Online Personal Essay Writing Courses

Banish writer’s block, unearth fresh ideas, and sharpen your storytelling ability with the practice of fast, timed writing.

Take a four-week writing adventure deep into the core of your story, to find the true theme of your personal essay, short story, or short memoir.

Turn your experience into fiction, autobiography, or creative memoir. Bring forward stories with a powerful truth at their core. Instructor Anya Achtenberg.

Go beyond narrow definitions of “journaling” to include visual images and let writing give what is seen a new voice. Surprise yourself.

Gretchen Clark pick axes her way into the volcanic marriage of real life and fiction. Weekly writing with incisive feedback.

For writers of memoir, creative nonfiction and fiction, with some experience. Particularly helpful to writers in the midst of a longer work.

Make science come alive through storytelling. Write about any area of science, nature and the environment or health and medicine.

Fiction or nonfiction? Article, short story, or how-to book? Do you want to write for children, teens, adults? There is a type of writing that is best suited for you, and the discovery process can be an adventure.

Have a grand time with specific physical exercises that honor your health, generate imaginative ideas, explore deeply and make your creative writing entertaining.

Can you translate the movement of a dance into a poem? What happens when you write a story in the form of a multiple-choice quiz? Learn to take your work in rich and unexpected new directions by subverting and blending genre conventions.

Do you collect cookbooks, love to cook, or religiously read anything about food? This course is for you. With award winning writer Jennifer Billock.

Gather material through writing and experimenting with journaling, researching and taking notes to develop into poems or prose works.

Create your blog, brand it, create engaging content and successfully promote posts. Taught by journalist, writer and photographer Jessica Festa.

From branding to search engine optimization and advertising, this course puts bloggers on the path to earning an income through their blog.

Draw inspiration and material from your life experiences or “real life” people you know to craft compelling, publishable personal essays. With author Margo Perin.

Elevate your memoir, travel writing, literary journalism, & lyric and personal essays.

Join us for this insightful four-week “get the writing done” program, give and receive thoughtful comments from your fellow writers and the instructor, and enjoy heaps of encouragement and writing wisdom along the way.

No experience is too small or mundane to serve as a foundation for extraordinary poetry and short fiction.

“Who are you to want to write?” Someone great, that’s who! Politely ask Mr. or Ms. Fear to step aside while you sign up for this fun, freeing and functional adventure.

As a prison volunteer for 20 years, Gloria Kempton has met many anti-heroes. In this course, you’ll receive feedback on your story antagonists.

Explore the literary essay – from the conventional to the experimental, the journalistic to essays in verse – while writing and workshopping your own.

Explore non-traditional and imaginative ways to tell your stories with this ten-week writing course online. Creative nonfiction teacher Gretchen Clark provides detailed feedback on weekly writing assignments that emphasize creative freedom.

For any writer wanting to root writing in vision and vision in the body: for poetry, fiction, essay, memoir & pleasure.

Join Susan in two writing circles each week: intimate spaces for writers to free-write together, saying yes to whatever shows up, followed by group read-arounds. These writing sessions are spontaneous, intimate, freeing, and transformative.

Learn to depart from “what really happened,” and write compelling fiction from your own life experiences.

Expressive writing can be a powerful elixir for what ails you. Learn and practice tools for writing expressively, including two virtual writing circles each week, and come away with a better understanding of how writing can lead toward wellness.