Elevating Your Nonfiction: Memoir, Essay, and Other Creative Non-Fiction

Julia Ingalls‘ stories, essays, reviews, and other work regularly appear in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, BOOM California, Crimereads, KCRW, and Dwell, among other publications, anthologies, and public radio programs. Her in-person literary reading series, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” has received rave reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The L.A. Weekly, and features emerging and established novelists, poets, essayists, graphic novelists, and short story writers. As a moderator and host, she relishes facilitating in-depth discussions of books and the ever-evolving role of literature in our contemporary society.

A week before class begins, please email the draft of a personal essay, memoir, or an idea for a subject you’d like to write about to subtextdesign@gmail.com. For the first day of our workshop, please bring something with which to write (a pen and paper is preferable).

We will be introducing a new schedule for Writer’s Week 2026! All workshops will begin at 9AM and include a lunch break from 12-1PM, concluding the day at 4PM.

Included in the week-long programming, we will be hosting featured events such as Craft Talks and Lectures. These will be hosted twice a day: the first session starting at 2:30PM and the second session at 7:30PM.

On Wednesday, we will have a rest period. During this time, you will be able to attend optional sessions, an afternoon open mic, and Beat Nite at Middle Ridge Winery and Galleries in Idyllwild’s town center!

I will create a packet (in PDF form) for each class that features relevant examples of excellence from a diverse group of writers. We will review the readings from the packets in class together.