How to Improve Your Memoir or Personal Essays by Balancing Scene and Exposition with David McLoghlin (Zoom)

This 8-week course will meet on Wednesdays from 1:00-3:00 p.m. ET on the following dates: April 15, 22, 29, May 6, 13, 20, 27, and June 3. All classes will be held on Zoom.

We have an instinctive sense from fiction, film, and memoir that scenes are where time slows down, giving us immersive sensory detail, conflict and dialogue, but what about exposition (also known as reflection, “glide,” or summary)? In fact, exposition is just as important as scenes, as it’s where the writer explains, and comments on the scenes. Here is where the writer provides essential, non-immersive information that moves the story forward and links scenes together. Scenes are where we “show,” whereas in exposition, we “tell.” Scenes immerse us. Exposition orients us. Both are essential. Learning how to identify your principle story points (or scenes) will help you to structure your story. As you develop your scenes and improve them, you will also develop a better sense of what they mean for you. This knowledge in turn will help you to develop and improve your narrative voice, which is what well-employed exposition can do. Scenes often tell the core story of the past, whereas exposition is in the voice of the adult narrator located in the “narrative present,” reflecting on the past.

Writers and artists are some of the only professionals to work in isolation. This class stresses community, and will help you to build connections with other writers: hopefully “writing buddies” with whom you can share work long after our eight weeks have come to an end. Class also comprises optional “office hours” where you can meet with me to discuss any aspect of your writing process that is on your mind. This is an especially important part of the class for me, as I very much enjoy assisting writers in teasing out the essential core of the story that they need to tell.

One element of this course is discussion of a weekly reading (a memoir chapter or personal essay) to help us hone our understanding of scenes and exposition. (FYI, there is no obligation to buy books.) Each two-hour class will be divided between craft and workshop.  Class time will be divided between creative writing workshop and learning about and then practicing important craft elements. While two to three of our six classes will be dedicated to learning and practicing scenes and exposition, you will also learn how to:

·      work with leitmotifs, by implementing recurring images, or thematic elements.

·      work with time in memoir.

·      grow a structure that works for you.

·      map plot points, obligatory scenes and characters.

·      identify the “story within the story,” or through-line / central narrative thread.

·      develop your narrative voice.

·      Use the free-writing method of Gail Sher and Joan Bolker to progressively home in on the story you want to tell, and / or assist you in freeing you from writing anxiety.

My teaching is influenced by craft books like:

·      The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

·      The Anti-Racist Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez

·      The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne

·      Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

·      Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

·      Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John Mcphee

·      One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher

·      Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker

BIO

David McLoghlin has taught over 200 hours of memoir with Hudson Valley Writers Center, The Center for Fiction, The Shipman Agency and The Irish Writers Centre and teaches and mentors creative writing in Ireland with Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools and The National Mentoring Programme. While living in New York City between 2010 and 2020 he was Resident Writer at Hunts Point Alliance for Children in the South Bronx, and an NYU Teaching Fellow at Coler Specialty Hospital. He won the Waterford Poetry Prize in 2025, was awarded an Irish Arts Council grant for memoir in the same year. He was a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship Recipient in 2023. He is a prize-winning poet and a writer of memoir and personal essay. His third book of poetry is Crash Centre (Salmon Poetry, May 2024), which was shortlisted for the 2025 Pigott Prize. He has published memoir extracts, essays, and poetry in Literary Hub, Poetry Foundation, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and other journals. An essay on being mentored by poet Sharon Olds is forthcoming in This Glistening Verb (University of Michigan Press) as part of their “Under Discussion” series. An essay was also published in the anthology Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (Black Lawrence Press been broadcast on WNYC’s Radiolab and published in Literary Hub. He is currently at work on a book about his grandfather, the golf architect, Eddie Hackett, widely considered “the Father of Irish Golf Design.” An immersion piece about playing one of his grandfather’s courses will feature in Golfer’s Journal in the USA in 2026.