Words on the Page: Fragmenting Experiences, Fragmented Structures Taster Workshop with Roe McDermott
Info
Date: July 6, 2026
Time: 12.00 pm – 1.00 pm
Duration: 1 hour
Level: Advanced | Intermediate | Beginner |
Cost: €20 (€18 Members)
This course will take place in person at the Irish Writers Centre as part of our ‘Words on the Page Summer Sessions’ -a week of in-person intensive courses.
Course Summary
What happens when we stop trying to force our experiences into neat, linear narratives? This taster workshop explores the literary fragment as both structure and emotional language – a way of writing that embraces contradiction, multiplicity, rupture, memory, and the unfinished. Drawing on memoir, fiction, essays and experimental forms, we’ll look at how fragments can capture experiences that resist easy coherence: grief, desire, shame, transformation, intimacy, identity, alienation, joy.
Participants will explore how fragmentation can create tension, rhythm, voice and emotional depth on the page. The workshop will include a guided writing exercise designed to help writers experiment with fragments as both narrative structure and emotional expression, whether working in fiction, memoir, poetry or personal essay.
Suitable for writers at all levels, this class is an invitation to think differently about voice, form, and the stories we tell ourselves about wholeness.
At the end of the week, participants are invited to sign up to read their work at a showcase on Friday 10th July from 5-7pm.
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
Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email bookings@irishwriterscentre.ie.
