Description
What makes a personal story matter to readers? The self is a lens for viewing the world, and we can avoid the “so what?” question by reaching outward. Essayists often start with a story or a question and then explore diverse topics in ways that carry us into new terrain.
We’ll write from memory and our own experience as a foundation, and then turn to strategies for linking our singular lives—the merely personal—to a life in relationship to others and a broader world—the truly personal. We’ll look at a spectrum of essays with special attention to those that explore cross-cultural experience. The form is perfectly suited to cultural exploration; essayists dwell in uncertainty and essaying–trying out ideas and stories that bring the reader along with the writer, meandering into unknown territory.
Discussion will include the essay’s shape-shifting forms from blogs, lists, and mosaics to straightforward narrative arcs. Our guide will be Philip Lopate’s “The Art of the Personal Essay.” Excerpts by international writers from Jorge Luis Borges to Joan Didion and Zadie Smith will be sent in advance and discussed in the workshop. We’ll leave with a beginning draft to expand and revise on our own.
About Joanne B. Mulcahy
Joanne B. Mulcahy spent 30 years teaching creative nonfiction at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, where she also created and directed the Writing Culture Summer Institute. She has taught in Alaskan and Oregonian prisons and in libraries and other community settings. Mulcahy’s cross-cultural experience includes work with women’s groups in Northern Ireland and teaching at the Universidad Latina de América in Morelia, Mexico. Her essays and interviews appear in Creative Nonfiction, Hyperallergic, Nexos, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Anthologies featuring her work include The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write About the West and These United States.
She has received nine artists residencies, the New Letters essay prize, and grants from the British Council, the Barbara Deming Fund for Women, Fulbright-García Robles, Oregon’s Literary Arts, and the Oregon and Alaska Humanities councils. Her books include Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island, Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz, and Writing Abroad: A Guide for Travelers (with Peter Chilson), which won the Peace Corps Worldwide 2017 Best Travel Book Award. Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait—A Biography is forthcoming in 2025.
