Classes

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 will teach 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 will help 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.

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, will guide 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.

In this one-hour session, Amanda Knox, author of two memoirs, including the recent bestseller, Free, will draw from her own extraordinary lived experience and her ongoing creative work as a writer, podcaster, and advocate to guide participants into the heart of narrative power: how stories are formed, how they get taken away, and how we reclaim them with voice, agency, and craft.

This one-hour class is for anyone who has ever felt misunderstood, misrepresented, or silenced. Amanda will cover 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.

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. This class will explore 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.

Exclusive Class - Date Coming Soon

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.

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.