MFA for All – American Short Fiction
MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles of time, expense, and geography that MFAs demand.
These master classes will offer structured insight into your craft and writing practice, giving access to a rarified level of instruction that is usually reserved for students at privileged institutions. Taught by some of the most elite authors of our day, the lectures are designed to be as rewarding for seasoned authors as they are for writers earlier in their careers.
Each semester is comprised of three classes taught by three different authors; each class—two linked lectures, a couple weeks apart—will include the opportunity to engage in Q&As with the instructor and fellow students, writing prompts, suggestions for further reading, and more. Students may sign up for one class or a full semester. Those who enroll for the semester will receive a 20% discount on tuition and access to an online community of their fellow students.
Classes will be held on Zoom Webinar. They will be recorded and available for the following month. You do not have to be present during the class time to sign up. Please use an email that you check regularly. We will send your Zoom invite and recording link to this email. If purchasing classes for someone else, please enter their email address.
Answers to our FAQs can be found here.
Single Class: $150
• Entry to one two-lecture class
• Curated reading list and writing exercises
• Access to a recording of each lecture for one month after the class’s completion
• Discount on a year’s subscription to the magazine
Scroll down to choose a class!
Full Semester: $360 (20% discount)
• Entry to three two-lecture classes (one full semester)
• Curated reading list and writing exercises
• Access to a recording of each lecture for one month after the class’s completion
• Access to our community platform
• Zoom writing meet-ups with other full-semester students
• Discount on a year’s U.S.-based subscription to the magazine
—
Perspective and Temperament
Jamel Brinkley
Wednesday, October 9 & October 23
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. to 8 p.m CST
What does it mean to choose or instinctively reach for some variety of first person, second person, or third person narration? What dynamic possibilities and risks are at play in our fiction when making this choice? In this class, we will explore point of view, with special attention to the hidden tendencies that might be exerting a significant influence on our story drafts without our awareness. Recognizing these tendencies and reckoning with them—responding to them in an artful way—are important parts of writing powerful fiction.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man and Witness. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Story Prize, has won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
—
Generate and Revise (Make a Mess, Clean it Up)
Susan Choi
Thursday, November 7 & November 21
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. to 8 p.m CST
Fiction writing consists of two processes that can seem to be complete opposites: the generative process, which requires that we be open, messy, and indifferent to expectations and rules; and the revision process, which requires that we be disciplined, orderly, and attentive to formal demands. In this class we’ll explore how to be equally at ease in both these modes, and the ways in which these modes are deeply interconnected, despite their surface differences.
Susan Choi is the author of the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, My Education, and Trust Exercise, which received the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. She has also been recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn.
—
Other-than-Human Nature
Karen Russell
Tuesday, December 3 & December 17
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. to 8 p.m CST
Humans are often the protagonists of our literature, but we’re certainly not the center of the action on this spinning rock. What happens when a writer imaginatively inhabits a parrot, a stone, a baby monster, a body of water? What fresh narrative possibilities—and surprising challenges—arise when we write from the intersection of human and other-than-human nature in our fiction? We’ll study and discuss a diversity of approaches to building other-than-human characters into the world of a story or a novel, and we’ll also experiment with voice, tone, and form through a series of stylistic imitations and generative exercises.
Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and daughter. Her new novel The Antidote is forthcoming from Knopf/Penguin Random House in March 2025.
