Dig down into your exisitng essay drafts to enhance them with the foundational elements of the personal essay you’ll study in this 6-week class.

Start your summer on the road! In this 4-week class, you’ll take a trip across various states & states of mind, reading and writing about wandering the backroads, following familiar routes back home, traversing the distance of the desert, gas station stops & more.

Each week, you’ll read model essays by writers such as Hanif Abdurraqib, Penny Guisinger, L.I.Henley, Caitlin Horrocks, Aube Rey Lescure, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Stephen J. Lyons, Dinty W. Moore, Jericho Parms, Joanna Pollock, Colson Whitehead, and more—you’ll write your own roads—experimenting (300-800 words) with ways to essay your escapes, odd encounters, observations, pilgrimages, and discoveries. I’ll send you encouraging, thorough feedback each week, and on Mondays, you’ll get to hear what’s working in your writing from your fellow writers, discuss the week’s readings, and learn effective craft elements for writing (the road). A packet of the class readings and the Zoom link will be emailed to you before class begins.

This four-week class explores and interrogates the adventures and joys our younger selves experienced, the memories (clear and hazy), the discoveries of crushes and loves and desires, searches for freedom, private worlds, and the ways we tried (and failed) to find our truest selves.

Week 1: Points of View for the Younger Self | Week 2: Self, Identity, Discovery

Week 3: Nonlinear Structures | Week 4: Combining past & present selves + questioning memory

Each week, you’ll read model essays by writers, and you’ll write experiments (350-800 words) , share a section of your experiment during Saturday’s class (optional), and receive weekly feedback from me. The Zoom link and model essays will be emailed to you before class begins.