Personal essays pack a literary punch as stand-alone pieces but also allow us to ‘test’ non-fiction book ideas. From Montaigne, via Didion and Zadie Smith, essays are where we try ‘essay’, try, we write about philosophical skepticism , address young poets, explore our love of savouring sandwiches, evoke badass women in love or investigate the language of trauma. In the essay, as William Carlos Williams wrote ‘ability …is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness.’ But how do we write a personal essay, develop an idea, write a pitch and get it published?

In this three-part set of workshop, we’ll read excerpts essays from Augustine, Joan Didion, Viriginia Woolf, William Gass, Lydia Davis, Montaigne, Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alexander Chee and more, use generative dynamic exercises to write our own powerful personal essays, develop narrative technique and authoritative voice, and look…