The 44 North Essay Contest judges Mikaela Brewer & Matthew Dawkins are offering a two-part writing class featuring teaching & live workshop

For a long time, writing an essay felt like trying to fit a toy back into its hyperstructured packaging. We broke our fingernails trying to twist-tie words and ideas into five perfect paragraphs and a seamless three-point argument. Maybe, we hadn’t read enough essays beyond high school and university to see this in practice. Now, years later, we’re closer. And we’d love to share what we’ve learned from the rich breadth of genre-expanding essays living in our world.

Essays are, instead, more like sand villages built in sandboxes. They’re for exploring and shaping—in real time—what we don’t know intimately enough yet (and want to). More specifically, they’re a form for holding how we’re thinking about the juxtaposition of what we know with what we still don’t know by the end of the essay. Essays aren’t airtight—they can’t capital-K-know something. Sandcastles are fragile, but always worth building for the action figures who would rather live in a sandbox than suffocate in a cardboard/plastic one.

We believe that part of being a good writer is being a good reader, and in this class, we’ll spend some time with literary ancestors and their essays. You’ll leave with not only a new TBR, but a thoughtful list of craft choices to look for and incorporate into your own reading and writing.

WHAT TO EXPECT:

📆 Session 1. Free Attendance on November 28th, 6 pm: an hour of teaching with excerpts from essays we admire.

📆 Session 2. For $6 on December 5th, 6 pm: an hour of live editing & feedback, incorporating what you’ve learned from Session 1.

📁 Materials: A recording of Session 1 + a reading packet with Mikaela's & Matthew’s notes from Session 1