Art and the Personal Essay with Roe McDermott

Course Summary

This course will explore how to use a work of art to tell a personal story. We will look at memoirs, essays, and reviews to look at how art – in any medium – can inform and elevate our understanding of ourselves, and the world. By doing close reading of how writers use paintings, books, poems, films, video games and other art forms to illuminate personal experiences, we will learn how to craft our own stories. Writing prompts shall cover writing about art that you’ve had a changing relationship with over time; how to discuss emotional life events and the experience of the body through art; and how even popular, ‘lowbrow’ art can hold profound meaning.

Course Outline

The course shall run for six weeks and shall include a weekly workshop elements where participants will give and receive feedback on their work. Participants will each have the opportunity to submit three pieces for feedback over the course.

Week 1: Ekphrasis: Learning how to describe art in vivid detail, finding your voice, and entering a piece of writing.

Week 2: Unchanging Art, Changing Self: Looking at how your relationship with a piece of art can change over time

Week 3: Emotions and Art: Using art to illuminate emotional life experiences

Week 4: Bodies of Art: How representations of the body in art can let us explore our own embodied experiences or body image

Week 5: Lowbrow or Popular culture and the Profound: How ‘lowbrow’ forms of art such as video games, mainstream comedies and reality TV can hold meaning and significance

Week 6: Reviewing and Reflecting: How to write a critical personal essay and use art to reflect on personal and cultural questions

Course Outcomes

Writing about art can often feel intimidating as ideas of expertise, authority, and ‘objective’ opinions about the merit of art can make it feel inaccessible. In this course, participants will learn how to value and express their subjective experiences of art and in so doing, invite in their readers, by showing that personal perspectives are vital and illuminating. Participants will leave with an awareness of the many ways they can explore both ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ art in their writing; feeling confident in their ability to bring their personal, subjective experience to the page; and having developed workshop skills that will allow them to critique and appreciate others’ writing.

Some writers whose work shall be explored include Cristin Leach, Jia Tolentino, Brandon Taylor, Maggie Nelson, Chloe Cooper Jones, Sarah Polley and Doireann NiGhriofa.

Roe McDermott is a writer, journalist and Fulbright scholar with an MA in Journalism, an MA in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University, and an MFA in Creative Writing. Roe is a columnist for The Irish Times, the film editor for Hot Press magazine, an arts critic for various publications and national radio shows and has had essays published on The Rumpus and The Coven. Roe has taught creative writing to students in secondary/high school, and at undergraduate and graduate level. In August 2020, Roe was awarded the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award for Literature and is currently working on her first essay collection which will explore PTSD, trauma, and patriarchal constructions of knowledge and credibility.

Testimonials

“If you want to elevate your writing life, I highly recommend Art and the Personal Essay with Roe McDermott. Over six weeks, Roe introduced us to a variety of voices, literary techniques, writing prompts and peer discussion centred around different ways of thinking and reflecting on art. The course foregrounds personal experience as vital when writing about art, so the whole idea was to bring our histories, emotions and identities into the conversation. For our own writing, we drew inspiration from a compelling reading list, which reflected the power and possibility of subjectivity. We each submitted three pieces for gracious and comprehensive feedback from Roe and our fellow participants. The course is extremely well-organised and structured, and from the first session, there was an atmosphere of warmth, inclusivity and shared positive regard. Roe is a seasoned tutor, engaged and engaging, with a vast knowledge of the subject matter and much more. I learned so much about how to ‘enter’ an artwork and how to bring my critique of it to life using my personal, subjective experience. I came in with writer’s block and am leaving revitalized. I’m very thankful to Roe and everyone on the course for making it such an enjoyable and enriching few weeks. I would happily begin again in the morning.” Tracy Gaughan, Art & Personal Writing, February 2025

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.