Creative Writing

The Personal Essay

Students in this course will study, practice, produce and revise short pieces of personal essay or memoir, while examining basic structures of the essay, long-form narratives, and other forms of nonfiction. Together, we will study the anatomy of a scene, the use of language, point-of-view, voice, setting, dialogue, and plot through both assigned readings and essays produced by students. Writing exercises and readings in the course will acquaint students with memoir writing, the personal essay, the lyric essay, flash creative nonfiction, and more experimental nonfiction forms.