About

The personal essay is a unique blend of storytelling, lessons, and poetry. Not quite memoir, not quite self-help, it is a form that lends itself to blogs, essays for magazines, or opinions for newspapers. 

In this workshop we’ll look at the structural foundation of the personal essay, as well as learn some simple tools to help authors use their life experiences as limitless source material. Most importantly, we’ll dig into how best to offer readers lessons without being dogmatic or obvious so that our essays can be both entertaining and inspiring.

Bring a brown bag lunch.

Instructor: William Kenower is the author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence, and Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion, the Editor-in-Chief of Author magazine, and a sought-after speaker and teacher. In addition to his books he’s been published in The New York Times and Edible Seattle, and has been a featured blogger for the Huffington Post. His video interviews with hundreds of writers from Nora Ephron, to Amy Tan, to William Gibson are widely considered the best of their kind on the Internet. He also hosts the online radio program Author2Author where every week he and a different guest discuss the books we write and the lives we lead.