Launch: Drafting the Personal Essay
January 25-28, 2010 / Instructor: Lyall Bush
“I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public,” Montaigne wrote in an essay on bodies and love, and in a style that more or less invented the form of the personal essay. And nothing is more critical to that portrait than how it begins, how it steers readers into its world. Readers often keep reading because of the opening, too. In this class we will focus on entrances, first paragraphs, the way writers push off into the story they want to tell. We will take up all of the following, and more: the anecdotal beginning, medias res (beginning in the middle of the story), reportage, faux-reportage, the memoir, the false memory. And we will read: Sara Suleri, Jonathan Raban, Jonathon Lethem, Thoreau, Joan Didion, Harold Brodkey, Montaigne. We will write in class and out, too, working toward a solid first draft of an essay.
Instructor: Lyall Bush
Register Now for this Workshop:
“I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public,” Montaigne wrote in an essay on bodies and love, and in a style that more or less invented the form of the personal essay. And nothing is more critical to that portrait than how it begins, how it steers readers into its world. Readers often keep reading because of the opening, too. In this class we will focus on entrances, first paragraphs, the way writers push off into the story they want to tell. We will take up all of the following, and more: the anecdotal beginning, medias res (beginning in the middle of the story), reportage, faux-reportage, the memoir, the false memory. And we will read: Sara Suleri, Jonathan Raban, Jonathon Lethem, Thoreau, Joan Didion, Harold Brodkey, Montaigne. We will write in class and out, too, working toward a solid first draft of an essay.
Instructor: Lyall Bush
Register Now for this Workshop:
25-Jan-2010Drafting the Personal Essay