Nonfiction Workshop: The Memoir and Essay

Level: Undergraduate

Division: The New School for Public Engagement

School: School of Writing

Department: Writing Program

Course Number: NWRW 3879

Course Format: Seminar

Location: NYC campus

Permission Required: No

Topics:

• Creative Writing
• Non-fiction
• Civic Engagement

Description:
Personal memoir and essay writing may often overlap, but they are very distinct forms. A memoir explores a world unique to the writer. Metaphorically speaking, memoir is an intimate form that takes place in a private room inside a house with no one else there. It is always set in the past and draws on the imaginative faculty of memory. An essay, in contrast, has the quality of a reflective conversation that might develop on a porch with passers-by. Its tone is friendly, but rarely confiding. Essay reflects on an aspect of the world we share and has the feeling of being in the present even if it draws on some past experience. Working in these two forms helps writers learn to tap their interior lives for writing riches. Students write and workshop short pieces throughout this course and work toward a longer piece in either form in the last six weeks. Throughout we read, including memoirs by Jamaica Kincaid and James Carroll and essays by Virginia Woolf and Junichiro Tanizaki.

Restrictions:

Level

Open to Undergraduate students.