The personal essay as a literary form is as popular as ever. But what exactly is a personal essay? How much of the form is meant to be an exploration of our personal experiences and how much of an essay that establishes a position about a topic and creates an argument? The range of personal essays is wide and the voices that tell their stories incredibly varied. The personal essay as a form stretches to include the lyrical writing of Claudia Rankine, the meditative essays on aging by Arthur Krystal, essays on race and politics by Ta-Nehisi Coates,
the hilarious work of Nora Ephron and David Sedaris, Virginia Woolf’s meditations on the need for a room of one’s own or Gretel Ehrlich’s and Annie Dillard’s awe-filled observances of the natural world. Writing a personal essay is an act of conversation. Each writer approaches the personal essay fueled by vernacular, a passion for language, and with a particular question to investigate. Writing a personal essay can be a way to think through a seemingly unanswerable
question, to bring universal questions to bear on personal experience, or even as a means of building an author platform.  It’s this very flexibility that makes this type of writing so engaging to study and meaningful to write. 

• Read (prior to class) and discuss (in class) one published personal essay each week from collected essays in book form and from personal essays published in literary and general interest magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, Esquire, Harper’s Weekly, The New Yorker and The Sun
• Write in response to prompts
• Acquire craft-based techniques for revision
• Workshop up to 10 pages of their own work (by reading aloud and receiving oral
• feedback from instructor and class participants)
• Gather ideas for pitching and submitting finished essays