Essays, Life-Writing and Memoir with Sinéad Gleeson

Many of literature’s most daring writers of the self have used auto-fiction, memoir and personal essays to write about their lives and the world, from James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to John Jeremiah Sullivan and Maggie Nelson. Sinéad Gleeson explores the art of the essay, past and present, focusing on the skills required for life-writing and first-person non-fiction. This workshop will discuss how to put ideas into practice, beginings and structure, making the personal universal and learning how to extract the key elements of your own story.

Sinéad Gleeson’s essays have appeared in Granta, Winter Papers, Gorse, Banshee and Elsewhere Journal. Her debut essay collection, Constellations will be published by Picador in spring 2019. She is the editor of three short story anthologies, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers (2015) and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Blog Awards. She has contributed poems and short stories to various anthologies and is currently working on a novel.