Class Description
What elements make up a successful narrative personal essay? How do you focus your ideas, memories, and experiences into a coherent form and make sure you’re telling a story? In this 6 week workshop, we'll learn how. Each week, we'll look for models and inspiration in essays by James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Sarah Smarsh, Audre Lorde and other examples from literary magazines and commercial publications such as the New York Times's “Modern Love" and Salon's "Life." Through exercises and sharing our work, we'll examine typical structures for how to build your personal essay around key scenes and passages of reflection and backstory. You'll identify the narrative arc or "plot" for your essay, and look at strategies to develop characters. We'll also look at how to craft vivid description, create a sense of place, and discuss how pacing can hook readers from the first paragraph. Depending on enrollment, each student will have her short exercises and/or completed essay drafts workshopped by the class at least twice.
Did you know that we have scholarships available for all GrubStreet classes? To apply, click the "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button in the top right corner of this page. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your scholarship application and await our Scholarship Committee's decision before registering for the class. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
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.