85 Best Nonfiction Creative Writing Classes in 2024

Through a series of engaging writing exercises, we will mine our experiences and imagination for material and bring what we find to life on the page, constructing characters and settings, shaping vivid dialogue, creating imagery, and exploring the nuances of voice.

In this fun, intensive class, over the course of six weeks, writers will produce six short essays (between 500 and 1,000 words each). Each week we will look at model essays, and students will respond to prompts based on the works we have read.

Learn how to identify several pivotal events of your life and shape one of them into a work of fiction or non-fiction. Following a tried-and-true formula, you will learn how to identify, begin, and structure an autobiographical story, whether fiction or non-fiction.

Learn how to write proposals to request grants from funders. This workshop will cover how to research prospective funders, the elements of a good proposal, and how to approach funders.

Join us to explore the elements of memoir in small manageable bites. We’ll read and discuss Micro Memoirs, also called Flash Memoir, (50-250 words) to inspire your own writing and enhance your storytelling skills.

Poems can capture the most meaningful moments of your life and evoke their essence in a reader. In this course you’ll begin to learn how to focus on such moments and present them so they illustrate you in your life and imply its arc.

Each writer completing the four-day intensive will come away with a captivating hook, a serviceable proposal, a deeper understanding of publishing houses, editors and agents; a template for navigating the submission manuscript process; and connections to a broader writing community.

We’re going above and beyond the experience of spending the day writing at a café—enjoy complimentary coffee, tea and water, chat with local creatives and maybe even find a new writing partner and friend!

Put simply, life experience, combined with a desire to write, qualifies you to tell your own story. Our experiences shape us and inform our world view, and nobody navigates life without struggle. Our personal circumstances, our observations of the world, and our personalities make us all unique individuals, and therefore the narratives of our lives are just as unique.

Our lives are rich with stories passed on from families and friends. How do you decide what's material for a short story or a novel that anyone outside your family will want to read? In this generative writing intensive, we'll engage in writing exercises that help us explore this question.

Anyone else have scraps of writing just sitting in the Google drive or an overstuffed notebook? What do you do with them all? These pieces do all have something in common; you wrote them and you like them, so we are going to have an old fashioned quilting bee.

In this three-hour workshop, we will approach personal essay through memories and experiences with food. In these essays, you can explore your relationship with particular people or with a gathering or event in your life. We will practice several techniques for connecting with food to craft a satisfying personal essay.