How To Never Run Out of Essay Ideas with Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya— July 8

Have a biweekly newsletter that's losing steam? Itching to pitch but fresh out of exciting ideas? This workshop is designed to give you the tools to find inspiration for creative nonfiction even when you think the well is dry (spoiler alert: the well is never dry). Through readings of unconventional essays and prompts designed to help you pull inspiration from unexpected places, I'll give you the tools, confidence, and discipline to keep finding things to meaningfully write about from your everyday life, memories, and environment.

This workshop is designed to give participants the tools to find essay inspiration from unexpected, easily accessed places, whether that's the recesses of their own memories or the objects around them or the natural environment in which they exist or the books on their shelves. I present my "anti-rules" of essay writing, including my favorite: that you don't have to know what an essay is about before you begin writing it. I'll detail useful practices for "scrap collecting" — a process of roughly observing and documenting throughout one's daily life (much more chaotic and generative than traditional journaling!) that can often lead to essays. This workshop is especially fruitful for writers who have to churn out personal writing on a regular basis for a newsletter or similar project or for writers considering starting a newsletter and worried about "not having enough to say." This is a hyper-generative class, by which I mean we will write a LOT, but we'll also read, share, and discuss practical tips for making sure the creative well never runs dry.

I bring knowledge and experience to this workshop from my combined career as a freelance writer pitching personal essays for over a decade as well as half a decade as a magazine editor on the other side of the pitching and essay development process. Throughout the years, I have often had to maintain consistent essay output as part of my literal job, so I couldn't afford to run out of ideas. This workshop is crafted from the various challenges of those experiences and how I eventually overcame them.

What you will learn

• The "anti-rules" of essay writing

• How to develop easy, organic practices for collecting potential essay ideas

• How to answer the question: "is this an essay?"

• How to experiment with form in essay writing

• How to pull inspiration for essays from unexpected places (including fiction!)

• How to NEVER RUN OUT OF ESSAY IDEAS

Course Takeaways

• Early, nascent drafts of SEVERAL essays

• Practical tips and tools for never-ending essay idea generation

• An expansive understand of what essays are and can do

• Take-home revision prompts to build upon the writing done in class

Additional info

If you can't attend this class live, it will be recorded! Students will receive a recording the day after the class, and it will be available for 30 days.

About the Instructor

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle, an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter, and the former managing editor of TriQuarterly.