Writing Workshops

Writing Your Memoir: Balancing Scene and Exposition with David McLoghlin

$645

10 sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT July 10 to September 11, 2025

Online via Zoom

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This is a class for writers who are beginning or revising a project, whether memoir, personal essays, a travel book, or some other room in the capacious genre known as creative nonfiction.

We have an instinctive sense from fiction and film that scenes are where time slows down, giving us immersive sensory detail, conflict, and dialogue, but what about exposition (also known as reflection, “glide,” or summary)? Exposition is just as important, as it’s where the writer explains and comments on the scenes. Here is where the writer provides essential, non-immersive information that moves the story forward and links scenes together. Scenes are where we “show,” whereas in exposition, we “tell.” Both are essential.

Learning how to identify your principal story points (or scenes) will help you to structure your story. As you develop your scenes and improve them, you will also develop a better sense of what they mean for you. This knowledge, in turn, will help you to develop and improve your narrative voice, which is what well-employed exposition can do. Scenes often tell the core story of the past, whereas exposition is in the voice of the adult narrator, located in the “narrative present,” reflecting on the past.

Writers and artists are some of the only professionals to work in isolation. This class stresses community, and will help you to build connections with other writers: hopefully “writing buddies” with whom you can share work long after our 10 weeks have come to an end. Class also comprises “office hours” where you can meet with me to discuss any aspect of your writing process that is on your mind. This is an especially important part of the class for me, as I very much enjoy assisting writers in teasing out the essential core of the story that they need to tell.

One element of this course is discussion of a weekly reading (a memoir chapter or personal essay) to help us hone our understanding of scenes and exposition. (FYI, there is no obligation to buy books.) Each two-hour class will be divided between craft and workshop. Class time will be divided between creative writing workshop and learning about and then practicing important craft elements.

While two to three of our ten classes will be dedicated to learning and practicing scenes and exposition, you will also learn how to:

· Use the free-writing method of Gail Sher and Joan Bolker to progressively home in on the story you want to tell, and / or assist you in freeing you from writing anxiety.

· grow a structure that works for you.

· map plot points, obligatory scenes and characters.

· identify the “story within the story,” or through-line / central narrative thread.

· develop your narrative voice.

· work with leitmotifs, by implementing recurring images, or thematic elements.

· work with time in memoir.

My teaching is influenced by books like:

The Anti-Racist Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez

The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John Mcphee

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher

Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, by Sven Birkerts

One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher

The Anti-Racist Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne

(There is no need to purchase books; weekly reading will be assigned.)

All Levels

This course is held online via Zoom.

Led by

David McLoghlin

David McLoghlin

David McLoghlin has taught memoir with The Center for Fiction, Hudson Valley Writers Center and The Irish Writers Centre. During his MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, he was Resident Writer at Hunts Point Alliance for Children in the South Bronx, and an NYU Teaching Fellow at Coler Specialty Hospital. His books are Crash Centre (May 2024), Waiting For Saint Brendan and Other Poems, and Santiago Sketches, all with Salmon Poetry. He is currently at work on a book about his grandfather, the golf architect Eddie Hackett, widely considered “the Father of Irish Golf Design.” In October 2023 he played one of his grandfather’s designs, Connemara Golf Links, an immersion piece will feature in Golfer’s Journal in the USA in mid 2025.

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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