The Personal Essay & Memoir

Somewhere inside you there is a story that only you can tell.

Not because it is dramatic. Not because it is unusual. But because it happened to you — and because you have been carrying it long enough that you now have some distance on it, and because that distance, combined with care and attention, is exactly what turns a life into literature.

This course is an open door. Walk through it at whatever pace you need. You do not have to be a writer. You do not have to have written anything before. You only have to be willing to sit still for ninety minutes a week, read a little, listen a lot, and put pen to paper in the company of neighbors who are doing the same.

Welcome to The Personal Essay & Memoir: Writing From a Life — a free sixteen-week course meeting right here at 2601, in the community room, for residents who want to explore the craft of true personal writing.

Over sixteen weeks we will read some of the finest essayists and memoirists working in English, talk about what makes their writing work, and then do a little writing of our own — by hand, on paper, in the room together. No screens. No keyboards. Just a pen, a blank page, and whatever you decide to bring to it.

Every session runs ninety minutes. The course is free, non-graded, and non-competitive. Nothing you write is collected or evaluated. Nothing leaves the room unless you choose to take it home.

I am glad you are here.

This is a reading-and-writing workshop for adults who want to understand how the personal essay and memoir work as literary forms — and who want to try writing in those forms for themselves.

Each week we will:

• Read a short essay or excerpt by a recognized writer in the genre
• Discuss what the writer is doing and how they are doing it
• Practice one craft element through a brief in-class writing exercise
• Take home a longer prompt to work on between sessions (entirely optional)

The emphasis is on craft: on how writers select, shape, and reflect on their own experience to make something true and resonant on the page. We will talk about scene and summary, voice and persona, structure and form, memory and ethics. We will talk about the difference between what happened and what it means.

• It is not a confessional support group. We are here to make art from experience, not to process it.
• It is not a competitive workshop. No one’s writing will be criticized, ranked, or compared.
• It is not a lecture. I will talk, but so will you. The best learning in this room will come from conversation.
• It is not a commitment to publish. Whatever you write belongs entirely to you.
• It is not required. Come when you can. Read what you are able. Write what feels right.
• It is not graded. There is no right answer to any of the discussion questions.

James F. Mulhern is a Professor of English and a former Department Chair, and is the recipient of a fully funded Writing Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford. He is a published memoirist whose work explores family, memory, and the experience of growing up in working-class America. He has taught writing at the university level for many years and believes, without reservation, that every adult has at least one memoir inside them worth reading.

He lives in Philadelphia.

Before you arrive: Each session has a short reading assignment — usually five to twenty pages, sometimes less. Reading ahead makes the discussion richer, but if life gets in the way, come anyway. We will spend time in class with the text.

In the room: We open with a few minutes for settling in and brief check-ins. Then we move to the reading and craft discussion — roughly forty-five to fifty minutes. Then we write: a focused in-class exercise, ten to fifteen minutes, by hand on paper. No one is asked to share unless they want to. The session closes with any questions or observations about the take-home prompt.

After class: An optional take-home prompt is offered each week. These are invitations, not assignments. If you write something and want to bring it back to read aloud — in whole or in part — Session 16 is your moment.

• I will not embarrass you, call on you, or put you on the spot.
• I will not ask you to share anything you have written unless you choose to share it.
• I will respond to all writing — if you choose to show it to me — with honesty and warmth, in that order.
• I will start on time and end on time.
• I will treat every person in this room as a writer.

• Come when you can, even if you haven’t done the reading.
• When others are speaking, listen the way you want to be listened to.
• Bring a pen. The writing in this course is done by hand.
• Be patient with yourself. First drafts — especially the handwritten, timed ones we do in class — are not supposed to be finished.
• Come to Session 16. We will celebrate what we have made.

Persona The version of yourself that appears on the page. The narrator of a memoir is not identical to the author; they are a constructed presence, shaped by the choices of selection, emphasis, and tone. A memoirist builds a persona the way a novelist builds a character — with intention.

The Reflective “I” The narrating voice in memoir and personal essay that looks back on experience with understanding unavailable to the person who lived it. The reflective “I” is the seat of meaning in memoir — not simply the one who acts, but the one who now comprehends. Phillip Lopate calls this “the reflecting consciousness.”

Scene A moment of narrative rendered in real time: dialogue, sensory detail, action unfolding. Scene puts the reader inside an experience. It slows the clock. It is the primary mode of dramatic intensity in memoir.

Summary Narrative that covers time efficiently, giving context, background, or pattern without dramatizing a specific moment. Summary is necessary — without it, a memoir would never move — but overused, it keeps readers at arm’s length from the experience.

In Medias Res Latin: “into the middle of things.” A structural technique in which a narrative begins not at the chronological beginning but at a moment of tension or action already in progress. Many successful memoirs and personal essays begin in medias res and fill in the backstory later.

Braided Essay A form of creative nonfiction in which two or more separate narrative threads are woven together throughout a single essay. The threads may appear to have nothing in common; the revelation of the essay often comes in the hidden connection between them. Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” is a classic example.

Lyric Essay An essay that moves by image, association, and resonance rather than by linear argument or chronological plot. The lyric essay borrows structural strategies from poetry. It values compression, ambiguity, and the suggestive gap. It does not always resolve, and the irresolution is often the point.

Second-Person POV The narrative voice that addresses the reader (or the author’s past self) as “you.” Second person is relatively rare in memoir but can be a powerful way to create immediacy, to implicate the reader, or to achieve a kind of protective distance from painful material.

Voice The sum of all the choices a writer makes that create a distinct personality on the page: syntax, diction, rhythm, tone, what is said and what is withheld. Voice is not style alone — it is the felt presence of a consciousness. The reader should feel that this could only have been written by this person.

Candor In memoir, candor is not the same as confession. It is the willingness to tell the truth — including uncomfortable truths about oneself — without flinching and without performing. The best memoirists are candid not for shock but for accuracy: this is what it was actually like. Candor earns the reader’s trust in a way that evasion never can.

Writing Toward Truth, Not Just Fact

There is a distinction that matters enormously in memoir, and it is easy to miss: the distinction between fact and truth.

A fact is a verifiable datum. The house was on Clearfield Street. The year was 1987. My mother said those words. These are facts, or at least they are my best recollection of facts, and they provide the scaffolding of any memoir. Without them, we are writing fiction.

But truth — the kind of truth that memoir is after — is something larger and harder to pin down. Truth is what the fact meant. Truth is the feeling that lived inside the year 1987, inside that house, underneath those words my mother said. Truth is what persists after the facts have been forgotten or distorted or reshuffled by time.

Every serious writer of memoir will tell you that memory is unreliable. We know this. Neuroscience confirms what anyone over fifty already suspects: memory is not a recording; it is a reconstruction. Each time we remember something, we alter it slightly. We add the feeling we have about it now. We shade it with what we have learned since.

This does not make memoir dishonest. It makes it human.

What it requires — what separates the serious memoirist from the casual one — is the acknowledgment that the narrator’s perspective is a perspective, not the perspective. This is why the best memoirists build into their work what we might call an epistemological humility: phrases like I believe, or It seemed to me, or I could not have known then, or simply the silence of not claiming to understand what they cannot have understood. Mary Karr puts it directly in The Art of Memoir: she never speaks with authority about how people feel or what their motives were. She keeps the focus on her own interior. She lets the reader know when she is speculating.

Vivian Gornick offers another way into this question. In The Situation and the Story, she distinguishes between the situation — the external circumstances, the plot of what happened — and the story — the emotional insight the writer is pursuing, the thing the writer has come to understand. The situation is the vehicle. The story is the destination. And here is the hard truth: you cannot know what the story is when you begin. You discover it in the writing.

This is why the first draft of a memoir is always, on some level, an act of exploration. You sit down thinking you are writing about the time your father got sick. You discover you are writing about authority. You think you are writing about a summer job. You find you are writing about shame. The facts take you somewhere you did not plan to go. That somewhere, if you follow it honestly, is where the truth lives.

For this reason, good memoir writing is not a matter of remembering correctly. It is a matter of attending carefully — to the detail that insists on being included, to the feeling that keeps returning even when you try to write past it, to the image that appears at the beginning and again at the end without your having planned it.

The craft of personal writing is, at bottom, the craft of paying attention. Not only to the world outside — though place and season and the texture of rooms are never incidental — but to the interior weather that runs beneath the surface of our days. The memoirist’s job is to triangulate between these two: the outer world and the inner one, the fact and the truth, what happened and what it meant.

The body is part of this. Memory is stored in the body before it is stored in the mind — in the smell of a particular house, the weight of a particular coat, the feeling of a particular floor under bare feet. Writers who work only from the neck up miss half the archive. Let your senses be your first drafts.

Structure is part of this too. The shape you give your material is not neutral. A chronological structure says: these events led, inevitably, to this. A braided structure says: these two things belong together even though I cannot explain why. A lyric structure says: this experience does not resolve, and I will not pretend that it does. Choose your structure the way you choose your words — with intention, because it is the truest form for this particular truth.

And finally: revision. The first draft is the act of remembering. The second draft is the act of understanding. By the third draft, if you have been honest with yourself about what the piece is really about, you will know what to cut: everything that does not serve the truth you have discovered. The cut is not a loss. It is the final act of precision.

When you write in this course, you do not have to have it figured out before you begin. In fact, if you have it entirely figured out before you begin, you may be writing a report rather than an essay. Come to the page with a question, a pressure, an image that will not leave you alone. Follow it. The truth, if it is there, will meet you somewhere in the middle of the page.

You do not have to write for publication. You do not have to write for anyone but yourself. But if you write with sufficient honesty and attention — if you stay with the difficulty rather than skating past it — you will almost certainly write something worth keeping. Something that, in ten or twenty years, will let you say: That is what it was like. I was there. I paid attention. I told the truth as well as I could.

That is not nothing. In fact, it is nearly everything.

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. I have been teaching writing at the university level for most of my adult life, and before that I was a student of writers who taught me that the best thing a teacher can do is get out of the way and let the work happen.

I am a published memoirist. My own writing is concerned with memory, family, working-class experience, and the ordinary tragedies and joys that make up most of a life. I believe memoir is one of the most democratic of literary forms — it requires no specialized knowledge, no particular credential, no extraordinary life. It requires only the willingness to look honestly at what you have lived and to try, with care and patience, to put it into words.

I live in Philadelphia. I am glad to be teaching here, in this building, for these neighbors.

If you have questions, or if you want to talk about a piece of writing you are already working on, please email me at [email protected].

This course is offered free of charge to residents of 2601, Philadelphia. All materials are for educational use within the course community.