THE NARRATIVE LIFE
Online narrative Nonfiction Courses with Kathryn Aalto
True stories, well told — taught live from Devon to writers on six continents
The Narrative Life is an international school of online narrative nonfiction courses and the poetic form founded and taught by Kathryn Aalto, New York Times bestselling author. Live on Zoom, in small groups, across memoir, nature writing, travel writing, ecopoetry and literary nonfiction — from a first true sentence to a finished book proposal.
Students who began here have signed book contracts, won the £10,000 Nature Chronicles Prize, taken Bradt New Travel Writer of the Year, and been shortlisted for the Fish Memoir Prize. Nearly all of them arrived having never published a word.
Why These narrative Nonfiction Courses Are Different
A bestselling author teaches every session. Not a rotating tutor, not a recorded lecture with a discussion board attached. Kathryn is in the room, live, every time — the author of Writing Wild and The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, teaching from her studio in Devon.
A method, not a mood. Every course is built on Kathryn’s ‘Eight Pillars of Narrative Nonfiction’ — presence, arc, character, dialogue, voice, language, setting and resonance. A framework for turning real life into resonant story, and one writers carry into everything they attempt afterwards.
Handwritten feedback on your pages. Kathryn responds in her own hand, in your margins — syntax and cadence, structure, pacing, and where a piece loses its nerve. Students name this sensitive human touch more often than anything else as the thing that changed their writing.
A genuine progression. Levels 1 through 4 build over terms rather than weeks: something close to an MFA in narrative nonfiction, taken one term at a time, without the fees or the residency, with exposure to the great contemporary writers.
Extraordinary company. From Level 2 onward, guest authors join the room live — Kathleen Jamie, Andrea Wulf, Ross Gay, Camille Dungy, Jon Boden, Elena Passarello, Ed Caesar of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Rush, Diane Ackerman and many more.
What you can study
Narrative Nature Writing. Learn to write the living world with precision and literary craft — observation as a discipline, and the sentence as an instrument.
Memoir, Biography and Profile. Every life an odyssey. How a human being — including yourself — becomes a character on the page.
Nature Poetry and Ecopoetics. From Wordsworth to contemporary ecopoetry, with attention to the musicality of the line and what poetry can do in an imperilled world.
Travel and Place Writing. Writing that goes somewhere, and knows why.
The Art of Narrative Nonfiction. The foundational course: structure, scene, character, voice, research.
Masterclasses and The Footpath. Single two-hour classes, or a full week of seven, taken alone or as a complete arc.
Book Proposal and Mentoring. One-to-one editorial work, and the course that ends with forty agent-ready pages.
Who teaches you
Kathryn Aalto is a New York Times bestselling author, garden historian, landscape designer, and a master teacher of narrative nonfiction with more than thirty years in the classroom.
She holds master’s degrees in Garden History and Creative Nonfiction, took her English degree at Berkeley, and has taught critical thinking at university level.
That combination is rare, and it changes the workshop. A draft is read for whether the sentence lands — and for whether the hedgerow is a hedgerow, how that valley was cut, why that plant grows on that slope and not the one opposite. Landscape has a history. Writing about it without knowing that history produces prose that gestures instead of prose that knows.
An experienced public speaker, she has spoken at more than two hundred venues across Britain and North America, including Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and the New York Public Library, and is represented for events by Chartwell Speakers, New York.
“She has an unparalleled knowledge of nature and landscape writing that she wears lightly without intimidating students.”
James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life
“Kathryn Aalto is a world-class teacher. I had thirty years’ experience as a journalist and copywriter, but I was a novice in narrative nonfiction. Kathryn taught me how to write.”
Gary F., Rutland, England
An International Room
Writers join from the United States, Canada, the UK, Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond. Most courses offer a morning or evening UK slot, so American students can take the evening class at 1:00 pm Eastern and 10:00 am Pacific. Every session is live; recordings go to everyone.
Discussion runs on the Harkness method — conversation-led, everyone contributing, nobody lectured at. Listening well is part of the training, not a by-product of it.
Begin
You do not need experience. Most people arrive with nothing but a true story they need to tell and no idea yet how to tell it.
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