Announcing Our Summer Narratively Academy Classes!

If you've been working on a big reported story, a personal essay about your family or a nonfiction book, join us this summer and get that project over the finish line.

Summer is juuuuust around the corner. For a lot of folks that means stepping away from the computer and hitting the sand and sun. But for writers, let’s be honest — the best part about slow summer days is finding time to focus on our work. To help you kick that focus into high gear, we’re thrilled to announce our first three Narratively Academy Summer 2024 classes. We have an intimate personal essay workshop, an essential seminar for nonfiction book authors and a one-on-one mentorship for reporters. If any of those sound intriguing to you, keep reading and I hope we can help you finish up that passion project this summer. (And sure, I hope you get a little time in the sand and sun, too!) P.S.: Early birds get 15% off any class when signing up by this Friday, June 7.

First up, we’re thrilled to welcome instructor Kerra Bolton back to teach an exciting summer writing workshop called Mastering Personal Essays About Family. If you’ve ever tried to write a story about your relationship with your parents, children or even your siblings you know it’s… well, it’s really, really hard! This intimate five-week workshop (capped at no more than 10 students) will help writers tackle those tricky family-centric personal essays — and get them published.

Next, if you have a nonfiction book in the works, this one is really a must. All writers who’ve worked with us at Narratively know we spend a lot of time fact-checking our longform pieces. But did you know that book publishers… um, don’t really do that?

It’s often just left to the author to check their own work, which can be an expensive and maddening project. So we’re so stoked to have Brad Scriber — who worked as a fact-checker at National Geographic for decades and served on the National Fact-Checking Advisory Board for the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT — teaching this class. In The Expert’s Guide to Fact-Checking Your Nonfiction Book, Brad will show you how to review your own manuscript with a fact-checker’s eye, how to decide when it’s necessary to call on outside help and how to prepare for that.

Last but (I hope) not least, I’ve had such a ball working with writers on our May Memoir Mentorship that I’ve decided to do something similar over the summer, but this time focused on reported stories. If you’ve done the research and reporting for a big story and you want guidance on how to turn all that into a dynamite written feature, I’ll be working with 10 writers this summer in one-on-one story structure and editing workshops designed to help you perfect that reported feature.

Questions? Not sure which class is right for you? Don’t see what you’re looking for and want to suggest a different class we should offer? Want to teach a class yourself? Drop us a line: academy@narratively.com.