Classes

What’s the best way to try to sell a memoir to an agent or editor? Can you do so on proposal, or should your book be finished first? To what extent must you follow agents’ and publishing house’s submission guidelines, and what are the best ways to get the attention of the agent and editor you want to work with? In this hour-long class, literary agent Alia Hanna Habib will demystify the sometimes-vexing process of shopping your memoir. 

Participants will walk away with clarity about:

• Whether their project is right for a proposal
• The non-negotiables agents and editors look for
• How memoir proposals differ from other nonfiction proposals
• Industry expectations around platform, story stakes, and market potential

If you’ve ever wondered whether a proposal is your best route—or felt overwhelmed by the mystery of crafting one—this session will give you a grounded, realistic, and empowering path forward.

We write creative nonfiction, in large part, to find the deeper meaning of our narratives. In this class, you’ll be treated to the brilliant teaching of Sue William Silverman, who will walk you through three techniques—scene, summary, and reflection—to show how these literary elements structure time and help turn raw experience into successful essays and memoirs.

As a celebrated memoirist (author of Love Sick, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, and How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences) and award-winning teacher of creative nonfiction, Sue brings decades of insight into how stories reveal themselves over time. In this class, students will get explicit craft lessons on how to take the epiphanies that comprise our stories and make them resonate with readers.

What if the real work of memoir isn’t shaping the story, but listening for it? In this reflective and grounding class designed for memoirists, Mark Nepo shares insights from a lifetime of storytelling, spiritual inquiry, and lived experience to help writers uncover the deeper narrative running through their lives. Memoirists will explore how attention, curiosity, and honesty transform memory into meaning, and how our individual stories connect us to one another. This class is for writers ready to move beyond events and into the heart of what their lives have been teaching them all along.

Mark Nepo is a poet and spiritual teacher, and author of 27 books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening.

In this practical, author-centered class, marketing expert and publicist Fauzia Burke demystifies book marketing and shows memoirists how to promote their work with clarity, confidence, and authenticity. She specializes in helping writers build visibility without compromising. From understanding your audience and platform to leveraging media, social channels, and long-term brand thinking, Fauzia will help you understand what marketing even is, but also how, as a memoirist, you can best use its various tools to your advantage (pre- or post-publication).

Fauzia Burke is a book marketing expert, author, and pioneer in online book publicity. She is the founder and president of FSB Associates, one of the first firms to specialize in internet publicity for authors when it launched in 1995. 

There's a term that floats around in conversations about nonfiction, especially about personal narrative: the “give a shit” factor. We've all got a story to tell, so why should the reader give a shit about ours? The question isn't whether we should tell that story, but how; it's not whether a given story matters, but how skillfully we take our readers on a journey that matters to them and sheds light on things that matter to the larger world. 

Join Marya Hornbacher, award-winning journalist, essayist, novelist, poet, and the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including the international bestsellers Wasted and Madness, for your own discovery journey to figure out what your own “give a shit” factor is and how to convey that to readers so they want to pick up your book and keep reading.

One of the fastest ways to lose a memoir reader is to lose them in time. In this craft-focused class, Brooke Warner teaches memoirists how to manage narrative time so readers always know where they are—and stay with you. Writers will learn the value of time markers and how to use scene-tethering over specific dates to move the reader along in their story. This class will cover time markers, transitions, and grounding details to confidently through the past, and will address why to avoid jumping confusingly into the present. This class focuses on why it’s so vital to the reading experience to stay anchored in time regardless of your story’s structure.

Brooke Warner is a cofounder of Memoir Nation and the publisher of She Writes Press. She is a memoir coach, author, TEDx speaker, and weekly podcaster. She publishes a weekly newsletter, Writerly Things, on Substack.

Writing with vulnerability is more important than any craft tool because being vulnerable is how we connect with others, so writers who risk vulnerability tend to write stories that are the most compelling.

A good story occurs when an author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability and genuinely opens his or her soul in search of truths that otherwise go untold.

Join Grant Faulkner and learn about what happens when you share the most difficult parts of your story in service of deeper truths.

Grant Faulkner is a cofounder of Memoir Nation, co-founder of the literary journal 100 Word Story, and the co-host of the Memoir Nation podcast. Grant is the author ofThe Art of Brevity and Pep Talks for Writers, as well as collections of fiction such as Fissures and All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. He publishes the weekly newsletter Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.

Details coming soon.

Exclusive Class - Date Coming Soon

Maggie Smith invites memoir writers to break free from linear narratives and traditional structures in order to find the shape that best serves their story and their truth. Known for her innovative use of white space, fragmentation, and poetic language in her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Smith encourages writers to trust intuition over chronology. This class explores how form itself can become a vessel for meaning—mirroring memory, emotion, and the nonlinear ways we experience life.

Theme holds your story together. Theme is a reader’s North Star. Praised for his depth and clarity in his memoir, Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace teaches how to identify and deepen the central themes that gives your memoir its emotional spine—threads that bind disparate moments into a narrative whole. This class helps writers shape stories in a way that contains the writing to a particular issue or subject while still being expansive and universal. Writers will leave with a clearer sense of what their story is truly about—and why that matters.

This class is for anyone who has ever felt misunderstood, misrepresented, or silenced. Amanda Knox, author of Free: My Search for Meaning, covers how to confront external narratives—whether they come from family, community, media, or culture—while cultivating an internal compass strong enough to withstand scrutiny and doubt. Participants will leave with a renewed commitment to the power of story, and a dose of encouragement and courage to keep telling it.

Confront the complex and often uncomfortable process of rendering the self on the page—not as a static identity, but as a dynamic, evolving character. Drawing from her own fearless approach to truth-telling, Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down, guides writers through techniques that move beyond confession and toward deep narrative insight. This class is for writers ready to interrogate their own roles in the stories they tell, and to write with the kind of vulnerability that creates resonance and connection.

Join Susan Ito for a discussion about all the forms your story might take before it becomes a memoir that’s ready to publish. Before Susan published her memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, it was a screenplay and a novel. Many writers find comfort in finding other ways to tell their story—whether to distance themselves from the fallout, or because the truth is something that needs to be waded into.

Immerse yourself in the visceral power of sensory detail to breathe energy and vitality into your story with a master of the senses. Renowned for her lush, evocative prose, Fitch (author of White Oleander), teaches how to tap into sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to create scenes that are not just remembered but felt.This class will help writers move beyond summary into embodiment—infusing their narratives with texture, atmosphere, and emotional depth. Through close reading and generative exercises, participants will learn to write memoir that resonates in the body as much as the mind.