Registration is now open for our Spring 2025 semester of MFA for All, with new faculty Matt Bell, ZZ Packer, and Kristen Arnett!
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
• One virtual seminar on the submission process, including submitting to contests, with ASF editors
• One virtual publishing seminar with agents and book editors
• Discount on a year’s U.S.-based subscription to the magazine
Registration for the full semester closes on February 25, 2025. You may still purchase individual classes beyond that date.
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Fulfilling and Subverting Genre
Matt Bell
Tuesday, March 4 & March 18
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. to 8 p.m CST
In this class, we’ll study the “obligatory scenes” of a variety of genres of fiction and film, using them to explore the story beats and tropes that give each genre its unique characteristics. (What is a rom-com without the meet-cute? What is a detective novel without someone investigating the scene of a crime? What is a horror novel without the first reveal of the monster?) We will analyze examples from fiction and film, then create our own versions of these famous scene types, aiming to meet readerly expectations without sacrificing surprise, innovation, and play. By the end of the class, you should have an increased knowledge of various plot shapes and their component scenes, as well as a significant amount of new fiction putting these ideas into practice.
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Registration for Matt’s class closes on March 2, 2025.
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Advanced Narrative Techniques
ZZ Packer
Monday, April 7 & April 21
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. to 8 p.m CST
This tutorial series concentrates on Advanced Narrative Techniques: these techniques go beyond mere “point of view,” “description,” “plot,” and “imagery” to show the techniques great literary writers use (ofttimes intuitively, without naming or knowing the technique) that shifts writing from good to great. Over my years of teaching I’ve developed reams of materials, hundreds of Keynote slides, and a book’s worth of exercises, and I love sharing everything I’ve learned over these past 30 years!
ZZ Packer‘s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, STORY, Ploughshares, GRANTA, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories, Best Non-Required Reading and, most recently, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories and The New York Times Magazine‘s “The 1619 Project.” She has contributed nonfiction to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, The Believer, Essence, O Magazine, GQ, PORT, Salon, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. She is the recipient, among other honors, of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Award 5 Under 35 prize. Packer has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Hutchins Fellow at Harvard University, a Knafel Fellow at The Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Packer teaches writing at Vanderbilt University. She has previously taught at Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, Tulane, the MFA at Hunter College, and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and editor of New Stories from the South, 2008.
Registration for ZZ’s class closes on April 5, 2025.
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Send Us to Perfect Places: Crafting Place-Specific Regional Narratives
Kristen Arnett
Tuesday, May 6 & May 20
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. to 8 p.m CST
Learn how to write perfect (and perfectly imperfect) places and spaces that have “main character syndrome.” Unpack how memory, nostalgia, the environment, and class influences how we craft versions of home and beyond.
Kristen Arnett is the queer Floridian author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute, has held residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Studios of Key West, and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She runs the substack “Dad Lessons.” Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, Vogue, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her next novel, STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE, about a lesbian birthday party clown, will be published by Riverhead Books (March 2025), followed by the publication of an untitled collection of short stories. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and lives in Orlando, Florida.
Registration for Kristen’s class closes on May 4, 2025.
