4-Week: Personal Essays—From the Particular to the Universal

In this four-week class, we'll explore how to write appealing and meaningful personal essays. We'll discuss how to create characters in nonfiction and examine different styles of creative nonfiction, including the braided essay, hermit crab, narrative, and lyric essays. We'll read examples by Hanif Abdurraqib, Leslie Jamison, Phuc Tran, Sarah M. Broom, and more contemporary creative nonfiction writers to learn how we can expand our personal essays outside the parameters of the self by incorporating cultural and historical touchstones, art criticism, scientific research, and other sources, making felicitous connections that improve the resonance of our essays. We'll study how writers use setting in their nonfiction to learn how we can intertwine our personal story with the larger story of the places we've lived, and use the two stories to amplify and reflect each other. We'll discuss how to build a news hook into our essays to help them reach a larger audience. If you have ideas for personal essays you want to write, but don’t know how to structure them, get started, or craft them so your personal story will grip readers who don’t know you, this is the class for you!