Courses
Scroll down to see our Spring 2025 courses.
See course descriptions for new information about payment plans!
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Memoir in Collage
This five-week course will guide you through a new way to write your story from life’s twists and turns through lectures, readings, and exercises.
Date: April 27, 2025
Instructor: Megan Baxter -
The Muse Incubator: Women Creatives Inspire One Another
The Muse Incubator is a new bundled offer for women who want monthly writing support and community. There is space available in the April-June cohort.
Date: April to June 2025
Instructor: Joanna Penn Cooper -
Seeds of Healing & Resistance: Grounding Yourself to Think Beyond
A generative writing workshop where we will work together to ground our minds and nervous systems through models from a variety of genres.
Date: March 8, 2025
Instructor: Joanna Penn Cooper
Past & Future Courses
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Writing the Lyric Essay
Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play.
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Memoir in Collage
This class will guide you through crafting a memoir from life’s twists and turns. A collaged approach to memoir composes a narrative through fragments and found items, building a story from many smaller pieces.
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The 30-Minute Memoir
In this eight-week course, manageable daily writing assignments will help you break down the task of writing a memoir.
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Shapes of Stories
This course will help you expand your writer’s tool kit by experimenting with a variety of structures—everything from straightforward, traditional presentations to offshoots of the lyric essay, such as braids, collages, and “hermit crab” essays.
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Writing Beyond the Known
In this four-week, instructor-guided course, you will explore the elastic quality of the essay form as you delve into the ways metaphor, speculation, and imaginative play can enliven your writing and help you explore your values, fascinations, and imaginings.
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Writing Beyond the Known (Self-Guided)
A self-guided version of the four-week course exploring metaphor, speculation, and imaginative play.
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Monthly Generative Workshop: Five-Month Bundle
Five months of generative writing where we will check in about writing goals and I will provide prompts and model readings. We will work together to determine the balance of writing time and sharing/feedback time.
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Stringing the Beads: Craft Your Personal Essay
This guided four-week online course is for intermediate to experienced writers of nonfiction who are interested in workshopping an ongoing or new essay project in an online group setting.
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Stringing the Beads: Group Developmental Editing
This online course is for intermediate to experienced writers of nonfiction—including lyric essay, personal essay, memoir—who are interested in workshopping an ongoing or new essay project in an online group setting.
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“The Hinge of the Year” Writing Retreats
On the first Saturday of the month for the next three months join us for one, two, or all three of our three-hour online generative writing retreats aimed at helping writers get at the heart of a writing project—or discover the seed of a new one!
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Tarot Guidance Session
My style of tarot is less about prophesying and more about helping you think through a current situation and the internal & external forces you may be negotiating.
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Finding Your Creative Center: Flash Memoir
In this four-week online workshop, you will generate short passages of creative nonfiction inspired by your life as we work on accessing creative flow and reconnecting with the wonder and joy of a life lived as creative witness.
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New Year Writing Retreat for Women
Let's write together! In this two-day Zoom retreat, we will generate material for essays, poems, or flash fiction. Using models from a variety of genres, as well as visual art, we will spend two afternoons writing.
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Reading Contemporary Poetry: Tracy K. Smith's Wade in the Water
In this course, we’ll read contemporary poems together with the goals of feeling more comfortable entering into discussion about poems; broadening our exposure to contemporary poetry; and adding the richness to our lives in the ways available through poetry.
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The Call: A Self-Guided Course on Creative Witness
Based on series of virtual talks about witness, personal meaning, and the creative life, this course includes pre-recorded talks by three authors, selected works by each guest, writing prompts, suggested readings, and a community space to post and discuss writing.
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Approaching Mystery: Writing Flash Memoir About Wonder and the Unexplained
Self-Guided. Capture the absurd or surreal quality of everyday life and tell a meaningful story in as few words as possible.
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Coaching Packages
Choose from two different coaching packages to join Joanna’s current cohort of coaching clients.
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Creativity Jumpstart Self-Paced Course
This self-paced course includes four weeks' worth of lessons, including prompts, lecture materials in written and video form, and readings.
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Through the Veil: A Prose Poem Workshop
A Halloween-inflected workshop on prose poems in which we’ll discuss models for poems that move “between worlds” and write our own!.
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Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry and Nonfiction Play
Read and write lyric essays using techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking.
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The Writer as Researcher
A 5-week introduction to the techniques, tools, and use of research in creative writing, open to all genres.
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Hybrid Forms & (Re)Imagined Spaces
Focusing on life-based writing, we’ll explore work that exists in between genres, exploring the spaces of our lives, both literal and emotional/psychological.
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Writing from the Unconscious
Writing inspired by tarot, dreams, guided meditations, and “automatic writing.”
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Spectral Traces: A Generative Writing Workshop in Hybrid Forms
A Day of the Dead workshop to write using the spectral traces of memory, psychic inheritances, and all that came before. Forms may include prose poem, flash memoir, speculative nonfiction, and poetic memoir.