Fall 2025 Classes

Registration for our for-credit fall classes will open Thursday, 7/10. 

Non-credit Workshop

Please pay attention to the following announcements, and read all course descriptions carefully before registering.
-We are offering some classes in-person and some classes via Zoom.
-Some courses require instructor permission or prior workshop courses to enroll.

5-Week Classes

**There are several Cori Gross scholarships available for 5-week classes for those with financial need. Apply here!**

Lang 371.EZ3: Telling It Slant: Getting to the Heart of Creative Nonfiction

Instructor: Susanne Paola Antonetta
CRN: #####
Meets in-person at UNCA

Tuesdays starting 9/2, 6:00-8:30

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore said that we need nonfiction, as “we live in fictitious times.” Creative nonfiction is the newest of the major literary genres—the term “creative nonfiction” only came into use in the 1970s, and the crucial term “lyric essay” appeared in the late 1990s (compare that with genres like “tragedy,” “story,” “novel!”). Considering forms like memoir, flash nonfiction, ekphrastic writing, lyric essay, and more, this course explores this wonderfully expansive genre with an eye toward identifying the forms and skills each student would most like to develop. We’ll discuss everything from finding what Emily Dickinson called your “flood subjects” to ensuring that each sentence packs a punch.

This class will be highly generative—each class will involve reading literary models, craft discussions, and writing together, with feedback designed to grow each piece and ourselves as both authors and characters.

Required Text: Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (TIS) by Miller and Paola, 3rd edition (be sure to get the third edition). We recommend purchasing the book from Malaprop’s Bookstore or Bookshop.org.

Susanne Paola Antonetta’s latest book is The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here. Forthcoming from Counterpoint in 2025 is The Devil’s Castle. She is also the author of Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Awards include a Pushcart Prize, a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon best memoir of the year award, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, and The New Republic and have been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series.

For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page. 
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Lang 371.EZ4: The Isle Is Full of Noises: Impulse & Idiosyncrasy in Short Stories & Novellas

Instructor: Nathan Jordan Poole
CRN: #####
Meets in-person in Asheville at LOCATION TBD

Fridays starting 9/26, 6:00-8:30

In this course we will read and write with two assumptions: The first is that every person is intensely unique and strange, regardless of how good they might be at hiding it. One of the primary thrills that fiction offers us is the ability to peer into the inner workings of our characters, and to remind us as readers of the paradox that their strangeness is what is most familiar to us. Freud’s ID, or “it,” while not a representative of our immoral selves, does represent the amoral, the primitive, furtive, and instinctual side of ourselves; our carefully concealed individual wildernesses.

The second assumption seems obvious, but I’m amazed how often we forsake it as writers: Life happens, circumstances arise, and almost all our actions are not as measured as we think they are. By nature, most of our actions are impulsive and constrained by context, and thus, we have what Aristotle termed “internal necessity,” as one impulse has its implications and consequences that leads to a denouement that feels both mysterious, inevitable, and reminds us of our own human condition. With this in mind, we will focus on the role impulse plays, especially in shorter forms of fiction, and how we might take advantage of it as writers. Along the way we will have important reflections on the modalities of 3rd person point of view, the advantages and disadvantages of free-indirect discourse, and what it means to let some of our own inner wilderness onto the page.

Readings will include stories and excerpts from Flannery O’Connor, Edwidge Danticat, Claire Keegan, D.H. Lawrence, Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Anton Chekov, Roxane Gay, and others.

Nathan Jordan Poole is the author of two books of fiction: Father Brother Keeper, a collection of stories selected by Edith Pearlman for the Mary McCarthy Prize, and Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost, selected by Benjamin Percy as the winner of the Quarterly West Novella Contest. He is a recipient of the Narrative Prize, a Milton Fellowship at Seattle Pacific University, a Joan Beebe Fellowship at Warren Wilson College, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at Sewanee School of Letters, and a North Carolina Artist Fellowship. His stories have appeared in various journals including, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Narrative Magazine, The Common, Image, Shenandoah, and Quarterly West. He is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers.

For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page. 
Register Now

Lang 371.EZ2: Imitation as Apprenticeship: A Poetry Workshop

Instructor: Christian Detisch
CRN: #####
Meets in-person in Asheville at LOCATION TBD

Thursdays starting 10/2, 6:00-8:30

In this workshop, writers will bring a particular poet whom they admire, or at any rate want to imitate—we will begin with a discussion on imitation and influence, drawing from sources such as Harold Bloom, T.S. Eliot, and some other perspectives on learning from other writers. We will then focus on reading the “master” poets, chosen by students in the group, where we will pinpoint aspects of craft that students want to emulate. Students will draft imitation poems with these insights into craft in mind; discussion in the workshop will center on how each student is thinking about their reading, and how they incorporate (or resist) it in their writing.

Christian Detisch is a writer whose poems, essays, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, 32 Poems, Image, Blackbird, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and his M.Div from the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale Divinity School. He works as a healthcare chaplain in Asheville.

For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page. 
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Lang 371.EZ1: Grief Is a Portal: Writing Our Way Through

Instructor: Kalyn Livernois
CRN: #####
Meets in-person in Asheville at LOCATION TBD

Saturdays starting 10/11, 3:00-5:30

Whether grief consumes us, lingers at our edges, or moves in and out of view, it is a steady presence in our lives. We may grieve over death, a version of ourselves we no longer identify with, or world events we cannot control. No grief is too small or large to be acknowledged and given space. In this course, we will examine how it shows up on the page (whether we want it to or not) and its role in art and writing on a collective level, which is often to help us process grief in a society that can otherwise move too quickly to allow us the time. This will largely be a discussion and workshop-based class, open to writers of all genres and experience levels — and to all experiences of grief.

Kalyn Livernois graduated from the New England College MFA program, where she studied poetry and fiction. She also holds a BA in medical anthropology from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Door Is a Jar, Dust Poetry Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, HAD, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. She is a prose editor at Cobra Milk and the former managing editor of Variant Literature. She is putting finishing touches on her first full-length poetry manuscript, which blends work about climate grief with that of familial trauma and addiction. Her deepest joys come from the natural world, deep and nourishing friendships, dancing, and her dog, Mage.

For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page. 
Register Now

10-Week Class

Lang 372.EZ1: The Soul & Psyche of Your Characters

Instructor: Zelda Lockhart
CRN: #####
Meets online via Zoom

Thursdays starting 10/9, 6:00-8:30

The most memorable fiction offers characters whose life journeys connect readers to their own life journeys. I am forever transformed by the work of authors like Alice Walker and Helena Maria Viramoontes. In this course we will develop our fiction utilizing the “personal plot” method outlined in my book The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript. You are the character you have spent your life developing, so we will create characters using our own life experiences from wounding impactful events to joyful revelation and outcome. Characters should be complex folks with wounds, wants, gifts, and reasons for their behaviors, just like you and me. We will rely on psychological and setting research as we give our characters a soul based on our own plots. What we do not know, we will imagine and speculate based on the probable truth and the desired outcome. This course is a transformative journey and will not only offer long-term skills in daily writing and peer editing, but also in managing and manifesting your creative life.

Dr. Zelda Lockhart is a current Fulbright Specialist engaged in cross-cultural story projects for generational healing. She holds a PhD in Expressive Art Therapies and an MA in Literature. Her novels, keynotes, and workshops focus on the power of story and nature to connect us and heal our generations. She is winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation 2024 Outstanding Mid-career Novelist Prize. Her novels include Trinity (HarperCollins, 2023), which was translated and released by HarperCollins France in 2024; Fifth Born, a Barnes & Noble Discovery selection and a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award finalist; Cold Running Creek, a Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Fiction award winner; and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle, a 2011 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her methods are contained in her book The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript: Turning Life’s Wounds into the Gift of Literary Fiction, Memoir, or Poetry.

Required Text: The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript, Zelda Lockhart. We recommend purchasing the book from Malaprop’s Bookstore or Bookshop.org.

For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page. 
Register Now

15-Week Class
Lang 473.EZ1: Poetic Analysis & Criticism