Building a Creative Nonfiction Course From Scratch Is a Summer Project. I Didn’t Have a Summer, So I Built It One Unit at a Time.

I wanted to run a full-semester Creative Nonfiction course — not a scattered handful of memoir prompts, an actual sequence: genre introduction, technique, memory and self-writing, profile writing, place writing, research-informed essays, all building on each other. What I found when I went looking were fragments. A single strong lesson here, an interesting prompt there, nothing that added up to a semester.

I didn’t have a summer to sit down and build all seven units at once. So I didn’t. I built one, taught it, built the next one, taught that. Over a few years, the fragments I couldn’t find turned into a complete course.

See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $24.99

All seven unit packs, classroom-ready with assignment sheets, rubrics, teacher notes, and student-facing materials for each. The sequence I couldn’t find pre-built, assembled the slow way so the next teacher doesn’t have to.

See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $24.99