Start and Revise Your Memoir or Personal Essays with David McLoghlin

Course Summary:

For writers who are beginning or revising a project, whether memoir, personal essays, a travel book or some other room in the capacious genre known as creative nonfiction. We will focus on in-class exercises and you’ll be encouraged to develop and sustain a writing practice to help you to generate new work, or revise a work in progress. Each class will be divided between craft and workshop, the latter being a re-imagined space where you can bring whatever you need to the table.

Course Outline:

Class time will be divided between creative writing workshop and learning about and then practicing important craft elements. These elements of craft will include:

• Using the (free-)writing process itself to progressively home in on the story you want to tell, and / or assist you in freeing you from writing anxiety.
• Finding a structure that works for you.
• Mapping plot points, obligatory scenes and characters
• Learning the importance of scene to bring your story alive with dialogue and descriptive, immersive language.
• Identifying the “story within the story,” or through-line / central narrative thread.
• Developing the voice of the narrator (per Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story)
• Working with leitmotifs, by implementing recurring images, or thematic elements
• Working with time in memoir (per Sven Birkerts).

Course Outcomes

Students will become more aware of implementing the craft of creative nonfiction in revising their writing; they will be given the chance to develop a literary network, and to establish a writing practice that works for them.

David McLoghlin is a prize-winning poet, and a writer of memoir and personal essay. He is a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship Recipient (2023) and received a major Bursary for memoir from The Arts Council. He has published personal essays, short stories and memoir extracts in the Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, New Hibernia Review, and a golfing essay is forthcoming in Golfer’s Journal. He has previously taught memoir with The Center for Fiction and The Hudson Valley Writers Center and teaches creative writing with The Heritage Council, the Munster Literature Centre and the National Mentoring Scheme. www.davidmcloghlin.com for more information

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