The Personal Essay
8 WEEKS, Sept 14 – Nov 2
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 works 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 had written for Artforum, n+1, 032c, and Resident Advisor, and several had never written a personal essay in their lives.
Sign up below.
Class
Structure
Every week, we will discuss a selection of writing 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. (Students do not circulate or give feedback on each other’s work.)
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. I don’t give feedback on writing, but happy to talk about your ideas and works-in-progress.
Syllabus
Week 1: Intro to the Personal Essay
Where did the personal essay come from? It began with the epistle, the only form where one divulged personal details, even as the epistle became published in 8th century China with the invention of the woodblock. Through the development of liberalism in France, the essay and democracy joined forces in the maturation of the personal essay, which came of age in James Baldwin, the apotheosis of the form in the 1950s.
Week 2: Story Structure and Character Arc
The most important thing in publishing your writing is structure and causality. Before we look at experimental structures in the second half of this course, we’ll get acquainted with historical conventions, from the Bible to the bestseller’s list, that are hard-wired to deliver reader satisfaction and memorability. What are the problems of these structures? Why are they so successful? What is a beat sheet?
Week 3: Narrative Basics
There’s a difference between personal essays and journalism. If you left a camera on in your kitchen for five hours while cooking, that’s an act of journalism. It’s not a personal essay. An essay needs to sequence details along a satisfying rhythm. This seminar is all about how we do time in an essay, which is the source of all pleasure. If a scene mimics the pacing of real-time experience, summary is speeding it up. Most essays will modulate between the two for dramatic effect. We’ll take a look at essays that take both approaches, and see how they work.
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 sequences 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 braided Essay
Over the last twenty years, a new genre of the personal essay emerged: the braided essay, a new essay structure that switches between idioms (i.e. history, reporting, criticism) within the same format of a personal narrative. Its foremost practitioners are poets, like Claudia Rankine and Christian Wiman and Maggie Nelson, whose sensibilities collage different images and registers within a single, often short, piece. 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? And we’ll learn the hardware that the braided essay lives or dies on: transitions and callbacks.
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?
TESTIMONIALS
“Geoffrey Mak’s personal essay class is rigorous focus on the technical aspect of writing. A lot of writing classes are woo-woo and focused on vibes but Geoff’s class is firmly rooted in technique, technique, technique! But this class is not prescriptive. Through the readings, you learn that a personal essay can be ANYTHING. A personal essay could be: a delicate whisper of grief, an angry Reddit screed, or more often than anything, a marriage of many art forms. It really felt like the closest thing I may do to an MFA-level course, but it was not without the friendships, hangs, and meme groupchats that may come from that experience. I walked out of it with relationships with people in the European art magazine world, the NYC Lit Scene, and deepest sewers of Bushwick populated by gay substackers. If you’re ever wondering how, through examining the vast world of personal essays, we can learn what artistic lineage Kanye West and Jia Tolentino have in common with a Chinese Feudal Lord from the 5th Century mourning his relative (or maybe it was his male concubine), you must take this class to find out.”
— Charlie H.
Sign Up
Tuition for the course is $550 for eight weeks. Class fees are non-refundable. No application necessary. Class size will vary depending on scheduling. Additional classes may be opened on other days due to demand.