Creative Nonfiction Writing Classes: Choose Any Four

The Four-Class Bundle: Choose Your Own Footpath

Name: Creative Nonfiction Writing Classes: Choose Any Four
SKU: 8063
Price: 160.00 GBP
Availability: InStock

Four steps of seven. Yours to choose.

Monday 14 – Sunday 20 September 2026 · 4–6 PM London · Live online, recordings included

The Footpath runs for seven afternoons, and not everyone needs all seven. If you already have a writing practice but no voice on the page, or you can read well and cannot revise, choose the four creative nonfiction writing classes that meet you where you actually are. Four classes for £160 — a saving of £40 on booking them singly, and £30 less than three at full price.

How it works

Purchase the bundle and we will write to you asking which individual classes you wish to join. You will receive joining links and a recording afterwards whether or not you attend live. Classes run 4–6 PM London — 11 AM New York, 8 AM San Francisco, 5 PM Paris, 8:30 PM Delhi.

Choosing your four

Take the whole first half — Setting Out, Clearing the Ground, Reading the Ground, Finding Your Footing — if you are early in the writing life and want foundations. Take the second half — Finding Your Footing, Off the Path, The First Step and the Last, Retracing Your Steps — if you have material already and need to shape it. Or pick four that answer your four hardest questions. There is no wrong combination, and each class stands alone.

Questions

How do I choose? We will send you a confirmation email and ask for your choices then.
Can I change my mind? Yes, up to a week before the week begins.
What if I can’t attend one live? A recording is sent to everyone.
Can I upgrade to all seven? Yes — email and we’ll settle the £115 difference.

Schedule

Step One · Monday 14 September — Setting Out: An Introduction to Narrative Nonfiction

The gateway class, and the only place to take in the whole territory in one sitting. What narrative nonfiction actually is: not journalism, not memoir exactly, not the essay exactly, but true stories told with a novelist’s tools and a historian’s conscience. We walk through the Eight Pillars one by one — the framework underpinning everything taught at The Narrative Life — showing how each appears in published work and how together they turn true material into story. You leave with a map of the whole discipline and a clear sense of which pillar your own writing most needs next.

Step Two · Tuesday 15 September — Clearing the Ground: Building a Creative Nonfiction Writing Practice

Before craft, the conditions for craft. How to set up a writing practice that survives contact with real life: the mechanics — time, place, ritual, the phone in another room — and the deeper work of cultivating attention rather than waiting to be visited by it. We treat the working habits of real writers as engineering rather than folklore, and you build a boundary around your writing life that family, work and the noise of the world learn to respect. Everyone leaves with a written plan: when, where, how long, and what to do when it collapses, because it will.

Step Three · Wednesday 16 September — Reading the Ground: How to Read Like a Writer

Writers are made by reading, but not the reading most of us do. This is reading with the hood up, watching how the engine works: slowing over a paragraph to ask why this verb, why this sentence length, why the scene breaks here. We dismantle two short passages together, one for structure and one for sentence-craft, and cover the annotation habits that turn every book you love into a private masterclass. The aim is a permanent change — after this class you never read the same way again, and everything on your shelf becomes faculty.

Step Four · Thursday 17 September — Finding Your Footing: Recovering Your Voice in the First Person

For everyone who feels they have no voice, or had one once and lost it writing like an institution. Especially for academics and professionals trained out of the first person: taught that authority means absence, that hedging is honesty. And now for everyone drafting alongside a machine that writes in a permanent, agreeable middle register belonging to no one. You will strip out the trained reflexes one at a time, then learn the craft of the ‘I’ itself — how much presence a narrator needs, where it illuminates, and where it blocks the view.

Step Five · Friday 18 September — Off the Path: Research for Writers of Narrative Nonfiction

Where material lives and how to gather it. The paper trail — archives, letters, deeds, newspapers, and how to interrogate a document that is partial or quietly lying. The field, where place becomes a primary source and the right note-taking makes a walk yield prose. And people, because the richest material lives inside other people: preparation, question sequences that open a subject up, and the discipline of silence. We finish with the two disciplines that save years — a filing system that holds, and recognising when research has become an elegant way of avoiding the writing.

Step Six · Saturday 19 September — The First Step and the Last: Beginnings and Endings

The two moments a reader never forgives you for getting wrong. First, openings: how your first five hundred words make a promise — of subject, of voice, of the attention the piece will ask for — and how hooks earn attention rather than beg for it. We dismantle published openings to expose each one’s promise. Then endings: resolution against resonance, the final image against the final idea, and why last paragraphs are written last. The pairing is the point, because a great ending returns, transformed, to the promise the opening made.

Step Seven · Sunday 20 September — Retracing Your Steps: Revising Your Own Work

The class where writing actually becomes good, because nobody drafts well and everybody can learn to revise well. The passes in order: the structural read, the paragraph pass, the line edit. The techniques that create distance — reading aloud, the cooling-off period, printing it out, the reverse outline that X-rays a draft’s real structure. And the psychological half nobody teaches: reading your own pages as a stranger, cutting sentences you are proud of, and telling revision from fearful rearranging. As the final step, it closes the circle the first evening opened.

About The Footpath

Kathryn discovered the joys of footpaths when she moved to England in 2007, and they have served as significant parts of living a narrative life.

The Footpath series of masterclasses takes its name from the way a path is actually made. Nobody surveys it or lays it down; it appears because one person walks a route, and then another, until the ground itself remembers the way through. Learning to write works the same way. These seven masterclasses are seven steps along that path — each one complete in itself, each one two hours of live teaching you can take on its own, and each one facing the same direction. Walk a single step if that is what you need. Walk three. Walk all seven and you will have crossed the whole ground, from the empty desk on Monday morning to the revised page on Sunday night.

About Kathryn

Kathryn Aalto is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and passionate teacher of narrative nonfiction. Her books include The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood and Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World.

From her studio in Devon, England, she leads The Narrative Life, an international school of narrative nonfiction whose students write from six continents. She teaches live online creative nonfiction courses in memoir, nature writing, travel writing and literary nonfiction — many of her students arriving as complete beginners, with nothing but a true story they needed to tell. Her students have gone on to win national travel writing prizes and sign contracts with major publishers.

Her teaching is built on her Eight Pillars of Narrative Nonfiction — presence, arc, character, dialogue, voice, language, setting and resonance — a framework for turning real life into resonant story. She holds master’s degrees in garden history and creative nonfiction, has taught critical thinking at university level, and believes the writing life is not a talent bestowed on a few but a path anyone can walk with excellent teaching.

Explore all of Kathryn’s online creative nonfiction writing courses, masterclasses and mentoring: Online Creative Nonfiction Writing Courses | Kathryn Aalto.