The Queer Self with Gavin McCrea

Course Summary

All writers who write about themselves must contend with the question of difference. What makes me ‘me’ and not ‘him’, ‘her’ or ‘them’? Which parts of ‘me’, if any, are genuinely mine, and which are shared or universal?

We, as queer writers, must grapple with these same questions—though, for us, the task of accounting for difference comes with a particular set of pressures and opportunities. What do I make of my position outside the fold? Do I like the view, or am I eager to get back in? What exactly lends queerness to my writing – the subject I choose, the forms and the techniques I employ, the tone I assume, the perspective I take?

In this course, we will consider such questions as we each work – slowly and thoughtfully – to construct a single piece of writing about ourselves. Each week we will read an extract from a queer memoir. In class we will perform close analyses of passages from that week’s text. Our focus will be on identifying what information the writer is transmitting, how she conveys that information, what she seems to hide or elide, what questions she is trying to answer, and what further questions her answers raise.

In addition to reading, we will perform a series of writing experiments. Here, the idea is to show our writing in a raw state, as fragments. Rather than workshopping each other’s work in a formal manner, we will be generating new material, experimenting, trying things out, failing, and failing again – without the pressure of having to develop our experiments further or present them to our peers for critique. This is our space to play – queerly.

Course Outline

The class will take place on Zoom. We will meet every Saturday morning at 10am (Irish time) for six weeks, from 3 October to 7 November 2026. Each seminar will be two hours long. The seminars will be structured in the following way:

1. The first 30 minutes will be spent informally sharing our writing experiments (homework).
2. The following 60 minutes will be spent performing close textual analyses of a memoir extract.
3. The final 30 minutes will be spent performing writing exercises based on the themes of our analyses. Students will be expected to work on these experiments (expand them and/or edit them) as homework. Students will then share these experiments with the class.

Each week of the course, we will focus on a specific theme essential to understanding queer memoir:

Week One: Writer

Week Two: Father

Week Three: Mother

Week Four: God

Week Five: Body

Week Six: Desire

Course Materials

Participants do not need to purchase any books. All required course materials will be shared (in PDF format) before the relevant class. Below is a week-by-week list of the required reading. (These texts might change according to the make-up of the class and the students’ responses and interests.)

Week One: Writer

Sky Gilbert, extract from Small Things

Week Two: Father

Didier Eribon, extract from Returning to Reims

Joseph Osmundson, extract from Spawning Season

Week Three: Mother

Jeanette Winterson, extract from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Claire Lynch, extract from Small

Week Four: God

Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, extract from The Koran and the Flesh

Yukio Mishima, extract from Confessions of a Mask

Week Five: Body

Roxane Gay, extract from Hunger

Paul B Preciado, extract from Can the Monster Speak?

Week Six: Desire

Carmen Maria Machado, extract from The Dream House

Edmund White, extract from The Loves of My Life

Gavin McCrea was born in Dublin in 1978. He is the author of the novels Mrs Engels (2015), The Sisters Mao (2021), Rousseau’s Lost Children (2026), and the memoir Cells (2022). His work has been shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Walter Scott Prize. His articles have appeared in The Paris Review, The Dublin Review, The Guardian, The Irish Times, Lithub, and Catapult.

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