Class Catalog

This asynchronous course features online workbooks, including ten essential templates in Word and Excel to kickstart your writing life, and resources professional writers use to get published.

Instructor: Susan V. Meyers. This course will introduce students to the workshop model focusing on three key elements of fiction: description, conflict, and character.

Instructor: Corinne Manning. This generative workshop examines and explores autofiction—an experimental form of autobiographical writing that considers the container of the story and examines the speaker.

Instructor: Kimberly Lee. This fun and interactive class explores narratives beyond the traditional hero’s journey through their appearance in literature, film, poetry, podcasts and more.

Instructor: Tina Tocco. With optional take-home exercises and in-class writing prompts, students will generate and workshop new work focused on writing for ages 8-12.

Instructor: Liza Birnbaum. In this class, we’ll read work by authors who bring books into their accounts of daily living, looking closely at craft choices that weave literary reflection into lively narration.

Instructor: Leora Fridman. This participant-driven workshop will explore contemporary nonfiction on illness and disability, with extensive opportunities to write into the realities of vulnerable bodies and to offer one another generative feedback. 

Instructor: Tina Tocco. This generative class offers a low-stress, supportive environment for those eager to experiment with fiction writing, with imaginative prompts such as music, sounds, images, and more.

Instructor: Eugenia Toledo, Carolyne Wright. Poets and translators Eugenia Toledo and Carolyne Wright will share translations from several Chilean poets and present poems from Eugenia's award-winning bilingual volume, Map Traces, Blood Traces. 

Instructor: Deborah Woodard. Explore your writing with four Seattle museums—the Frye Art Museum, the National Nordic Museum, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery. 

Instructor: Kaelie Giffel. This class will examine Sara Stridsberg's Valerie, with discussions and prompts utilizing Stridsberg's techniques, such as play-like dialogues, abecedaria, court records, and history to jump-start our work.

Instructor: Corinne Manning, Jay Aquinas Thompson. With discussions and generative prompts, this co-taught class will adopt feminist and queer explorations of George Eliot's Middlemarch. 

Instructor: Holly Day. This class will offer a variety of generative prompts, from basic character formation and development exercises to creating vivid scenes and scenarios for your characters to live and participate in. 

Instructor: Shankar Narayan. In this part-generative, part-analytical course, we'll examine the diverse voices of South Asian bhakti poetry—a centuries-old movement of devotional poetry that finds divinity in the beloved.

Instructor: Peter Mountford. In this generative course, students will read and examine short stories with an eye toward craft and apply those skills in refining two of their own pieces (one short, one long). 

Instructor: Kelly McWilliams, Wendy N. Wagner. With examples from literature and film, students will explore and examine the concept of "beats" in building an outline for a horror novel.

Instructor: Geraldine Woods. This class examines writing techniques that connect reader to writer (point of view, voice), idea to idea (parallelism, sound), emotion to experience (sensory detail, figurative language), and more.

Instructor: Alli Parrett. This class will look at few submission tools, both for short and long works, review examples of cover letters, and discuss the dos and don'ts of submissions. 

Instructor: Susan V. Meyers. This class introduces the art of subtext: those implied messages that give invisible life to the things we say.

Instructor: Grace Bialecki. This course is designed for writers of all genres seeking to create compelling, dimensional characters.

Instructor: Midge Raymond. In this class for beginning and seasoned writers alike, we'll learn through discussions, assignments, and readings the craft elements of character, voice, plot, pacing, structure, and more.

Instructor: Rachel Sobel. In this course, we'll cover classic tough topics in fiction, discussing the freedom and insight we gain from letting ourselves be "bad writers" and exploring aspects of writing which scare us. 

Instructor: Alma García. This class will build upon craft learned in Fiction I, with weekly readings, in-class and take-home writing exercises, class discussions, and workshopping in a supportive environment.

Instructor: Molly Schaeffer. This class will investigate and interrogate the book and its form, exploring the integration of visual art, chapbooks, zines, and more.