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Topics that lend themselves to effective personal essays and the elements of context, digression, and meaning that allow these pieces to blossom.
It seems like any remarkable event from one’s life would make a good personal essay, the more remarkable the better. But the main action – the “plot” – is rarely the true heart of the essay. Often a very small occurrence can serve as the canvas for a powerfully executed piece of nonfiction writing. In this session, author and essayist David Giffels will discuss the sorts of topics that lend themselves to effective personal essays, and the elements of context, digression, and meaning that allow these pieces to blossom.
About the William N. Skirball Writers' Center's Writer in Residence, 2018-2019
David Giffels’s latest memoir, Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life, was praised by the New York Times Book Review as “tender, witty and ... painstakingly and subtly wrought,” and by Kirkus Reviews as “a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son.” It was a January 2018 Book of the Month pick by Amazon and Powell’s Books and a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice.”
His previous books include The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt, and the memoir All the Way Home, winner of the Ohioana Book Award. He is the coauthor, with Jade Dellinger, of the rock biography Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! and, with Steve Love, Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron.
A former Akron Beacon Journal columnist, his writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Parade, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Grantland, Redbook, and many other publications. He also was a writer for the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head.
He is an associate professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program.
TAGS: | Writing |