Exploring the Essay w/ Lauren Markham

Exploring the Essay is a 6-week-long workshop with award winning writer and researcher Lauren Markham. The class will take place on Zoom on Mondays from September 28 until November 2, 2026 from 5 to 7 p.m. PST. Each participant will be able to submit one (1) piece of writing of up to 4000 words and receive written feedback from Lauren Markham.

The essay: that opulent and shape shifting form that attempts to teach, convince and move the reader into a new way of seeing. The essay, as we know it, encompasses everything from the lyric essay, reportage, personal narrative, borrowed forms (aka "the hermit crab" essay), and so many others in between. This is a class dedicated to exploring the essay, itself an exploratory creature that weaves experience, fact, query and observation. Together, we'll investigate how an essay takes shape from material off the page, how it is constructed on the page, how it weaves meaning, and how it excites or moves a reader to keep on, well, reading. Each week, we'll read two essays from writers like Leslie Jamison, Rabih Alammedine, Joseph Mitchell, Sierra Murdoch, James Baldwin, Alexander Chee, Alex Marzano Lesnevich, Carvell Wallace and Chris Feliciano Arnold, and discuss them in depth and with a forensic eye. (We will also look at excerpts from other works.) Through close reading exercises, small and large group discussions, in-class writing exercises, and lectures, we will all come away with a deeper understanding of how essays work -- and how to better write our own. Participants will also have the chance to submit up to 4,000 words for feedback from the instructor. 

Lauren Markham is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and the critically acclaimed A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. Her third book, Immemorial, was published by Transit Books in 2025.