6 Best Writing Classes in Nashville

Ninety-minute Friday-morning workshop with novelist Ramona Ausubel, $60 ($51 for members), run by The Porch in partnership with the Southern Festival of Books. It is held off-site in the Smart Classroom at the Tennessee State Museum on Rosa L. Parks Blvd rather than at The Porch House. The subject is the stalled project - self-doubt, the manuscript you have started to resent - and practical ways to get moving again.

Four-week in-person evening workshop at The Porch House in Nashville with Cara Lynn Albert, whose debut book Worshipping the Sun is due in 2027, $255 ($217 for members). The class reads widely in monster literature, then has you build an original monster-centred piece - story, poem or essay, your choice of form - which is workshopped in the final session. Homework is required and the workshopping is intensive.

Six-week in-person short fiction workshop at The Porch House in Nashville with Erin Cecilia Thomas, $365 ($311 for members). This is a true workshop rather than a lecture course: you submit your own work in progress for critique and are expected to give considered feedback on everyone else's. Published models under discussion include Joy Williams. Aimed at writers already drafting stories, not at complete beginners.

Four-week in-person memoir course at The Porch House in Nashville led by bestselling memoirist Marianne Richmond, $242 ($206 for members). Richmond teaches a Choose - Shape - Share framework, working through theme, voice, scene, reflection and revision, and treats memoir as an argument rather than a chronology. The final sessions cover publishing pathways, so it suits writers thinking about where a finished manuscript goes.

Single Saturday-morning poetry workshop at The Porch House in Nashville with instructor Melissa Jean, $63 ($54 for members). The session reads Mary Oliver, John Keats and Jane Hirshfield for the techniques poets use to render seasonal detail, then moves into generative exercises built on sense memory. In-class writing load is light and there is no homework - a good fit if you want a poetry session that fits in a single morning.

Four-week in-person evening course at The Porch House in Nashville, taught by novelist Lauren Nossett, author of the thrillers The Resemblance and The Professor. Priced at $255 ($217 for Porch members). The target is volume on the page: you draft roughly ten pages a week so you leave with about thirty pages of a first draft, alongside craft sessions on story catalysts, openings, dialogue and endings. Homework is required and drafts are workshopped intensively, so budget writing time between classes.