar, we'll look at narrative personal essays by David Sedaris, Cheryl Strayed, Barry Lopez, and others, and use them both as exemplary models and to find inspiration. Then we'll examine typical structures for how to build your personal essay around key scenes and passages of reflection and backstory. We'll look at how to create a narrative arc or "plot" for your essay, and how to develop yourself and others as characters. We'll discuss how time travel, pacing, and narrative order can control how readers experience your story and how you can hook them from the first paragraph. In-class writing exercises will allow us to immediately put these concepts into practice. The final segment of the seminar will be focused on identifying publications to submit your essays, how to communicate with editors, and what a cover letter looks like. You'll leave with an outline for an essay and several passages towards a first draft.
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.