The Personal Essay
8 WEEKS, SUMMER 2026
MONDAYS, 7-9PM EST
VIRTUAL
We are witnessing a revolution of the personal essay. It’s as old as medieval Japan and as contemporary as Substack. Call it autofiction, call it memoir, the personal essay is the genre of our times. In this graduate-level course we’ll look at different approaches to the personal essay: a story that happens to be 100% factual, and an essay that work through problems using life experience.
Adapted from my MFA classes, this course offers advanced craft instruction along with historical scholarship to students of all experience levels. Past students have written for Artforum, n+1, 032c, and Resident Advisor, and several have never written a personal essay in their lives.
Class
Structure
Every week, we will discuss a selection of writing across disciplines—memoir, criticism, fiction, and poetry—that will give tools for writing personal essays. Seminar might include a slideshow presentation, a close-reading exercise, or a participatory activity like a character interview or an in-class writing prompt.
Office Hours
Each student may request individual chats, for thirty minutes or so, to talk about writing, essay ideas, career advice, pitching, working through writer’s block—anything at all.
Syllabus
Week 1: Intro to the Personal Essay
Where did the personal essay come from? Let’s get into the history. We’ll take a look at two medieval forms of personal writing in world literature, one from France in the 6th century and the other from 8th century China. How does innovation happen? And how does innovation work?
Week 2: Story Structure and Character Arc
A book with a good structure but bad sentences can still land a book deal, but a book with a bad structure won’t be saved by good sentences. (I’ve seen this happen, many times.) Structure remains to be the single most-difficult aspect of writing personal essays—especially when you don’t get to decide what happened. In this class, we’ll look at various conventional story structures, while also introducing your new best friend: the beat sheet.
Week 3: Narrative Basics
Virtually every piece of narrative writing has three basic building blocks: scene, summary, and interior monologue. Each are different ways of narrating time and organizing information. Scenes are about dilation, summary is about compression, and an interior monologue is structuring a story along the scaffold of an abstract argument. We’ll take a look at all three.
Week 4: The Life of Information
We often think of a story’s momentum in terms of its plot, but momentum can also be driven by how one disseminates information. This is often most important when beginning a story or scene or chapter. We’ll want to avoid the info-dump, which is traumatic for the reader—it’s like waking up in a bed that’s not your own, and being terrified: who, where, what am I, and why? But if you can disseminate information as leisurely as a walk in the garden, information will organically unfurl or secrete from your narrative, and the reader will learn things without even realizing it, almost by accident.
Week 5: The Hybrid Essay
If there are two kinds of personal essays—a story that happens to be entirely factual, or an essay working through a problem using the writer’s personal experience—the “hybrid essay” belongs to the latter. It was birthed out of, well, an inferiority complex: writers wanted to write about their own lives, but needed to be taken more seriously so they began incorporating other genres or “idioms.” First of all, what is an idiom? Do we notice it when we see it? How many idioms can belong in a single essay before it falls apart?
Week 6: Sentence Consecution
What is style? Often, we think about the words on the page—what’s actually there—but what about the relationship between the elements? We’re going to look at the subtle logic of how one sentence leads to the next, and how you can play with it, revealing the subconscious ways a mind works, and how to represent a mind thinking through complexity on the page.
Week 7: Character
Character remains to be one of the most elusive, but necessary, devices in the storytelling craft. Often, when we think back on books that had a strong effect on us, we might not always remember what happened, but we remember the characters as if they were friends. Especially in book-length work, characters take center stage in becoming the motor that drives a reader through the pages. In this class, we’ll discuss the many ways—speech pattern, idiosyncratic mannerisms, interior monologue, decisive action, ideology, backstory—to convey character, when to use which, and why. And what happens when that character is yourself?
Week 8: Writing Pain and Trauma
In the way a coin will roll to the bottom of the sink if you drop it in the basin, the personal essay or memoir will naturally tend toward one central topic: trauma. Pain can be a trap—it forces your gaze backward to yourself, or sucks you into its tar pits of self-pity. Yet implicit in trauma is always some injustice, and can be galvanized for change, action, and protest. When does it work and when do we hate it? Why?
Sign Up Today
Tuition for the course is $550 for eight weeks. Class fees are non-refundable. No application necessary. Class size will be be capped at around twenty-five. Additional classes may be opened on other days due to demand.