
Saturday, July 9th, 2022
Live Seminar Via Zoom at 11AM - 1PM CST
Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.
Taught by Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Jill wrote “The Last Year,” a year-long column that appeared online in The Paris Review. Her work has been recognized four times in The Best American Essays. Her short story collection, A Distant Town, won The Florida Review’s 2021 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and will be published in Spring 2022.
In Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past,” she explains writing a memory out of “a desire to explain it,” but when looking back at certain childhood moments, she notes, “I am hardly aware of myself, only the sensation.” “Why is it so difficult,” she wonders, “to give any account of the person to whom things happen?”
In “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into A Character,” Phillip Lopate explains that essayists must create a “clear picture” of the person speaking. Lopate includes aspects of ourselves to consider, beginning with our quirks then moving to aspects such as ethnicity, gender, and class. As essayists, he explains, we must also act like a journalist, establishing the who, what, when, where, and why “as close to the top of every story as possible.”
- Various approaches of crafting persona
- The Importance of Time and Place
- Strategies for revising essay openings
- Potential openings for new essays
- "Jill has a specific way of teaching a workshop that I find more conducive to learning new ways of thinking about the essay than any other workshop I've been in. I'm always blown away by how much my essaying improves at the end of a class from her."
- "Jill has done more to expand my understanding of the essay than any I have encountered."
- "Jill seems to always know just what to say to improve my work and it's always fantastic advice."
- "Publishing class with Jill Talbot was amazing. Chock-a-block with useful, practical, real-world tips. She also gave us a look behind the scenes at what editors look for. Can't wait to use all her resources! And, Jill was fun, funny and warm. Really, what more can you ask for?"
- "I just took a class taught by Jill Talbot called the Writing the Lyric Essay. It was a wonderful generative class. I know much more now about lyric essays and feel my writing has improved!"
- "Jill Talbot was super organized and insightful. Her Lyric Essay Course was a very productive experience for me. The class built in a sequenced fashion from the reading of models, to craft discussions, to our own writing experiments. Her feedback on my work was generous and astute. You'll work hard, but so will she. This was a first-rate online writing course."
ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:
This class will meet via Zoom on Saturday, July 9th, 2022 from 11AM - 1PM CST-
Instructor: Jill Talbot
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July 9th, 2022 | 11AM - 1PM CST
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Seminar is fully ONLINE and meets via Zoom
Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this seminar.
Instructor Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been recognized four times in Best American Essays and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, LitMag, Longreads, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus. Her short story collection, A Distant Town, won The Florida Review’s 2021 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and will be published in Spring 2022. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at University of North Texas.