Writing the I Positioning the Self in Personal Essay

INSTRUCTOR  Rosa Boshier Gonzalez
TIME Sunday, December 10, 3:00–6:00 p.m. CST

PRICE Early bird price $45 for members, $60 for nonmembers. The deadline for early bird pricing is Monday, December 4. After Monday, December 4 $55 for members, $70 for nonmembers. Become a member here. Apply for a scholarship here.

LOCATION  Writespace, 1907 Sabine Street, #125, Houston, TX 77007 (map)

LEVEL All levels

CAP 15

As nonfiction writers, we are tethered to our subjects, be it the art of estrangement, family relationships, or national history. We constantly negotiate our narrative distance between ourselves and the things that we write about. In memoir, that distance is more closed, tending towards the personal and confessional. In critical writing and journalism, the distance must be carefully calibrated to make room for our subject. Take Joan Didion, for example. Would she have been able to write so eloquently about her era if she hadn’t been able to simultaneously implicate herself in the trends and assumptions of her generation?

In this 3-hour course, we’ll look at examples from writers such as Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Joan Didion, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and Myriam Gurba to study and practice how we position ourselves in our own writing. We’ll discuss disclosure–what needs to be divulged to the reader and why. We’ll talk about perspective and the responsibilities of contextualizing the self. This dance between the self and subject will result in essays that address our subjects, and tell the story of our lives, in nuanced and authentic ways.