PLEASE NOTE THIS COURSE IS NOW FULL 

Looking to hone your writing talent this year? You may also like these short courses: 

• How to Write a Novel 
• An Introduction to Flash Fiction 

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WORKSHOP

Dates: 27 January to 31 March, 2025 ((excluding 3 February and 17 March) 

Time: 11am-1pm

Venue: Bishopston Library, Wilton, Cork 

Fee: €300

Please note limited places are available in this course. Register early to avoid disappointment. 

Course Overview: 

In this course we will delve deeply into non-fiction as a genre and study the art of memoir / autofiction and the personal and lyric essay. We will look closely at work by Ocean Vuong, Nastasha Trethewey, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Rebecca Solnit amongst others, as well as the historical pioneers  of the form such as Michel de Montaigne, George Orwell, Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag and more.  

Each week we will look at an author’s work in detail and write our own pieces of creative non-fiction inspired by their particular methods, insight and practice, bringing our own experiences and passions to the page.  

Students will aim to produce one piece of longer work of up to 4000 words from a combination of class and homework exercises with writing prompts or alternatively two shorter ‘chapter’ style pieces, with a view to the excerpts eventually forming the body of a collection, or longer book. There will be an opportunity after each class for students to submit short fragments for workshopping by the group, or alternatively just by me in the form of constructive editorial suggestions.

Course Schedule:

Week 1 – The Female Trailblazers – a historical overview. We will identify different genres within nonfiction and look at the political and personal essay through the ages, revisiting 18th and 19th century female writers such as Virginia Woolf, the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as modern political personal essays from Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit and more. Class exercise and homework.    

Week 2 – Men of Letters and their Contemporary Relevance. We will identify some of the most respected and contentious essaysists in the genre going back to the 16th century. We will look at writers such as Albert Camus, George Orwell and Michel de Montaigne and discuss what influence or impact those works have on the personal or political essay today from Irish writers such as Rob Doyle and Colm Tóibin. Class exercise and homework.

Week 3 – Art and the Essay. We will read Irish writer Sara Baume, American academic Christina Sharpe, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein and John Berger amongst others and look at how art impacts our own personal writing. A focus will be Just Kids by Patti Smith which recounts her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe against the backdrop of the New York City art scene. Class exercise and workshopping of homework. 

Week 4 – Love, Parenting and Queer Kinship. We will look at the wide range of autofictional writing spanning approaches to writing about caregiving and relationships, from Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti to Karl Ove Knausgård, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Carmen Maria Machado and see what is possible to explore within this most personal of subjects. Class exercise and homework. 

Week 5 – Poets as Memoirists. (Part One). Taking examples such as Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Nikki Giovanni’s Gemini, we will look at styles of different poets approaching the writing of creative nonfiction. Class exercise and workshopping.  

Week 6 – Poets as Memoirists. (Part Two). We will look at contemporary poetic memoir such as Mark Doty’s Firebird, Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy, Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, Ocean Vuong’s poetry, memoir and essays and will have a special guest reading. Class exercise and homework.  

Week 7 – Ghosts in the Memoir. We will read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and excerpts from Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat and look at how the supernatural is threaded into personal narrative. Class exercise and workshopping. 

Week 8 – Summary of memoirs explored, Q & A session, writing exercise and class discussion and presentation / workshopping of final CNF piece written over the eight weeks.  

Course Lecturer : 

Lucy Holme is a writer and mother who lives in Cork, Ireland. She gained a BA in English at Manchester University and then travelled the world, working in the private yachting industry as a chief stewardess, sommelier and purser. Her poems feature in PN Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, The London Magazine, Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Southword, and Poetry Wales, amongst others. She has been shortlisted or runner up for The London Magazine Poetry Prize, The Red Line Poetry Competition, The Brotherton Prize, The Mairtín Crawford Award, The Wales Poetry Prize, and The Fool for Poetry Chapbook Award and won the Cúirt New Writing Prize for Poetry and the Southword Editor’s Prize 2024. Her debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis, which was shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award, was published by Broken Sleep Books in August 2022 and she was granted an agility award by the Arts Council in 2023 to work on her first full poetry collection. She was a runner up in Southword’s Literary Essay Competition 2023 and her CNF features in Southword, The Pig’s Back, Banshee, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and Annie Journal amongst others. A nonfiction essay collection entitled Blue Diagonals was published by Broken Sleep Books in September 2024. She holds an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from UCC and is currently studying for a PhD in Poetry also at UCC. She was founding co-editor of Cork based literary and visual arts journal, The Four Faced Liar.

Entry Requirements:

Applicants must be at least 18 years old at course commencement. 

Contact Details for Further Information: 

Email: shortcourses@ucc.ie  

Please note our refund policy as follows: 

100% refund if student cancels 1 week prior to course commencement, less €50 processing fee.

100% refund if student's course is cancelled due to insufficient numbers.