Class Description
Personal essays are intimate, transformative, and compelling, inviting us to explore the nuances of everyday life and to deepen empathy for different identities and lived experiences. By blending memory, dialogue, speculation, and reflection, we can create writing that lingers in a reader’s mind. Personal essays can take many forms: it can be a polished journal entry, a braided or fragmented collage, or an epistolary experiment. The essay can shift across emotions, ideas, and timelines, allowing a single moment to unfold in surprising ways.
Over six weeks, you will learn the essentials of the personal essay, and put them into practice by writing your own essays. Each week, we will discuss an element of craft, including scene, summary, reflection, narrator and character. We'll study published examples from writers like Kendra Allen, Kiese Laymon, Athena Dixon, Alexander Chee and more. To put what we learn into practice, we’ll use prompts and different essay forms to inspire our own drafts. During the second half of the class, you’ll have the chance to workshop and revise at least one of these essays with the entire class.
Writing Roadmap: We've created a simple, goal-based writing roadmap to help you find the perfect GrubStreet course for your writing needs.
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.