Class Description
In these tumultuous times, you probably have strong opinions. But perhaps you don’t know how to turn them into strong essays. Whether you want to write persuasive, opinion-based, commentary "op-ed" style essays, or reflective personal experience literary essays, in this workshop, you will learn how to turn your passions, expertise and personal takes into compelling, topical essays that touch on the political and social issues, news cycle and ideas of the moment.
Each week, we'll look at exemplary published works by a range of voices on diverse topics in a range of publications. Some will be torn from the pages (and web-pages) of newspapers, magazines, and online publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, WBUR Cognoscenti, Newsweek, The Guardian and The Washington Post. Others will be drawn from literary magazines such Witness, Guernica, The Sun, and Orion, and satirical publications such as McSweeney's Internet Tendency and The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs." We will also examine masters of the politically conscious essay: Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, and others. We'll mine all these exemplary works for inspiration and instruction, and you’ll write and present to the workshop two new short essays: one targeted as an 800 word op-ed; the other a longer, up to 2,000 word literary essay for feedback.
The craft content will include mining the best topics for you, based on your personal experience and expertise; practicing how to hone your ideas and opinions into a focused, timely, topical and marketable idea responsive to current events; and exploring voice, form, and rhetorical appeals (such as logos, ethos and pathos, and how to acknowledge other perspectives in your essays). Towards the end of the workshop, we will cover how to pitch and submit these essays to newspapers, magazines, online publications and literary magazines The class also includes a guest visit by an editor from a publication (likely WBUR Cognoscenti) who will give their advice and perspective on the publishing process.
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.