Creating Persona in Memoir and Personal Essays

Asserting the Self: Resources on Persona in Personal Essay and Memoir

Welcome to the resource companion for my craft lecture "Asserting the Self: Developing Persona in Memoir or Personal Essay." This page gathers some of my favorite texts, essays, and books that explore or exemplify the art of creating a rich, nuanced persona on the page. Whether you're writing memoir, personal essay, or even fiction, these resources will help you understand how voice, tone, structure, and stylistic choices construct a "self made of words."

Talk notes are first. Links to resources will be below the craft talk notes.

An aside: I'm blown away by the work the class produced during our very short writing prompt time. Please. All of you: Keep writing and never stop. I had so much fun with you and I have nothing but the highest hopes for your writing.

Talk notes:

If you're a writer exploring voice, tone, or self-representation on the page, this distilled version of the live lecture is for you. Use it alongside the resource links and essays provided to deepen your understanding of persona, whether you write memoir, personal essay, or fiction.

What Is Persona?

Persona comes from the Latin for "mask." In memoir and personal essay, it's not the raw self-but a version of the self created with language. According to Carl Klaus, persona is "an illusion of presence, a character created from words." It is a curated self, not a fictional one, shaped through craft choices like tone, diction, and structure.

You can't not have a persona-so why not create it on purpose?

Memoir vs. Personal Essay

Memoir: A sustained narrative about a relationship, period, or theme in a writer's life. It shows how the self evolves over time.

Personal Essay: A shorter, focused inquiry into a thought, moment, or question. It shows how the mind works in the moment.

A great personal essay often doesn't deliver answers, but gives us a front-row seat to a mind in motion.

Voice vs. Tone

• Voice is the writer's unique fingerprint across multiple works.

• Tone is the mood or attitude in a specific piece. It shifts depending on subject, audience, and intent.

Examples of tonal decisions:

• Humorous vs. Reverent

• Detached vs. Intimate

• Playful vs. Analytical

Point of View (POV)

• First person (I): Intimate, direct, default POV for memoir.

• Second person (you): Builds a bridge or creates distance. Tricky but powerful.

• Third person (she/he/they): Adds objectivity or detachment-often used to write about trauma.

Colson Whitehead masterfully blends first, second, and third person in City Limits, creating a layered persona that invites the reader in.

How Persona Is Built

Through your choices:

• Word choice (big words, slang, sentence length)

• Syntax and rhythm

• Humor, humility, contradiction

• Emotional distance or vulnerability

• Structure (linear vs. fragmented)

Think of persona as the host of the party: What kind of experience are you curating for your reader?

Sample Writing Prompts

1. Write a self-portrait in an ordinary moment. Don't explain-show your thinking and presence.

2. Rewrite the same moment in a different tone (funny, bitter, dreamy).

3. Change POV: write it in third person or second. What happens?

4. Ask: "Who do I want the reader to meet?" and shape the piece accordingly.

Red Flags of a Weak Persona

• Reads like a journal entry, not a crafted experience

• Presents the self as fixed, heroic, or flawless

• Tells instead of reflects

• Forgets the reader (memoir is not therapy-it's art)

One Final Thought

An essay isn't just about what happened. It's about what you make of what happened.

Let your readers watch you think, change, contradict, or revise your position mid-stream. Invite them in-not just to your life, but to your mind.

Bonus Track: Fiction Writers & Implied Author

The implied author, a concept from Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, is the version of the author the reader infers from the text. Fiction writers also make persona-like decisions. Your narrator's attitude, structure, and tone shape the reader's experience of you-even in fiction.

Think of persona and the implied author as cousins. They both ask: What does the reader believe about the person telling this story?

Foundational Readings on Persona

Carl Klaus:

• A Self Made of Words Amazon link

• The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay Amazon link

Klaus's work deeply informs how we think about persona not as the "real" self, but as a constructed narrator -- a self made out of choices.

Michel de Montaigne:

• Essais Free at Project Gutenberg.

• "Thought as Style: Montaigne's Essays" (3AM Magazine)

Montaigne's genius was not just in what he said, but in how he showed himself thinking. He invented the essay form by letting the reader into the wandering, self-questioning, intimate space of his own mind.

Essays That Exemplify Strong Persona

"Arkansas Chicken Apocalypse" by Michah Dean Hicks
Brevity Magazine link

This essay blends humor, chaos, and reflection to deliver a persona that is at once bewildered and strangely philosophical. He has a retrospective viewpoint that also manages to capture the feelings a child might have without slipping into a child's narrative tone. I think this persona is underrated brilliance executed within a very short essay. The tone is dry but specific, using concrete detail to create a self that feels authentic and self-aware.

"Strong Men" by Hope Edelman
Brevity Magazine link

A model of layered persona work, Edelman constructs herself as vulnerable, grateful, flawed, and observant. Pay attention to how she introduces character through tone and structure. This essay is a lovely demonstration of how authorial persona can be crafted by writing about other characters.

“The Way We Live Now” by Colson Whitehead, also called “City Limits” sometimes. I think there are two versions- a pre- and a post-9-11 version.

City Limits

A word about Colson Whitehead: This guy is one of my favorite modern writers. I tweeted him once, and he tweeted me back, and I walked on clouds for a week and kept revisiting the tweet. This essay is a masterclass in point of view, Whitehead uses first, second, and third person to move between collective experience and individual reflection, forming a choral persona that embodies the city itself. He also writes exceptional fiction, and I recommend all writers trying to improve their craft to read all his work. Sag Harbor is a good starting point.

“Here is New York” by E.B. White
Essay PDF

A word about E.B.White: White's persona is observant, modest, specific, and deeply humane -- a voice that feels both familiar and quietly authoritative. I worry that people are too quick to put him in the “dead white guy,” but I believe essayists and aspiring essayists should study his work. You may have read some of his work as a kid with Charlotte’s Web. He’s one of my favorite writers because much of his work is anchored in observation, not tension. His tension is subtle and often comes from a feeling of loss or passage of time. He’s a writer after my own heart. His persona is curious, gentle, and humble.

You don’t need TikTok “going off” level of drama to write essays that matter. You don't need the trauma porn.

“Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin.

I misunderstood Lyric's question the other day and when she asked about examples of heroic memoir and she meant in the negative way, the uninspired or more shallow way, I mistakenly thought she was asking about true heroic memoir persona, which does exist. This essay of Baldwin's is always at the top of the list for me so I blurted it out, though this essay was already on my resource list. Anyway, Baldwin’s essays operate on a different frequency -- full of emotional truth and moral complexity. In “Notes of a Native Son,” he reflects on the death of his father and the Harlem riot of 1943 with precision, sorrow, and fierce intellect. His persona is forged in tension: between love and rage, justice and grief. Baldwin doesn’t rely on traditional conflict. He lets language and thought carry the emotional weight, modeling how to reveal a mind in motion.

"I Cannot Explain My Fear" by A. Papyta Bucak -- a good example on how persona can be created with structure...this is fragmented in structure but very specific in language. It's not a cohesive narrative. It's a list, but we get an idea of who she is, while also being simultaneously nudged into thinking about our own experience with fear. Her fragmentation mirrors the nonlinear way fear operates in the mind.

"Why I Write" by Joan Didion. Older essay, but she's doing stuff in there that I think is deliberately contradictory which is always fun for the reader.

Craft Essays on Persona

I Craft, Therefore I Am - by Micah Bay Gault. If you know of any others, let me know and I'll add them to this list.

Recommended Books Featuring Distinctive Persona

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Amazon link, Hub City
  Didion's cool, precise voice renders grief with surgical clarity. Her persona is detached but emotionally exposed, giving the reader a striking sense of her mind navigating the unthinkable.

• The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead Free PDF
  Expands on the linked essay, offering a lyrical, polyphonic portrait of the city.

• Intoxicated By My Illness by Anatole Broyard Free PDF

Suggested Exercises (from the Workshop)

• Write a self-portrait during an ordinary or extraordinary moment. Focus not on the plot, but on how you reveal your inner life.

• Recast the same story using a different tone (humorous, reverent, skeptical) and notice how your persona shifts.

• Try switching from first to second person to examine emotional distance or intimacy. Try third person and see what you can pull out of it and reuse.

A Tiptoey Traipse through Implied Author for Fiction Writers

Implied author is one of my favorite things to think about and study. IT would have been quirky to talk about it during a nonfiction craft talk today, but I’ve written papers about it and I use what I learned in my own work, and I think it's valuable for writers to study.

I highly recommend reading The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth.
Cute Video Summary
The Book

Final Thought

A good essay tells a story. An excellent essay shows how the writer thinks.
Persona is not a mask you hide behind -- it's a voice you craft to invite the reader in.

For more post-class resources or to get in touch, visit my Substack, The Whistle Tree Project, or email me at thewhistletreeproject@gmail.com