Essay Revision Intensive with Lilly Dancyger | Virtual

Registration required. Click event url below for more details.

You’ve written a personal essay, you’ve revised it, maybe even had a friend read it and give you feedback, but it’s still not quite up to snuff. You know it could be a great piece, but something isn’t quite clicking. Now what?

Revising is an absolutely essential part of the writing process, but sometimes it can be hard to see your own work with a critical eye—especially a piece you’ve already been working on for a while, one you’ve read so many times you can’t tell anymore whether it’s brilliant or awful. During this one-day course, we’ll experiment with different techniques to find a new way into your draft—seeing it with fresh eyes so you can cut away the excess, dig deeper into the richest ideas, and take a fresh approach to structure.

We’ll do a series of short exercises together to get the wheels turning, and then students will work through additional written exercises on their own time after class ends. Through this process, you’ll polish one essay, and learn techniques you can apply whenever you get stuck on future pieces as well. This course is designed for experienced writers who want help shaking things up a bit, as well as newer writers who feel daunted by the prospect of self-editing.

Come prepared with an essay you want to work on (can be any length and any stage of development!).

Note: This class will meet over Zoom. The meeting will NOT be recorded, and can only be accessed live.

Students will have opportunities to ask questions, but there’s no workshop component. 

Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press. She’s currently at work on a collection of personal and critical essays about the power and complexity of female friendship.

Lilly’s writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She is an assistant adjunct professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, and has also taught creative nonfiction for Catapult, Barrelhouse, Gotham Writers Workshop, and more. You can find her on Twitter at @lillydancyger.