Very Deeply Personal: Advanced First-Person Essay Workshop
In this intimate 6-week workshop, students who have completed "Deeply Personal" will further peel back the layers of how to effectively tell your most personal and most impactful stories.
Paid Narratively Academy members get 20% off all classes, including this one. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to joinâor to get the paid member promo code if you already are a member.
Cost: $650
Class Size Limit: 6
This class is open to writers who have already completed one session of âDeeply Personalâ with Caroline Rothstein.
âVery Deeply Personalâ is an opportunity to further peel back the layers of what makes a strong, succinct, compelling, and meaningful personal essayâand to deepen your own writing voice. In this intimate setting with a small group of peers, weâll go deeper into all of the elements that make a personal essay sing.
This workshop is a chance to use craft techniquesâand also your own inner wisdom as a thinker and feelerâto tap into the crux of the lived stories you seek to tell. We will also learn how to use our bodies and intuition as editorial feedback.
Each week, only one person will have their essay workshopped, for a total of 40 minutes. During this time, you will read a portion of the essay out loud. Through live, supportive, and thoughtfully responsive feedback, you will learn how your own spoken voice can provide a pathway for deeper, clearer writing.
Throughout the six weeks of this class, writers will explore craft tools, written peer and instructor feedback, and more, helping each of us locate where in our holistic ecosystem of self we are holding our most compelling and meaningful stories.
All students enrolling should have a draft of a personal essay (up to 2,500 words) ready to share by the class start dateâthis can be a new essay or one you worked on in Deeply Personal, if you want to further deepen it in this class. This is a workshop-based class and all students are required to read and critique one peerâs essay each week.
This six-week workshop takes place on Tuesdays from 7pm to 8:30pm ET. Class starts on May 19 and ends on June 23. All Narratively Academy classes are conducted online and accessible to students anywhere in the world. This class will be recorded and shared with all enrolled students in case there are specific sessions you have to miss, but live attendance and participation at a majority of the live sessions is required.
Instructor Bio: Caroline Rothstein is an internationally touring writer, poet, performer, educator, New York Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and producer. Her work has appeared in Narratively, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Nylon, The ABA Journal, Williams Magazine, The Forward, Hey Alma and many other publications. Caroline and her work have been featured widely including in The New Yorker, MTV News, The Chicago Tribune, CBS Evening News, BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, Mic and Newsweek. She tours year-round performing spoken word poetry; public speaking; facilitating workshops; and teaching at colleges, schools, performance venues, summer camps and community organizations worldwide. She teaches literary journalism at Baruch College, and is a facilitator for the Dialogue Arts Project. Caroline self-publishes a monthly nonfiction series on her website called âmy word(s),â and is currently co-writing a musical about elder millennials and technology, co-authoring a romance novel, and developing her second autobiographical one-woman play, among several other writing, poetry, performance, audio and film projects.
Registration Details: Seats in this class are limited and available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Prior to the start of your class youâll receive an invitation to access the virtual classroom and view all class materials.
Cancellation Policy:
Full refund when canceling 7 or more days before the class start date.
50% refund when canceling less than 7 days before the class start date.
No cancellations after the class start date.
Scholarships: A limited number of sliding-scale, income-based scholarships are made available when possible. Apply for a scholarship here.
Questions? Email us at academy@narratively.com.