Our Building, Our Story: Writing the Life of 2601

Every building is a village. Behind each door on every floor at 2601 is a life — an arrival story, a triumph, a private sorrow, a friendship struck up in the elevator, a joke that is still funny fifteen years later. Most of it is never written down. It lives only in conversation, and then, eventually, it doesn’t live anywhere at all.

This course exists to change that.

Over ten sessions, the residents of 2601 will learn to write the personal essay — clearly, honestly, and well — and will use those new skills to build a shared book: a collection of true, first-person essays about what it has meant to live in this particular building, among these particular neighbors, in this particular slice of a life. No experience is required. No one needs to have written anything since a high school assignment. You only need a memory, a willingness to look at it honestly, and ninety minutes a week.

By the end, we will have a manuscript — a real one, ready for the kind of independent publication available to any of us through print-on-demand services such as Amazon KDP. A book with your neighbors’ names on the spine, on the shelf, in the lobby, and in your own hands.

Welcome to Our Building, Our Story — a ten-session course in personal essay writing, built specifically for the residents of 2601 and organized around a single shared subject: this building, and your life within it.

The first four sessions teach the craft fundamentals every essayist needs — brainstorming, structuring an essay, drafting a scene, and revising with a clear eye — using 2601 itself as the shared material for every exercise. The next five sessions each introduce one essay type particular to a residential community: the arrival story, the neighbor portrait, the happy memory, the hard memory, the funniest memory, and the most unforgettable moment. The final session is a workshop and manuscript-planning meeting, where the group decides, together, how the individual essays will become one collective book.

This is not a memoir-writing marathon. Each essay is short — the kind of piece a person can draft in one sitting and refine in two or three more. The goal is a body of work every contributor can be proud of, gathered into something permanent.

I am glad to be teaching this course, and I am glad you are here.

This is a beginner-friendly workshop in the personal essay, using the shared experience of living at 2601 as its subject matter throughout. Each week we will:

• Learn one specific craft skill (brainstorming, outlining, scene-writing, revision, or a particular essay form)
• See that skill demonstrated with short published examples
• Practice the skill directly on 2601 material, in class, by hand or by laptop
• Leave with a clear, short take-home assignment: a complete draft of that week’s essay

By Session 10, every participant will have a folder of five to seven short personal essays, each between 500 and 1,200 words, all set at or shaped by 2601 — ready to be assembled, edited, and published as a shared building anthology.

• It is not a gossip session. We write about our own experience of people and events — not to expose, wound, or settle scores.
• It is not a legal risk. Session 4 is devoted entirely to writing about real people and real events without inviting a lawsuit — a subject every contributor must take seriously before anyone’s essay is considered for the shared book.
• It is not mandatory disclosure. You choose what to write about. No one will ask you to reveal more than you want to.
• It is not a contest. There will be no ranking of essays. Every finished, honest piece belongs in the anthology if its author wants it there.
• It is not a one-way lecture. Bring your stories. The best material in this course will come from you, not from me.

James F. Mulhern is a Professor of English and a former Department Chair, and the recipient of a fully funded Writing Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford. He is a published author whose short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in more than 350 literary journals, and he is the founder of Silver Current Press. He has taught writing at the university level for many years and has a particular, long-standing interest in the way ordinary communities — families, workplaces, neighborhoods, buildings — hold literature inside them that no one has yet written down.

He lives at 2601.

For residents who would like a book to read alongside the course, I recommend:

Bill Roorbach with Kristen Keckler, Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature (Tenth Anniversary Edition, Writer’s Digest Books).

This book is the single best-suited guide I know for a group exactly like ours: working writers and non-writers alike, drawing directly on lived memory, with no academic jargon and no assumption of prior training. Roorbach’s chapters on finding material, building scenes from memory, and shaping a true story into a finished essay map closely onto what we will do together, week by week. It is widely available secondhand and at public libraries, and no purchase is required to succeed in this course — I will bring copies to class, and every technique in the book is also taught directly in these session materials.

An alternate, equally strong choice for anyone who wants a second opinion on the craft: Dinty W. Moore, Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (Writer’s Digest Books), which is especially good on classifying essay types and on the practical mechanics of turning a finished draft into something ready to submit or publish.

Brainstorming An unfiltered, quantity-first method of generating raw material for writing, in which the writer lists memories, images, or ideas without editing or judging them. Sorting and selection happen only after the list exists.

Situation / Turn / Insight A simple three-part shape for a personal essay: the situation (what things were like before), the turn (what happened or changed), and the insight (what the writer now understands as a result). Nearly every short personal essay can be mapped onto this structure.

Scene A moment of narrative rendered in close, sensory detail — as opposed to summary, which covers time and events more quickly and generally. Scene puts the reader inside a specific moment.

Voice The distinct, recognizable personality that comes through a writer’s specific word choices, rhythm, and way of noticing the world. In personal essay, voice should sound like an honest, particular person — not a generic “writerly” tone.

Defamation A false statement of fact, presented as fact rather than opinion, that damages a real person’s reputation. Personal essays that stick to the writer’s own experience and clearly-framed opinions carry far less legal risk than essays that assert unverifiable claims about another person’s character or actions.

Invasion of Privacy / Public Disclosure of Private Facts A legal concern distinct from defamation: even a true statement about someone can expose a writer to liability if it discloses a highly private fact (medical, financial, or similarly sensitive) that the subject had a reasonable expectation would remain private, and the disclosure would be considered highly offensive to a reasonable person.

Anthology A collected volume of writing by multiple authors, gathered around a shared theme. The finished product of this course is a resident-written anthology: a single published book containing every contributor’s finished essays.

Print-on-Demand (POD) Publishing A publishing model, of which Amazon KDP is the most widely used example, in which a book is printed one copy at a time as orders arrive, rather than in a large advance print run. This makes small, community-scale books like a building anthology financially practical to publish.

Why a Building Deserves a Book

Every apartment building accumulates a kind of oral history that almost never survives its residents. Someone remembers the year the boiler failed in January. Someone remembers the doorman who knew every child’s name on the block. Someone remembers exactly how the light came through the lobby windows on the day they first walked in, hopeful and a little frightened, carrying a single box because the movers hadn’t come yet. And then, eventually — because people move, because people age, because people pass away — all of it is gone, the way almost everything about almost everyone is eventually gone, unless someone writes it down.

This is not a small loss. A building like 2601 is not merely an address; it is a sustained, ongoing act of communal life — hundreds of small kindnesses, hundreds of small frictions, celebrations and losses experienced in close physical proximity to people who did not choose each other, exactly, but who ended up choosing, in whatever way, to stay. That is worth a book.

The personal essay is the right form for this project because it does not require its writers to have any particular credential or life story. It asks only for honesty and attention. You do not need to have done anything remarkable to write a remarkable essay about living here — you need only to look closely at what actually happened, choose the moments that matter, and render them so a stranger could feel them too.

What you are being asked to do in this course, session by session, is what every essayist has always done: to take the enormous, undifferentiated material of a lived life and select from it — deliberately, carefully, sometimes painfully — the handful of moments that carry the most truth. Brainstorming finds the material. Outlining gives it shape. Scene-writing makes it vivid. The session on writing about real people keeps it safe and fair. And the five essay types that follow — arrival, portrait, joy, hardship, comedy, and the most unforgettable experience of all — simply point that same set of tools at the different rooms of a life lived at 2601.

By the end, you will not just have learned to write personal essays. You will have helped build something that did not exist before: a permanent, physical record of what it meant to live, for however many years, in this particular building, among these particular people, at this particular moment. Long after any of us are still here, someone — a future resident, a grown child of a current one, a stranger who buys the book secondhand — will be able to open it and know, in specific and vivid detail, what it was like. That is not a small thing to have made. It is, in fact, a form of care for the people who will come after you, the truest kind a writer can offer: I was here. I paid attention. Here is what it was like.

I am a Professor of English and a former Department Chair, and I am the recipient of a fully funded Writing Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford. My own short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in more than 350 literary journals, and I am the founder of Silver Current Press, an independent publishing house. I have taught writing at the university level for most of my adult life.

I also live at 2601, which is why this course exists. I have my own arrival story, my own portraits of neighbors I have loved, my own hard memories and my own very funny ones — and I believe, without reservation, that every one of my neighbors has at least one essay in them worth reading, and that together, we have a book worth making.

If you have questions, or want to talk about an essay you are already working on, please email me at [email protected].

This course is offered free of charge to the residents of 2601. All materials are for educational use within the course, in service of the shared resident anthology it is designed to produce.

These materials — course descriptions, reading lists, syllabi, discussion questions, session pages, and prompts — were written and designed by James F. Mulhern for Silver Current Press. Readers are welcome to read, print, share, and quote them for personal use and study.

Teachers, program directors, and institutions who would like to use any of this material in a classroom, syllabus, publication, or paid program are asked to write first — a short email is enough. The answer will almost always be a warm yes, with a note on attribution. Please contact Professor Mulhern at [email protected].