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Learn what makes a great personal essay and how to write one yourself, with author Andy West.
The personal essay offers the writer immense freedom to move between storytelling, emotion, argument, science, memoir and political writing. At every turn, the writer has to make choices about how to bring the material together into unified aesthetic vision. They must ask questions like:
- How can I connect my particular experience to something more universal?
- How do I sustain an even voice on the page as I combine intimate and analytic tones?
- What do personal stories mean in the age of social media and arguments from lived experience?
In this series of five workshops, led by author and teacher Andy West, you will look at writers like James Baldwin, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Mary Gaitskill, Geoff Dyer, Vivian Gornick, Agnes Callard, David Sedaris, Andre Aciman, Tony Hoagland, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Ahmet Altan and Merve Emre.
We will see what we can learn from them that will give us more creative choices in our own writing. You will also share extracts of your own essays and receive feedback from Andy and from other writers in the workshop.
Workshops run on Mondays, 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM London time, from 9 January to 6 February.
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In addition to series tickets, members get access to our community Discord (with a channel for this series to chat between events)—as well as free salon tickets each month, discounts, free members-only events, and more.
# Date Episode 1 Jan. 9, 2023 Week One: What is the personal essay?
What is it about the personal essay that makes it special? How is it different to memoir, and what possibilities does it offer that an impersonal essay can’t? In this workshop we’ll be looking at what the personal essay has been though time—from the ancients to articles that went viral on Twitter—and we will ask: Why it is that the personal essay has been declared dead for almost as long as it has been around?2 Jan. 16, 2023 Week Two: Form
Some personal essayists are, first and foremost, storytellers. Others write with a greater focus on interiority and are more interested in reflection than action. Then there are the polemicists who are looking to find the most intimate way to communicate their argument. Few forms have as must possibility as the personal essay. In this workshop, we will learn how to read our own work to find out what form and mood most suits the piece we are writing. 3 Jan. 23, 2023 Week Three: Truth
A confessional story can be written in the plainest of prose and yet still absorb the reader because of its veracity. A personal essayist lives and dies by the truth of what they write. But what if the truth hurts? What if telling the truth would breach your own privacy, harm someone you love, or provoke someone you don’t? What can you do to balance these concerns in your own writing? 4 Jan. 30, 2023 Week Four: Voice
The best personal essayists sound like themselves. But this can take a very long time to achieve, as we often try to sound like our idea of what a lettered person sounds like or our literary heroes. In this session, we will look at how to hear yourself on the page so that you can sound more like you. 5 Feb. 6, 2023 Week Five: Getting Published
In this session we will look at the places—agents, publishers, magazines—you can try to submit your work, how to make a game of rejection, and how to manage the sometimes ambivalent feelings that can come with publishing intimate information.
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