This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
Writing the Personal Essay
When we write a personal essay, we establish a kind of friendship with the reader—an imaginary one, of course—which encourages us to open up our internal life as we would when talking to an intimate companion. The genre dares us to be candid, to air our doubts, to hunt down hunches, to follow the course of our internal debates on the page. We tell the story of thought.
In this workshop we’ll read and discuss the work of classic and contemporary essayists. In the early weeks, we’ll do in-class prompts to help us plot out the possible directions in which beginnings might take. Later, participants will present their essays-in-progress to the group. The instructor and class members will read them carefully (at least twice) and offer reactions and detailed suggestions.
Emily Fox Gordon is the author of five books, including Mockingbird Years: A Life in and Out of Therapy and Book of Days: Personal Essays. Her most recent book, Madeleine and Jane, is a novel about New York City in the 1960s. She has won two Pushcart Prizes and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. Her work has been reprinted in Best American Essays 2014, received David Brooks’s Sidney Award for the Long-Form Essay in 2019, and appears in Phillip Lopate’s 2021 anthology, The Contemporary American Essay.
