Personal Essays: An Intensive 8-Week Workshop
email sanders@thereaderberlin.com to sign up!
Personal essays, a vital and vibrant contemporary genre, can be as unique and heterogenous as each of us. Able to draw on the techniques of fiction, the forms of poetry, and the conceptual argumentation of an analytic essay, these essays can take whatever shape you wish to give them—whatever you can imagine.
Do you seek to crystallize the impersonal significance of your personal experience? Are you looking to develop a conceptual argument through lived experience? Or, do you simply want to experiment with new forms?
Over the eight weeks of this extended workshop, you’ll have the chance to deepen your own writing practice by learning from the writing of each member of the course as well as the essayists who have come before us. Along with reading each other’s work, you’ll be able to learn from writers like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Renee Gladman, and Wayne Kostenbaum. There’ll be exercises, time for workshop, and you’ll receive workshop letters to return to—meaning that you’ll come out of this not only with vital feedback for future revisions, but also greater resources for future writing.
The course will be built around workshopping—approaching texts in-process, thinking of them from the inside. The first session will engage the composition of a personal essay—from genesis through revision—offering techniques as useful for veterans of the form as beginners. The next seven weeks then allow you to draw on this first week of discussion in workshops as you submit your own work and read that of your fellow writers. Every participant will have the opportunity for two 35-minute workshop sessions.
This workshop is open to writers of all genres and all experiences. Please come to the course ready to workshop at least one piece. This workshop will consist of 9 2 hour and 15 minute sessions—8 weeks of workshop and a final evening of readings. It is capped at 10 participants.
Email sanders@thereaderberlin.com to sign up!
Sanders Isaac Bernstein is a writer living in Berlin. His work has appeared in newyorker.com, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hypocrite Reader, Ploughshares, Slow Travel Berlin, London Magazine, Majuscule, and The Bad Version, a literary magazine he founded and edited from 2011-2014. He holds degrees from Harvard College, the University of Oxford, and the University of Southern California, where he recently completed his doctorate in literature. If you’re looking for him in Berlin, chances are you can find him at the Berlinische Galerie. He likes the dimensions of the upstairs gallery very much—and can hardly tear himself away from that Fred Thieler.
