How to Improve Your Memoir or Personal Essays by Learning and Practicing the Core Elements of Creative Non Fiction: a Craft Workshop with David McLoghlin
- 9-week course (18 hours)
- €225 waged / €200 unwaged
- Thursday evenings 5:30 to 7:30 pm
- Class # 1 starts on 22nd October 2026
- Classes run weekly until 17th December
- All levels are welcome
- Email info@munsterlit.ie to book
This is a course for those writers who are beginning or revising a project, whether memoir or personal essays. Each two-hour class will be equally divided between creative writing workshop (twice per student) and the craft of memoir. We will discuss exemplary texts, as we learn about, and then practice, how to
- “show” and when to “tell”, learning the importance of scene to bring your story alive with dialogue and descriptive, immersive language.
- use free-writing as a process to progressively hone in on the story you want to tell, and / or assist you in freeing you from blocks.
- work with time by moving between present and past convincingly without confusing the reader, possibly employing more than one timeline, or at least establishing greater awareness of your “narrative present.” (By narrative present I mean the life of the adult narrator that is telling the story.)
- identify the “story within the story” or central narrative thread, and work with leitmotifs by implementing recurring imagery or thematic elements.
- create a balance of authentic scenes and exposition by weaving interjections by the adult narrator into the narrative, thus adding richness and texture. Scenes happen in an approximation of real-time while exposition is the informative linking material between scenes that helps us compress time, and deliver vital information.
Apart from workshopping your work, we will focus on in-class exercises and you’ll be encouraged to develop and sustain a writing practice to help you to generate new work, or revise a work in progress. 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 time together has come to an end.
Bio: David McLoghlin has taught many memoir courses with The Irish Writers Centre, The Center for Fiction, Hudson Valley Writers Center and The Shipman Agency. He has also taught in the creative writing departments of New York University and The American College, Dublin. His third book of poetry, Crash Centre, was shortlisted for the 2025 Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers Week. 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. An essay was recently published on Poetry Foundation’s website, and an essay about his grandfather, the golf architect, Eddie Hackett, “the Father of Irish Golf Design,” is forthcoming in Golfer’s Journal. He is at work on a memoir and a fourth collection of poetry.