Online Writing Classes – Rachel Howard

Updated July 2022:

I’m very excited to offer my first class through Catapult’s outstanding program of online writing classes. My six-week course on the personal essay will start on Tuesday, August 2nd. We have one student slot left. This is a highly generative class in which we will close-read some excellent short essays by writers like Grace Paley, Kiese Laymon, and Lydia Yuknavitch, and borrow some of their structural elements to write new essay drafts of our own. For the full class info, click here.

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I’m also very much looking forward to teaching a four-week online Life Into Literature course for the wonderful new San Francisco writing space Page Street. Check back here in August for full details. This class is for writers just beginning to experiment with memoir and essay and will take place fully online, on Saturday afternoons in October 2022.

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Past Classes

For Fall 2020 and 2021 I taught Form and Theory of the novel for Stanford Continuing Studies’ Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing. You can read more about the program here.

For Winter 2019, I taught Writing About Spirituality for Stanford Continuing Studies. Course description:

Our spiritual experiences stir our most urgent desire to communicate. We burn to share the questions and convictions that draw us to a reality beyond our limited selves. But how do we work with language to contain the ineffable? How do we write about spirituality without oversimplifying infinite complexities? How can our writing reach those who already share our beliefs and those who don’t? In this course, we will read the work of inspiring spiritual writers who represent a wide range of faith traditions, from the reflections of Protestant memoirist Christian Wiman to the Dharma talks of Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön to the contemplative journals of Muslim poet Kazim Ali and the instructive essays of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. During our first six weeks, we will alternate between “reading weeks,” in which we deeply examine and contemplate our model texts, and “writing weeks,” in which we draft new work. During our final month, each student will workshop a longer essay or spiritual memoir. By reading published spiritual writers closely, we will find new ways to point to a greater truth in our own work.