Writing Workshops

The Mind at Work: From Personal Essay to Lyric Essay with Javier Sinay (April 2025)

$495

8 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Thursdays, 7:00 pm EDT - 9:00 pm EDT April 24 to June 13, 2025

Online via Zoom

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As Elizabeth Hardwick famously put it in her introduction to The Best American Essays 1986, reading an essay is like seeing a “mind at work.” In this course, we will read different essays—personal, lyric, and more—to find the engineering behind the literature.

Course Outline:

  • Week 1: What’s “personal” in the personal essay? To riff on Phillip Lopate, personal essayists should ask what it is they don’t know at the beginning of any exploration. What one doesn’t understand is a good place to start investigating the borders of the self.
  • Week 2: Calibrating your point of view as an essayist. How to recognize complexity in the chaos of reality—and make the most of it.
  • Week 3: The big challenge: searching for originality and ambiguity. Go lyric: the association of ideas in the lyric essay.
  • Week 4: Writing and reasoning. Weaving questions, experiences, details, and scenes into our essays.
  • Week 5: Establishing the right tone. The narrative work of finding something new and understanding it.
  • Week 6: Structure vs. freestyle. How do structure and content influence each other? Analyzing structure, conceptual maps, and focus as tools to make your essay more solid.
  • Week 7: Beginnings. What’s the best opening for your essay?
  • Week 8: Revision and editing your essay.

This course is held online via Zoom.

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Led by

  • IMG_5295 - Javier Sinay

    Javier Sinay

    Javier Sinay

    Javier Sinay is an author and a journalist. His books include Camino al Este, Cuba Stone (in collaboration), Los crimenes de Moisés Ville (published by Restless Books as The Murders of Moises Ville in 2022), and Sangre joven, which won the Premio Rodolfo Walsh at Semana Negra in Gijón, Spain. In 2015 he won the award of Fundación Gabo for his story “Fast. Furious. Dead” published in Rolling Stone. He lives in Buenos Aires.

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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