Some of you may recall the controversial essay published in February about an MFA instructor who left teaching, then felt free to say what he really thought of his students. It is full of half-truths and a few moments of insight, but those moments of insight don’t really make up for the rest of it. (God help the new or inexperienced writer who tries to differentiate the half-truths from the insight.)
Contrast that piece with this wonderful meditation by Lisa Gornick, “An Analyst Teaches the Personal Essay,” in the latest bulletin from Glimmer Train. Gornick was asked to teach a personal essay course because of her background as a psychoanalyst. She says:
We all yearn to learn from our lives so we do not stumble like Sisyphus up the same hill over and over but, instead, discover the art of living well. For those interested in the therapy situation or the personal essay as a means to this end, there are pages to be borrowed from one another. The personal essay can provide an artful account of earned insight often more useful than tomes of session transcripts or the bastardized synopses of years of therapeutic work. Conversely, for the writer, the therapy situation can provide a road map for the diversions into defensiveness and self-deception, the way we fight self-knowledge as we seek it.
Read the full essay by Lisa Gornick.
For more from Glimmer Train:
- The Fire and the Snow by Jennifer Tseng
- The Writometer by Clare Thompson-Ostrander
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
