WEBINAR | The Pleasures of the Personal Essay: New Ideas, Fresh Forms, and Expanded Markets for Your Writing
April 1 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT
Fun, flexible, and highly marketable, the personal essay is an ideal way to extend our range and add to our writer’s toolbox.
For Nonfiction and Essay Writers
The personal essay is perhaps the oldest form of nonfiction prose yet remains one of the most misunderstood. This wonderfully flexible and creative form is as alive and inventive as the writer wishes it to be. More than memoir, but able to include elements of one’s own life experience, the essay remains an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge to not just live year to year, but to capture a bit of our relationship to the world.
What is an essay? Just this: the personal essayist takes a topic—virtually any topic under the big yellow sun—and holds it up to the bright light, turning it this way and that, upside and down, studying every perspective, fault, and reflection in an artful attempt to perceive something fresh and significant. But it is always an effort, a trial, an assay, not a lecture or diatribe. In the hands of contemporary practitioners such as Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, the personal essay at its best is an idiosyncratic combination of the author’s discrete sensibilities and the endless possibilities of meaning and connection.
In this 90-minute course, noted essayist and editor Dinty W. Moore will guide you through examples of the myriad forms that an essay can take, will survey the infinite range of possible topics, and will leave you with useful prompts to help you determine your own essayistic opportunities.
Can’t make it live? No worries—a replay will be available to all registrants.
In this webinar, you will:
- EXPLORE the myriad ways the essay fits into both literary and commercial publishing
- DISCOVER how the flexibility of the personal essay form can help with “stuckness”
- RECONSIDER The role of research (and how it can be more fun than chore)
- LEARN how to find the best markets (literary magazines and beyond)
This webinar is ideal for writers at any level who
- want to expand their skills and opportunities
- are looking for new ideas and fresh topics
- want to grasp the idea of “memoir-plus”
- feel “stuck” writing their memoir
- wouldn’t mind getting paid every once in a while
Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔
ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER
One of our most popular and beloved presenters, DINTY W. MOORE, is the author of the memoirs Between Panic & Desire and To Hell With It, and the writing guides Crafting the Personal Essay and The Mindful Writer, among other books. He has published essays and stories in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Short Reads, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction.
Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com
FULL REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.
