WRIT42480 - Joan Didion's "I"

Course Description

Joan Didion’s essays have been absorbed, dissected, and studied by generations of writers. For good reason. Few writers better illustrate the power of the “I," of the importance of crafting that “right” first-person narrator who can excavate a private personal truth to illuminate a shared universal one. The result is more than a signature voice – but a whisper-in-your-ear presence that feels tangible, that thrums with shared life.

In this class, we’ll dig deep into Didion’s use of the “I” to probe and practice finding that “right” narrator. It is a struggle familiar to writers of multiple genres – often painfully so. Using several of Didion’s most important essays, we’ll consider both in her work and in our own efforts what it really means to craft a persona who is and is not the self and why that choice informs so many others, ultimately serving as guide for both writer and reader. Throughout, we’ll use prompts, exercises, and a workshop format to reverse engineer some of these lessons into our own writing. We'll see first-hand how our myriad choices about a narrator’s persona, presence, and stance breathe life into our writing or rob it of vitality. As we do so, we'll consider how Didion's fierce drive to make sense of some private internal struggle makes fresh and urgent the subject in the world beyond the self that she’s come to explore -- with special attention on her famously cold, unsparing perspective. It is a combination that allows her to get beyond the "what happened" and the cognitive processing of what those events mean and tap the complex, messy emotional undertow -- attaching to her descriptions a layered subtext so that her hunger for understanding, her urgent need to know, becomes the reader’s as well.