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Dates: Wednesdays, October 14 - November 4 Time: 6-8pm (Pacific Coast Time) Format: Zoom Ages: Adult Class Description: One of the great challenges of personal narrative and memoir is to write about yourself honestly. How to avoid saying, “I was great, and everyone else behaved monstrously,” while also skirting the overcorrection that would paint you as a rotten villain? At the same time, while we’d love to be purely “ourselves” in writing, the act of memoir requires a performance of selfhood, an element of artfulness (even artifice), where you as a person must pull away from “you” on the page. So: how to do it well? Balancing our self-assessments and self-portraits – and the portrayal of the writer as a kind of flawed, possibly-lovable protagonist – will be our project in this course. Using the personal essay as an entryway, we’ll read short selections from such writers as Mary Karr, Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Mary Gaitskill, Roxane Gay, and of course, the O.G. master of cagey self-disclosure, Joan Didion. We’ll consider: where do these writers reveal themselves, and what do they omit or even hide? How do their descriptions of other people show us who they are via point of view and choice of detail? What IS voice, really, and how do you create a strong one? Much of our time will be spent writing short sketches in response to discussions and prompts, then sharing our work with each other. But the course will also allow students to work on a longer-form personal essay, revising to reshape the self in relation to other characters, settings, and events. LEFT MARGIN LIT'S CANCELLATION/REFUND POLICY: If you find that you can't take a class for which you registered, you may request a refund, less a $25 administrative fee, at least 48 hours prior to the start of the first class session. After that threshold, refunds are not possible. If a class doesn't reach its minimum enrollment, it will be cancelled, and all students will receive full refunds.