Memoir and Personal Essay
Manuscript Review
Individual and Group mentoring
I offer mentoring and manuscript consultation to individuals, and sometimes to small group classes (I am teaching a class at The Center for Fiction from late March to early May, 2024. Click here for more information). I offer both global structuring advice and line editing and help you to investigate and locate the thread of the deeper story you need to tell. Mentoring involves reading suggestions, prompts and writing exercises. If you are curious about working with me, get in touch via the Contact form for rates and further information.
Memoir is not your autobiography, or whole life: it is the exploration of a particular thread, or theme. You will learn to extract the story that you want to tell from the raw material of your life. For example, in This Boy’s Life Tobias Wolff writes about those years he spent with an abusive stepfather. In his second memoir, In Pharoah’s Army, he describes his time as a soldier in Vietnam. There is no crossover of material here. There is in life, but in memoir or personal essay we separate out these threads in order to better tell a specific story.
With My Guidance You wiLl learn how to
find the through-line, or story spine, as well as the lead for your project.
pace your story and polish your narrative arc.
use time, and move between present and past in a convincing way without confusing the reader.
find your narrative voice, which is a crafted version of you “pulled from the raw material of a life” (V. Gornick, The Situation and the Story).
create authentic scenes, and “glides” (glides are the informative linking material between scenes).
“show” and when to “tell”. Both are necessary.
pace your story, create authentic dialogue and improve your characterisation.
research the times you lived in, interview relatives and relations, read in ways that deepen your project in terms of historical and cultural contexts.
how to look at psychological and ethical challenges regarding how to include other people’s stories while expressing your own truth.
I have line edited and provided global story ideas on novels, personal essays, memoir and poetry, and taught in universities and in the community. I’ve worked as an editor of three literary journals, and studied with David Lipsky (Of Course You End Up Being Yourself) and Lawrence Weschler (New Yorker writer and author of many nonfiction books) and later with Leigh Stein (Land of Enchantment). I also created and organised a reading series for three years in Brooklyn, NY, with 50 writers per year, 150 in total, where my wife and I as curators created and sustained literary community.
Testimonials
“I have taken many memoir classes, but David's class was special. I started learning weeks before it even started because of the materials that David chose to share with us. Once class started, he made us comfortable as a group right away. As adult students with busy schedules, we didn't feel pressure to complete every assignment or read every book, but we did anyway. David has a gentle and encouraging manner. We read our work to each other and David was complimentary while also pointing out places in our work where it could be enriched. He read our work carefully and gave us structural and line edits on two chapters, helping me to solve problems that I had been struggling with for weeks. For anyone who isn't sure what the thruline of their story is, I recommend working with David to find it and help it grow. I am so grateful to him for helping shepherd my work along with such skill and grace.”—Kathryn Stam, PhD (student from The Center for Fiction).
David is a great teacher, he engaged so deeply with our individual work and helped me to see what was working in my pieces and gave great advice for what to do with it next. His vast knowledge of literature meant that he would regularly reference other works that became points of inspiration and helped me to expand my own thinking. —Kajal Odedra, author of Do Something: Activism for Everyone and Hair/Power: Essays on Control and Freedom.
“David edited my travel memoir, chapter by chapter, over the course of about nine months. Just as an expecting parent might look forward to periodic ultrasound appointments, I always anticipated receiving David's enlightening, encouraging, and entertaining comments. These included thorough line edits with a poet's sharp eye for language, and probing structural insights that revealed his broad and deep study of the art of the memoir. Looking back at David's comments on the first excerpt I sent him, I can see how prescient they were. He pointed out what was working best, what I should "lean into"; a year later, a literary scout for a major publisher (whom David put me in touch with) identified those same qualities as among the memoir's strongest elements. David also identified structural issues, including the advice, "you might need an overarching preamble, but you might not find it until you finish the whole thing." Six months later, just such a prelude came to me; I doubt it would have had that mental seed never been planted. In short, it was a great pleasure working with David, and extremely helpful in developing my memoir.” —Richard Prins, recently published in Best American Essays 2024, poet, essayist and literary translator.
I have so much gratitude to David for this class! This was my first time doing anything of the sort in terms of sharing my work, and David created the safest, most supportive, and encouraging space to do so, and I will always remember this. David also provided the most thoughtful and detailed feedback on my pieces that I can apply to lots of other writing. I recommend David and his workshops most highly! —Julia Gamolina, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Madame Architect.
“I am very grateful for David’s encouragement to explore aspects of the specific through line of my memoir project. It’s opened up a lot for me and helped in many ways!” —Heather Harrigan (student from The Center for Fiction).
“Thank you again for leading a wonderful workshop! It was exactly what I needed to get me going on my memoir and I'll draw on the lessons I learned as I continue to work on it.” —Christine Clay (student from The Center for Fiction).
“I just finished a memoir class taught by David and was impressed with how he was able to bridge the distance between the many different types of projects the twelve of us were starting, finishing, preparing for submission and in one case, publishing. I am writing a biography of a family member, not actually a memoir, but I learned much about creating scenes, linking them with context material and using time in telling a story. This was due to his graceful manner and encouraging feedback. I would recommend him to anyone concerned with those issues if their writing aims to be direct and honest. His careful notes handed out after class never failed to jog my memory and allowed me to stay focused during class discussions. The class was a great stimulation to my productivity— two new chapters and four revisions in eight weeks!” —Dorothy Shipps (student from The Center for Fiction).
David McLoghlin is an award-winning poet and writer who also happens to be as sharp an editor as you could hope to find. A wordsmith who truly enjoys helping others see their own work through to completion, McLoghlin excels at line editing, with a zeal for helping clients get every word, sentence and comma perfect. Yet he is also a master at figuring out big, structural questions. He is super pleasant to work with, but he is relentless when it comes guiding a project to perfection. You couldn't ask for a better companion when trying to get your work to the next level. —Scott Morris, author.
More About My Creative Nonfiction Credentials
I’ve recently been commissioned by Golfer’s Journal to write a piece about playing my grandfather Eddie Hackett’s design, Connemara Golf Links. This is part of a book-length journey into Irish golf, where I, as a complete novice, play all of my grandfather’s courses, who is widely considered “the Father of Irish Gold Design.“ I have received a major Literature Bursary for memoir from The Arts Council (Ireland), and published personal essays, short stories and memoir extracts in a Black Lawrence Press anthology, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, New Hibernia Review and Cyphers. An essay on being mentored by poet Sharon Olds is forthcoming in This Glistening Verb (University of Michigan Press) as part of their “Under Discussion” series, as is an essay on Irish writer Philip Casey, which has been pubished in anthology edited by Eamonn Wall, Katie Donovan and Mick Considine (Distant Summers: Remembering Philip Casey, Arlen House, January 2024).