Class

2025 Year-Long Creative Nonfiction Writing Project with Sun Yung Shin—Winter Online Cohort

Your life is a treasure, both utterly unique, never to be repeated again, and also undeniably part of the larger collective. This collective includes contemporary humanity, all our ancestors, as well as all existence in the cosmos. It also includes the unknowable future. Your creative nonfiction or memoir project can be a compelling container for the raw material of your life. Through writing it, you can learn what is most important for you to distill and share with a wider audience.

In this year-long course, you will find, refine, deepen your voice as you develop your craft skills in order to tell your stories and reflections in the most effective way you can.

How do we create energy, urgency, and emotions for the reader? How do we create forms that support the reader as they journey along with us through all kinds of experiences, ideas, and insights? We will dig in immediately and study from a wide variety of writers who have made artistic, ethical, and professional decisions in order to make the books they dreamt of, and which the world needed and needs. Through reading, writing, discussion, workshopping, and revision, you will focus on craft: credibility, tone, diction, imagery, description, scene, pacing, setting, time, summary, dialogue, inner monologue, flashback, revision, editing, and publishing.

We will visit with authors, agents, and publishing professionals to get our most pressing questions answered and to learn from their insights about the contemporary publishing market and writers’ considerations. By the time our year together is ended, you will have what you need to query agents, pitch to editors, and support your dream of sharing your work with readers.

Please see the Creative Nonfiction Writing Project page at loft.org for program specifics and schedule.

One-on-one meetings with Sun Yung Shin will also be held over the course of the year. These include one introductory meeting before the program begins, and one manuscript consultation session with Sun Yung after the program concludes (and you submit your final manuscript) in December, 2025.

Your program orientation meeting is scheduled to take place Wednesday, January 29, 2025, at 6pm online via Zoom.

Your final public reading will be Tuesday, January 6, 2026, at 7pm online via Zoom. Log-in information for orientation and final reading will be provided via confirmation email.