The Art of the Essay: A Workshop
Join Kim Dana Kupperman August 9-10, 2025, for an online, generative workshop
Join Best American Essays series editor Kim Dana Kupperman for an online, generative intensive workshop, The Art of the Essay, August 8-9, 2025, hosted by Maine Media Workshops & College.
Open the doors to the art of essay through an immersive, generative process of reading to write.
In this workshop, we will generate essays prompted by readings that illustrate varied approaches to the art of the essay. We will explore how reading urges us toward the act of writing and ultimately leads to discovery. As Hélène Cixous puts it, “Writing and reading are not separate, reading is a part of writing. A real reader is a writer. A real reader is already on the way to writing.”
Prior to the workshop weekend, participants will read four assigned essays. Each session begins with a discussion of how the writer describes what happened and how the writer makes meaning of the experience. What makes the essay vivid, concerned, fulfilled? Following the discussion, prompts will be given, participants will spend time writing and will then be given an opportunity to share their writing.
During the final session, we will discuss how to locate prompts in the work you read and, how to recognize prompts in your own work that help you to develop, expand, re-vision.
This workshop will be helpful for those who want to discover what they didn’t know they knew, whether they are looking to jumpstart new work, explore new processes for generating work, or re-energize or expand a current project.
For registration and other details, click here.