Personal Essay Workshop
This class returns in 2013. Email us to be notified when registration opens or to discuss other class options.
Personal essays allow us to dig into our life stories and deliver them in a short and potent form.
In this workshop, you will learn how to explore and shape your personal narratives—whether they’re pieces of an autobiography, sections of a memoir, journal entries or blog posts—into a work that can move others.
Since your own experiences will be the core of our material, you will get a chance to write a lot for this class. Weekly exercises will help you generate useful material for longer projects, with the goal of writing and submitting 1-2 manuscripts for workshop feedback from your peers and the instructor.
We will also turn to classic and contemporary essayists for tools to make our work more skilled and powerful.
This workshop is designed to be a long-term home for essay writers. You’re welcome to repeat it to continue building your material and your network!
What you need to know:
- Students should be ready to write in class and participate in active, lively discussion.
- Each week you can expect to read one short published work, and to read and critique two student manuscripts.
- By the end of class you will leave with a complete essay and 1-2 workshop sessions on longer or shorter pieces.
Writer’s Roadmap
This course is suited for those who have completed Craft of Life Stories or Creative Writing II and others who wish to gain regular feedback on personal essay drafts.
About the Instructor: Ellen Blum Barish has a masters degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her feature articles have appeared in Newsweek, Self and The Chicago Tribune. She is author of a collection of award-winning essays based on her syndicated newspaper columns on women’s issues and family life. Many of her personal essays have aired as radio commentaries on WBEZ-Chicago Public Radio’s Eight-Forty-Eight program. She has taught writing at many Chicago-area universities including Northwestern.