Price: $60 (Includes a copy of the book In the Key of New York City by Rebecca McClanahan)

The essayist who creates a book from independent pieces encounters challenges that the writer of a single-arc narrative does not. Though each essay can stand alone, each should also relate to the other essays in significant ways to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, the writer (and, later, the reader) needs to see the forest, not just the separate trees. In our time together, we’ll explore basic shaping principles and combine discussion with brief in-class writing prompts and take-away exercises. You are encouraged, though not required, to prepare a list of your essays or drafts (in-process or completed) that you imagine could be part of a book of essays or a memoir-in- essays.

Rebecca McClanahan’s eleventh book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, was published in 2020. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, The Sun, and in anthologies published by Simon & Schuster, Beacon, Norton, and Bedford/St. Martin, among others. Recipient of two Pushcart prizes, the Glasgow Award in Nonfiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Carter Prize for the Essay, a Governor’s Award for Excellence in Education, and four fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, McClanahan teaches in the MFA programs of Rainier Writing Workshop and Queens University. She can be reached at RebeccaMcClanahanWriter.com.