Mondays, April 15th - June 3rd* | One of the best ways to improve your writing is through close readings of great work. We'll unlock the secrets of great personal essays in this 7-week class, and apply those lessons as students workshop projects of their own.

The class combines focused, constructive workshopping of student writing with an examination of outstanding published essays past and present. We'll split our time each week between providing feedback on students' essays, and performing a close read of one or more published pieces. We'll talk about techniques that can be used to "get inside" a piece, and students will put those techniques to work not just in understanding their own work but in learning to provide useful feedback for their fellow writers as well.

We'll read essayists like Alexander Chee, Joan Didion, Gloria Anzaldúa, Mary Ruefle, and more. Along the way, we'll get at the heart of what makes a great personal essay tick. Workshopping will focus on what each writer wants to accomplish, with constructive feedback provided to help move them closer to their goals. By the end of the class, you'll have gained new insights and made important progress with your own work, and will have learned a new set of tools through the close study of how great writers approach the personal essay.

*Note: there is no class on April 22nd.

Mark Wallace's essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Independent, and many other places, and his features journalism in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Salon, Wired, and many others. He lives on the rural California coast south of San Francisco, surrounded by children and chickens. Find him on Bluesky at @markwallace.bsky.social.