Writing The Self with Jean O'Brien
This is a Life Writing course over six weeks. We all have a story to tell, it is usually about ourselves, our lives, and those close to us. If you feel you have a tale to tell in the form of memoir, journal keeping, personal essays, short story or even through the medium of poetry this is the course for you. Life writing is a way of recording everyday life, it facilitates the expression of feelings and a way of explaining life and events to ones self.
Think of writers such as Hugo Hamilton, Frank McCourt, Nuala O'Faolain, Alice Taylor and the powerful impact their books have had, yet most of them are just records of daily life, but daily life looked at anew and always with the human quest for meaning.
The aim of the workshop will be to help you to complete a short piece of memoir. You are encouraged to have an idea for a piece of writing you wish to work on in the class. Everyone will have chance to have their work discussed. We will look to the works of established writers to help us with narrative, structure and techniques, subject matter and voice.
This course is for anyone who wants to write, be they total beginners or further along with their writing and perhaps thinking of trying to publish.
Jean O'Brien
Is an award winning poet, whose most recent collection Lovely Legs was published by Salmon Poetry. She has an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin and has taught general Creative Writing, (Prose, Poetry, Memoir) for many years, in schools, prisons and for various County Council and as far afield as Texas (USA). She was a founding member of the celebrated Dublin Writers' Workshop. She has worked as a Writer in Residence and undertaken many shorter residencies and taken part in numerous festival & readings. She works as a mentor and occasionally as a short fiction writer/journalist.
Many of Jean's students have gone on to be accepted on University MAs and win prizes and be accepted for publication of their own work.