Writing Personal Narrative Essays About Moments that Changed You
Saturday, July 8  10 am – 4 pm
Saturday, July 22   10 am – 1 pm
The Ink Spot/San Diego Writers, Ink
More info & Registration

Our lives are filled with moments, large and small, that we emerge from a different person. James Joyce called them epiphanies and John L’Heureux refers to “a single moment in a character’s life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same.” In the personal narrative essay, we are the character and those moments of change are what characterize the genre and give it its universal appeal.

In the first session of this two-part workshop, we’ll embark on expeditions to discover, uncover, recover those moments of change in our lives—both large and small, and through in-workshop writing exercises we’ll generate the beginnings (or middles or ends/epiphanies) of personal narrative pieces. We’ll discuss the requirements of the genre and set a goal of writing the first draft of an 800- 1200-word essay, which we’ll bring to the second session for review and feedback. No experience in writing the personal narrative essay is necessary, just a desire to explore the moments.