Saturday, October 10th & Saturday, October 17th, 2026 (this is a two-session class)

10:00-12:15 PST / 11:00 - 1:15 MST / 12:00 - 2:15 CST / 1:00-2:30 EST both days

The beginning stages of a writing project can feel like an ecstatic mess: all possibility and promise. When I started my new book, Immemorial, I was working on pure instinct and a sense that the various stories, research interests and ethical pursuits that preoccupied me might hang together in a book. That was a nice few months. But ultimately I had to shape all this material into something cohesive. For it to be a book, there needed to be some structure that held it all together and allowed the reader to move forward with clarity and ease. The same had been true for my previous book, A Map of Future Ruins, and the same vexing drama is playing out yet again as I work my way toward finishing Pageant, my new historical novel. And truth be told, structure is a hurts-so-good challenge even in my longform journalism work. It turns out that ordering the mess is often the hardest work there is — and yet sorting out structure helps us better understand the thing we’re making, and what it needs from us. 

In this class, which will meet twice, we’ll be looking at various strategies and methods to help us develop a structure for our long form prose projects (be they books, long essays, novels, or something else). How do we order and organize our ideas? How do we figure out how various elements contained in the text–research, reporting, memoir and personal narrative, expository writing–  fit together? How do we balance story and idea, and create a structure that moves the reader forward? How do we figure out a project’s shape? 

This class is appropriate for anyone working on a long, ambitious prose project (fiction or nonfiction) at any stage–and will be particularly useful for folks working on books that don’t lend themselves to linear structures or clear narrative arcs (but hey, I wrote a narrative book too - The Far Away Brothers- and that had its own structural challenges and opportunities!) The two 2.5 hour sessions will include a combination of lectures, in-class writing and mapping activities, small group conversations and Q&A, with some optional exercises to undertake in the week between.  

Recordings will be made available after the class. 

Limited scholarships are available for folks in need.

Signup Here

Exploring the Essay is a 6-week-long workshop with award winning writer and researcher Lauren Markham. The class will take place on Zoom on Mondays from September 28 until November 2, 2026 from 5 to 7 p.m. PST. Each participant will be able to submit one (1) piece of writing of up to 4000 words and receive written feedback from Lauren Markham.

The essay: that opulent and shape shifting form that attempts to teach, convince and move the reader into a new way of seeing. The essay, as we know it, encompasses everything from the lyric essay, reportage, personal narrative, borrowed forms (aka "the hermit crab" essay), and so many others in between. This is a class dedicated to exploring the essay, itself an exploratory creature that weaves experience, fact, query and observation. Together, we'll investigate how an essay takes shape from material off the page, how it is constructed on the page, how it weaves meaning, and how it excites or moves a reader to keep on, well, reading. Each week, we'll read two essays from writers like Leslie Jamison, Rabih Alameddine, Joseph Mitchell, Sierra Murdoch, James Baldwin, Alexander Chee, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Carvell Wallace and Chris Feliciano Arnold, and discuss them in depth and with a forensic eye. (We will also look at excerpts from other works.) Through close reading exercises, small and large group discussions, in-class writing exercises, and lectures, we will all come away with a deeper understanding of how essays work -- and how to better write our own. Participants will also have the chance to submit up to 4,000 words for feedback from the instructor. 

Signup Here