37 Best Memoir Creative Writing Classes in 2024

Do you have a pile of abandoned story drafts or poems? One quarter of a memoir or novel manuscript that you're still not sure what to do with? In this generative class, we'll act as gardeners, using those old drafts as compost to create fertile ground for new pieces.

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 2-hour course, we’ll borrow inspirations from poetic forms, genre conventions such as time limited devices, and learn six common traditional and unconventional story structures by weighing the risks and rewards of each form.

Led by Sydney writer Elizabeth Gascoigne Rosa, this one-day workshop teaches crafting short stories from life experiences. Ideal for beginners and those with some experience in creative writing, it encourages participants to explore themes like family, nature, and passion, transforming these into creative nonfiction. Scheduled for April 6, 2024, the workshop is a six-hour session.

Held mostly outdoors at Shelby Bottoms, this workshop combines naturalist and forest bathing techniques to enhance observation skills. Participants will engage in creative writing exercises to translate these immersive observations into vivid written descriptions.

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.

In this writing course, we will discuss some non-fiction literary forms, such as memoir, essays, creative non-fiction and theme-driven autobiographical work and the differences between them, in helping situate the participant’s own work within this genre.

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.

This course has a very clear mission: to get you started on your memoir. Through a series of targeted writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of memoir writing: mining for material, constructing settings, finding emotional stakes and turning points, and looking for connecting threads to identify your overarching theme.

This course has a very clear mission: to get you started on your memoir. Through a series of targeted writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of memoir writing: mining for material, constructing settings, shaping vivid dialogue, and honing your voice.

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.