About This Workshop
Finding Your Essay's Heartbeat
Hi Writers,
Andrea Firth here. I’m your instructor for The Forever Workshop—Finding Your Essay’s Heartbeat. During this course, we’ll be reading and discussing a wide range of personal essays and writing our own essays, too.
Sometimes, a personal essay requires us to re-imagine what happened in the past because our memories are incomplete, but we’ll still be writing true stories as best we can. In this workshop, we’re going to take a deep dive into what makes an essay work and discover what your personal story is about and what it means.
Workshop Takeaways
Generate Ideas from Memory: Learn how to tap into your memories to inspire and develop personal essay topics.
Build Strong Scenes and Structure: Understand how to construct vivid scenes and organize your essay effectively.
Use Dialogue and POV Effectively: Explore how dialogue and point of view enhance your essay’s voice and depth.
Craft Powerful Openings and Closings: Create engaging beginnings, memorable endings, and striking titles.
Find the Core of Your Essay: Identify the central emotion or theme that gives your essay purpose and direction.
Follow a Step-by-Step Writing Process: Break down essay writing into six manageable steps.
Apply Essay Writing to Work: Learn how personal essay skills translate into professional and workplace writing.
Revise with Purpose: Embrace revision as a critical step and explore resources to refine your essays further.
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About The Instructor
Andrea A. Firth is an Editor at Brevity Blog and cofounder of Diablo Writers’ Workshop where she teaches creative writing, provides editorial consulting, and supports a vibrant writing community. Andrea has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California. She was a finalist for The Missouri Review's 2021 Perkoff Prize in nonfiction, and her work has appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Allium, Please See Me, Motherwell, The Coachella Review, Brevity Blog among others. She has also worked as journalist, was a longtime contributor to Oakland Magazine, and has published hundreds of articles in news outlets and magazines. Learn more about her and read her recent work at www.andreaafirth.com.
Hi Vedika. Thanks! and yes more great essays to come. And yes, we'll follow a six-art prompt in Lesson #6 that will guide you to get a full essay down in one sitting. Plus I'll provide ideas to get you writing along the way too. Happy to have you here.
Hi, Andrea,
Just read the first two essays you cited and I'm positively busting to talk about them. Already left a comment at Brevity. They're brilliant, and in several places they hang on a sentence you could almost miss if you're not paying attention. THANK YOU for bringing them to our attention.