Barcelona Writing Community

The essay is a famously unruly form, a tangle of the personal and impersonal. Practiced as memoir, reportage, diary, criticism, and sometimes all four at once, its method is unmethodical. No two are ever written in the same way.

Over eight weeks, we’ll read writers including Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Zadie Smith, Patricia Lockwood, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and practice writing our own essays alongside them. Rather than follow the form chronologically, we’ll move through some of the problems essayists have returned to again and again: describing the sublime, capturing another person, making art from tragedy, and creating change. We’ll read closely, discuss about works and what doesn’t, and pay attention to the choices — of voice, structure, detail, omission — that make an essay come alive. And then we’ll see what happens when we make those choices ourselves.

Sign up here: https://www.backstorybookshop.studio/courses