Writing Workshops

Composing Yourself: Constructing a Narrator for Your Memoir or Linked Personal Essays with David McLoghlin (September 2024)

$595

10 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT September 26 to December 12, 2024

Online via Zoom

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In her seminal book, The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick makes a surprising assertion that writing memoirs and personal essays requires us to construct a narrator to tell our story. That narrator is “composed” by selecting and weaving the raw material of our lives into a clear throughline. Whether detached, wise, wry, or humorous as they reflect on the past, done well, this narrator wins the reader’s trust by stitching moments together and presenting them as examples of insight and understanding into a particular life with universal application.

This course is for writers finishing or revising a creative nonfiction project, whether a memoir, personal essay, travel book, or other subgenre. Each class will be divided between craft and workshop: Across the 10 weeks, you’ll receive in-class exercises and homework assignments to help you progress. You will also workshop twice and have the option to participate in a “mini-workshop,” a reimagined democratic space inspired by Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Workshop. In those spaces, you’re invited to present whatever you need insight on most—an outline, a scene, or questions about your work for the group.

Finally, our semester together includes optional “office hours” where you can meet with me to discuss any aspect of your writing process that is on your mind. These are particularly important parts of class for me, as I enjoy assisting writers in teasing out the essential core of the story they need to tell.

Course Outline: Reading will be assigned and there is no obligation to buy books. Each session will be divided between constructive workshop time and learning about, then practicing, important craft elements via in-class exercises. These elements will include:

Identifying and developing your narrative voice—a constructed version of you “pulled from the raw material of a life” (Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story)
Identifying the “story within the story” or throughline/central narrative thread
Working with leitmotifs by implementing recurring images or thematic elements
Working with time in memoir and personal essay by moving between present and past convincingly without confusing the reader, possibly employing more than one timeline
Using free-writing as a process to progressively hone in on the story you want to tell, and/or assist you in freeing you from writing anxiety
Finding a structure that works for you by mapping plot points, carving out obligatory scenes, and polishing the narrative arc
Creating authentic scenes vs. summaries: Scenes happen in an approximation of real-time while summaries or “glides” are the informative linking material between scenes that helps us compress time, summarizing days or years.
Understanding when to “show” and when to “tell”—both are necessary
Writing authentic dialogue, improving our characterizations of real people, and avoiding “ghost characters”
Identifying the psychological and ethical challenges of acknowledging other people’s stories while expressing your truth

This course is held online via Zoom. There are no meetings on October 31st and November 28th.

Led by

David McLoghlin

David McLoghlin

David McLoghlin is a prize-winning poet and writer of memoirs and personal essays. His books are Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems and Santiago Sketches. His third book, Crash Centre, was published in May 2024 by Salmon Poetry, one of Ireland’s most international and innovative poetry presses. Apart from a major bursary (grant) for a memoir from Ireland’s Arts Council and a personal essay published in the anthology Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (Black Lawrence Press).

McLoghlin has published personal essays, short stories, and memoir extracts in the Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, New Hibernia Review, and other journals. His essay about being mentored by poet Sharon Olds is forthcoming in This Glistening Verb (University of Michigan Press) as part of their “Under Discussion” series. A personal essay on the Irish writer Philip Casey was published in Distant Summers by Arlen House in January 2024. He is currently working on a book about his grandfather, the golf architect Eddie Hackett—widely considered “the father of Irish golf design.” In November 2023, as a complete novice, he played one of his grandfather’s designs, Connemara Golf Links, and is now writing an immersion piece for Golfer’s Journal in the USA.

McLoghlin has taught memoir writing at The Center for Fiction and Creative Writing in Ireland with several organizations, including Writers in Schools and the National Mentoring Scheme. While living in New York between 2010 and 2020 he was a Resident Writer at Hunts Point Alliance for Children in the South Bronx, an NYU Teaching Fellow at Coler Specialty Hospital, and a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship Recipient (2023).

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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