Online Classes & Virtual Offerings
Virtual VorTEXT Intensive
Our VorTEXT intensive retreats suit writers at different levels of experience and phases in the writing process. The day begins with a chance for community connection during the half-hour Coffee Chat before the live writing workshop via Zoom. Writers are then encouraged and inspired to continue their writing on their own or in accountability groups, and the day wraps with a group share and structured feedback session facilitated by Hedgebrook staff. Writers also enjoy lovingly prepared care packages, mailed to your doorstep.
Coming soon:
Online Classes
Many of our self-paced offerings started out as live Hedgebrook webinars led by inspiring Hedgebrook alumnae, while others were recorded on the land. These pre-recorded classes are open to the general public to access and enjoy at your own pace. Once you register, please check your email confirmation for log-in instructions.
Please see the FAQs below for answers to many of your questions.
Current Offerings:
The Surprising Power of Vulnerability with Claire Dederer
Class Description: What does it mean to “do your job” as a memoirist? In “The Surprising Power of Vulnerability,” New York Times bestselling memoirist, critic, and writing instructor Claire Dederer expertly guides students towards saying the uncomfortable truth. Claire helps students see that writing those difficult truths is in fact the moral function of the memoir. Through a series of readings, discussions, and practical exercises, students learn how to build a structure out of their own discomfort so that readers might shelter there, and ultimately, feel less alone. You’ll use scene as an essential vehicle to write the kind of vulnerable work that lays bare the writer’s own honestly stated ambivalence--an honesty which ultimately serves the reader. Claire addresses the critical importance of self-exposure in memoir writing, and helps writers break through the catharsis (instead of getting stuck there) in order to take that material and write it into a gift for the reader that is a work of art.
Filmed at Hedgebrook, in the Gathering Space with a fire crackling and ducks quacking in the garden, this class offers writing exercises and strategies for writers to summon the courage needed to write difficult truths with real vulnerability in the memoir. This class is structured to be of value to a wide range of students, at different points in their writing career.
Class length: 75 minutes (broken up into 8 parts and includes participant sharing).
How to Finish Your Book, Really with Minal Hajratwala
Class Description: This class is about diving deep to understand your true needs and how to keep making progress on your book—all the way to the end—despite the obstacles you may be facing. Through writing prompts and exercises, we’ll diagnose where your book might get bottlenecked and figure out your best next step, and the one after that.
You’ll learn how to anticipate sticking points before they block you, and create power and momentum for your book. You’ll leave the workshop with a roadmap to navigate your own book-writing process so that you can proceed with clarity, confidence, and joy as you move toward the day you finish your book.
This class is for writers who are starting a book, have written a partial draft, or have a mostly complete draft that needs a boost.
Class length: 92 minutes (broken up into 12 parts and includes participant sharing).
Videos offer closed captioning.
Class Description: A fat drop of dew holding on to the tip of a leaf can stun you with the beauty of the universe. A hot teardrop of rage can change the world. We will gather to bring such beauty and rage to our page in the form of the personal essay. Come with all the feelings that have coursed through you in these past months as our lives have posed new questions and changed old relationships. Let's write about memories, let's write about mortality. We will read brief excerpts from beautiful and rage-filled personal essays to inspire our own writing. We will leave with fresh writing to grow into whole essays or books.
Class length: 72 minutes (broken up into 9 parts and includes participant sharing).
Beauty & Rage in the Personal Essay with Sonora Jha
Class Description: After a honeymoon period of writing the initial pages of a memoir, writers often get caught up in a maze of questions regarding the book’s structure and content. In this class “Structuring Your Memoir,” memoirist and award-winning writing instructor Theo Pauline Nestor will lead you through a series of writing prompts designed to ferret out the questions that underlie your writing project and that hold the key to your dilemmas around where to begin, where to end, and what to include and what to leave out. Theo’s step-by-step approach helps you to discover the answers you already hold and offers practical ideas for putting those answers to work right away. Set in Meadow House at the retreat, this class offers the magic of Hedgebrook’s famous “radical hospitality” and the feeling of permission that women writers inevitably experience working in the Hedgebrook cottages.
Class length: 73 minutes (broken up into 10 parts and includes participant sharing).
Structuring Your Memoir with Theo Pauline Nestor
Class Description: How do you write about what you don’t want to write about? How do you capture on the page what can’t be spoken? What does it look like to write what is unsaid? How do the stories we’re afraid to tell hold us back? And when is refusal a kind of agency? Join writer Sarah Sentilles for a two-hour generative writing workshop exploring miscommunication, secrets, and how language might show us a way through. Sarah will lead participants through a series of writing prompts designed to inspire and help you experiment, play, and break through blocks, habits, and writing ruts. Open to all genres and levels of experience. Everyone is welcome.
Class length: 110 minutes (broken up into 9 parts and includes participant sharing and writing time).
Videos offer closed captioning.
On Silence: A Generative Writing Workshop about Refusal, Agency & Transcendence with Sarah Sentilles
Class Description: Recapture some joy at your writing desk! In this online class, we’ll spend time exploring what gets in the way of our creative freedom. Inner Critic slowing you down? I’ve got ideas to quiet that noise. Fear of failing? I’ve got a few antidotes. Worried about cutting too close to the bone? Let’s talk about how to stay safe and make discoveries. We all get in our own way. It’s important to remember that the opposite of fear is faith. Faith in ourselves, in our process, in our voices, in our unique story. I’ve got thirteen practical steps to overcome the sludge of stuck! Once we’ve dissected our difficulties, we’ll spend time writing together, using prompts as a backdoor into our manuscripts, whether we’re starting something brand new, or in the midst of a long project.
Class length: 90 minutes (broken up into 10 parts and includes participant sharing).
Becoming Unstuck: Find Flow and Free Your Voice with Natalie Serber
Class Description: This workshop is for writers who are ready to begin a novel or who have hit some roadblocks along the way. It would also help someone who has a fledgling idea for a novel and doesn’t know how to develop it.
In this workshop, we will tackle essential novel-writing questions including:
How much do I need to plan before I begin writing? What point of view should I use for this novel? Are my characters well-developed? Do I know who they are and how they’ll change? Do I need to know where I’m heading in this story? How much plot do I need to know? How will I write this novel?
By the end of the workshop, students will discover how pre-writing can help them bring their novel ideas into focus and prepare them for first draft writing. They will also learn various ways to structure their time so that they can make writing a regular practice in their lives.
Class length: 103 minutes (broken up into 16 parts and includes participant sharing).
Videos offer closed captioning.
Jump Start Your Novel with Ellen Sussman
Class Description: Structure can be elusive in crafting a memoir – there are so many stories and pieces that don’t often lend themselves to a cohesive narrative. Understanding theme is vital to organizing your material and bringing a spine to your memoir. It also is what transforms a me-moir to a story that can resonate with a larger audience.
This will be a two-hour participatory workshop where students will respond to prompts, share work, and analyze their own writing to discover the underlying themes that inform the heart of their narrative. Fortified with clarity about the inner urgency of their work, students will be able to craft a roadmap for their memoir.
Class length: 103 minutes (broken up into 8 parts and includes participant sharing).
Videos offer closed captioning.
Finding Your Theme in Memoir with Monona Wali
Online Class Sliding Scale
$80 Regular (Reflects true cost of running this program)
$120 Supporter (Registration at this level helps allow us to offer classes to all, regardless of ability to pay)
$20-$40 Pay-what-you-can (pay-scale based on your capacity during this uncertain time)
Online Class FAQs
How do I access the class?
Once you have registered you will receive an automatic email confirmation that includes the link and passcode to access the class. Please do not log into Wild Apricot as it is our registration site, not our online class site.
How does the class work?
This online class is a series of pre-recorded video sessions, divided into chapters in chronological order. Some classes feature the instructor and a small group of students in a cottage at the Hedgebrook retreat. Classes that began as live webinars feature just the instructor and voices of some of the webinar participants. Each class includes lectures and writing exercises. You may start and stop the video at any point. Most chapters end with a writing exercise.
Is there homework?
The class is one continuous session that you can take at your own pace (or over several days or a few weeks), with writing exercises woven in. The teacher will prompt you in the video when there is a writing exercise. After you’ve completed the writing exercise, simply play the next class video when you’re ready. There is no homework.
How much time will the class take?
This is totally up to you! Different classes are different lengths, and all are designed so you can move at your own pace. Once you register, you are welcome to return to the class as often as you like until the last day it’s offered. The classes in our Online Writing Series range anywhere from around 60 minutes to around 105 minutes of total recorded video time. The writing prompts will extend the total length of the class, depending on how many prompts there are. Each class is broken down into chapters, varying in length from around 5 to 20 minutes. Most of the chapters end with a writing prompt or exercise, which you can do on your own time simply by pausing the video and then coming back and starting with the next chapter. If not specified by your teacher, you might want to plan to spend 5-15 minutes on each of the writing prompts, in addition to the recorded instruction.
Will the teacher review my work?
No, the instructors are not available to review your work. These are pre-recorded classes that don’t include interaction with the teachers.
Is there a discount if I take more than one Hedgebrook online class?
When you register, you will see options to pay anywhere from $120 (support others to take the class) to the regular rate of $80, as well as a range from $20-40. For some who are not in a position to pay for the class at this time, there is also a free option. Each time you register for a class, you have an opportunity to decide how much you can pay.
Please send other questions to programs@hedgebrook.org