Two Courses. One Destination. Your Book in the World.
The Art of Narrative Nonfiction and Writing Your Nonfiction Book Proposal are now open for registration — and together, they offer an affordable alternative to an MFA in creative nonfiction.
There is a particular moment in a writer’s life that is equal parts terrifying and exhilarating: the moment you realise that the story you have been carrying — the one that wakes you at three in the morning, that surfaces unbidden in the middle of ordinary Tuesdays, that refuses, with quiet stubbornness, to be ignored — is actually a book.
What happens next is where most writers stall. Not for lack of talent. Not for lack of material. But for lack of the right tools, the right guidance, and the right community in which to do the work.
This summer and autumn, two courses are open for registration that together form one of the most complete pathways into published narrative nonfiction available anywhere — online or otherwise.
The Art of Narrative Nonfiction teaches you how to write true stories at the highest level of literary craft. Writing Your Nonfiction Book Proposal teaches you how to take that writing into the world and put it in front of the agents and editors who can make it a book. One course builds the house. The other opens the door.
The Art of Narrative Nonfiction: Mastering the Craft
There is a particular kind of writing that sits at the intersection of journalism and literature, memoir and reportage, personal essay and cultural criticism. It goes by many names — narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction — but it does one thing better than any other form: it tells true stories so well that readers forget they are reading nonfiction at all.
It is also the most teachable form of serious writing there is. And this course teaches it completely.
Led by Kathryn Aalto — New York Times bestselling author, historian, and one of the most sought-after teachers of narrative nonfiction and memoir writing in the UK and US today — The Art of Narrative Nonfiction is a live, online creative writing course that takes you from the raw material of your experience to the disciplined, luminous craft of a writer who knows exactly what they are doing and why.
Over the course of the term, you will learn the Eight Pillars of Narrative Nonfiction — presence, arc, character, dialogue, voice, language, setting, and resonance — as an integrated system you can apply to any true story you want to tell. You will learn how to build scenes that pull readers forward, how to move through time in a way that honours how memory actually works, how to develop a voice that is unmistakably yours, how to research with depth and weave that research into narrative without interrupting its flow, and how to write endings that earn their weight.
This is not a course about finding your muse. It is a course about mastering a craft — the craft that, in an era of algorithmic content and AI-generated text, matters more than ever. Narrative nonfiction depends on human experience: on presence, on witness, on the irreducible accumulation of a life actually lived. These stories cannot be scraped, summoned, or hallucinated. They must be witnessed, felt, and told by someone who was actually there.
That someone is you. This course shows you how.
The course is capped at sixteen participants — small enough for every writer to receive genuine individual attention, large enough to create a real and lasting writing community. Sessions are live, interactive, and conducted via Zoom, which means you can join from anywhere in the world. All you need is a reliable internet connection and a story you have been meaning to tell.
Writing Your Nonfiction Book Proposal: Taking Your Work Into the World
You have the story. You have, perhaps, the early pages. Now comes the question that separates writers who dream about publication from writers who achieve it: how do you convince a publisher that your book deserves to exist — before you have even finished writing it?
The answer is a book proposal. And writing one well is itself a craft.
Writing Your Nonfiction Book Proposal is an immersive, step-by-step course that walks you through the creation of a complete, polished, submission-ready proposal — the 30 to 40 pages of persuasive, impeccably structured writing that agents and acquisitions editors use to decide whether to read further, request a full manuscript, and ultimately offer a deal.
Think of a proposal as the business plan for your book — your literary pitch deck, your blueprint, your considered and confident argument for why this book needs to exist, why you are the person to write it, where it belongs in the current marketplace, and why it will find its readers. A strong proposal includes a compelling overview, chapter summaries that communicate scope, tone, and arc, a competitive titles analysis, an author platform section, and a polished sample chapter. It is, in short, the document that persuades a publisher to buy your book before the book is finished. Strategy meets sorcery.
Taught by Kathryn Aalto — who brings thirty years of experience and the kind of publishing-level feedback you would normally expect only from an in-house editorial relationship — this course gives you not only the structure and language of a professional proposal, but the insider understanding of how agents and acquisitions editors actually think. What makes them lean forward. What makes them reach for the phone. What makes them say yes.
The course meets every other week for two hours — a rhythm designed for writers whose lives are full and whose creativity needs room to breathe — and moves section by section through the proposal, with lectures, workshopping, peer critique, and Kathryn’s detailed handwritten feedback at every stage. By the time the course ends, you will have a complete, submission-ready proposal and the professional confidence to pitch with intention.
This course is for first-time authors seeking traditional publication, for experienced writers moving into long-form nonfiction, and for anyone who has a book idea they believe in and needs the structure, clarity, and expert guidance to bring it into the world.
The Question of Cost: MFA, MA, or a Different Path Entirely?
For the right writer, at the right stage of their career, a Master of Fine Arts or an MA in Creative Writing is a serious and valuable investment. An MFA offers time — two or three years of sustained, protected creative space. It offers community — a cohort of fellow writers working at similar levels of ambition. It offers the credential, which matters in certain professional contexts, particularly for writers who intend to teach at university level. For writers who are genuinely uncertain about their genre, or who want a broad literary education across fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, a postgraduate degree in creative writing can be exactly the right choice.
But it is worth being clear-eyed about what it costs. A Master of Fine Arts at a US university typically runs between $30,000 and $70,000 in tuition — and can exceed $100,000 at private institutions when living costs are factored in. In the UK, an MA in Creative Writing at a reputable university currently costs between £9,000 and £18,000 for a single year of study. These programmes are broad by design: they cover multiple genres, require academic coursework alongside creative work, and culminate in a thesis or portfolio that may or may not be the book you actually want to write.
For writers who already know that narrative nonfiction — memoir, personal essay, nature writing, travel writing, literary journalism, cultural criticism — is their form, this breadth is not always a strength. If you know what you want to write, a programme that spends a third of its time on poetry workshops and another third on screenwriting seminars is not delivering the focused, genre-specific education your work actually needs.
Kathryn’s courses offer something different: complete, laser-focused immersion in narrative nonfiction, taught by a New York Times bestselling author with over twenty-five years of teaching experience, in a live and interactive setting with a small international cohort of serious writers. Every lecture, every exercise, and every piece of feedback is oriented toward a single question — how do you write true stories at the highest possible level, and how do you take them into the world? There are no electives in genres you don’t write. No academic hoops. No institutional friction between you and the work.
And the cost? A single term at Kathryn’s writing school is £550-£650— with payment plans available for writers who need them. Taking both courses, across two terms, represents a total investment that is a fraction of a single semester at most postgraduate institutions, let alone a full degree. This is an affordable alternative to an MFA or MA in creative nonfiction.
This is not to say that one path is universally better than the other. An MFA has its place, and for some writers it remains the right choice. But for the writer who knows their genre, is ready to work, wants an affordable alternative to an MFA, alongside expert-level instruction oriented entirely toward the craft and the publication of narrative nonfiction — the courses available here rival, and in their focus may surpass, what a university programme delivers.
Two Courses. Open Now. An Affordable Alternative to an MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
The Art of Narrative Nonfiction is for the writer who is ready to learn the craft completely — to understand not just what makes a true story work, but how to build one from the ground up.
Writing Your Nonfiction Book Proposal is for the writer who is ready to take their work to the next level — to move from the page to the world, and from aspiration to submission.
Together, they form a pathway that is focused, affordable, internationally accessible, and taught by one of the most experienced narrative nonfiction instructors working today.
Both courses are capped at sixteen participants. Both fill quickly.
If you have been waiting for the right moment to take your writing seriously — this is it.
Register below. Early places go first.
Lastly, one of the best things you can do alongside any writing course is read widely and attentively in the form — not just for pleasure, but with craft in mind. The following journals and resources represent the heart of the narrative nonfiction world, and returning to them regularly will make you a sharper, more ambitious writer.
Creative Nonfiction — the founding journal of the genre, established by Lee Gutkind, the writer and editor who named and defined creative nonfiction as a literary form. An essential destination for anyone serious about the genre.
Hippocampus Magazine — one of the finest online publications devoted exclusively to personal essay and creative nonfiction. A welcoming home for emerging voices alongside established writers, and an excellent guide to what the best contemporary work in the form looks like.
River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative — a flagship literary journal for narrative nonfiction, combining long-form essays and memoir with critical writing about the form. Their weekly micro-essay series, Beautiful Things, is one of the most quietly extraordinary things on the internet: essays of 250 words or fewer that find beauty and meaning in the texture of daily life.
Narrative Magazine — a prestigious, free-to-read online library of fiction, essays, poetry, and nonfiction by celebrated and emerging writers. A place to read widely, encounter new voices, and understand what serious literary ambition looks like across forms.
Reading these journals will not only develop your craft — it will show you where your work might one day live.