Writing Motherhood: Craft and Form in Memoir, Fiction, and the Essay — an Online Workshop with Noa Silver

Begins Monday, October 12th, 2026

This is a 6-week asynchronous online writing class held via Wet Ink, our dedicated online classroom. You complete the weekly assignments on your own schedule — there are no set meeting times.

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Instructor Bio

Instructor Noa Silver is the author of California Dreaming (2024), a finalist for the Sarton Women's Book Award. Born in Jerusalem and raised between Scotland and Maine, she holds a BA in English and American Literature from Harvard University, an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University, and was a recipient of an SF Grotto Emerging Writers Fellowship. She lives with her family in Cascais, Portugal.

Who is this class for?

This online writing workshop is for mother-writers — creative writers who want to bring a literary lens to motherhood in all its messiness and beauty. It welcomes writers at all levels who are serious about the craft and ready to render maternal experience on the page without sentimentality and without setting aside their ambitions as writers. If you're working in memoir, fiction, poetry, or the essay and want to take motherhood seriously as literary material, this class is for you.

What to expect:

Across six weeks, this creative writing workshop moves through the craft questions that writers of motherhood consistently face: how to write the self as mother without losing the self as narrator, how to handle the ethics of writing about children, how to shape a fragmented, nonlinear experience into form, and how to resist both idealization and complaint. Noa brings a practitioner's approach — as both a mother and a writer — pairing lived experience with the attention of a writer who has worked these problems on the page herself.

A particular focus of this online writing class is form. Rather than treating motherhood only as subject matter, the course examines how nonlinearity, fragmentation, and interruption open up explorations of maternal experience that traditional narrative structures don't fully allow. Each week pairs close reading of a key text — Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, and others — with generative prompts and workshop discussion of participants' own work in progress.

Feedback is built into every week. Each piece you share for workshop receives comments from the instructor, and you'll also read and respond to your peers' work within Wet Ink. A longer round of written instructor feedback is available on the final piece you submit at the end of the course.

What are the writing goals?

In this course, students will generate new work in response to weekly prompts and bring pieces to workshop for instructor and peer feedback. You'll build a toolkit for the central craft problems of writing motherhood — narrative interiority, formal structure, the ethics of writing real people, the physical body, and ambivalence — and develop a clear sense of the form your project wants to take. In the final week, you'll submit a revised piece alongside a one-paragraph statement of your larger project, with guidance on how to carry the work forward. Each shared piece receives written comments from the instructor, with extended feedback on the final submission.

Readings may include excerpts from:

Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work and Outline; Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation; Rivka Galchen's Little Labors; Natalia Ginzburg; Sheila Heti's Motherhood; Sharon Olds ("The One Girl at the Boys Party," "The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb"); and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: The Problem — Writing the Self Who Is Also a Mother. Core question: how do you remain a narrator with interiority and agency when the subject keeps pulling focus away from you? Reading: Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work (selections). Generative prompt: write a scene in which you are doing something entirely unrelated to your child; let the child enter only at the edges.

Week 2: Form as Argument — Fragmentation, Interruption, and What the Structure Says. Core question: why do so many serious books about motherhood abandon linear narrative, and what does that choice mean? Reading: Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (selections); Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (selections). Generative prompt: write a passage about a single day in fragments — what gets left in the white space? Workshop: first pieces from Week 1 discussed.

Week 3: The Ethics of the Page — Writing Children, Partners, and the People Who Didn't Consent. Core question: what do we owe the people we write about, and how do serious writers navigate this without either paralysis or exploitation? Reading: Rivka Galchen, Little Labors; selections from Natalia Ginzburg. Discussion-heavy week; shorter generative prompt: write a scene involving your child, then write the same scene from their imagined point of view.

Week 4: The Body — Pregnancy, Birth, Nursing, Exhaustion, and the Physical Transformation Nobody Writes Well. Core question: why is the physical experience of motherhood so hard to render without either clinical detachment or sentimentality, and how do you write it true? Reading: Sheila Heti, Motherhood (selections); Sharon Olds (poems — "The One Girl at the Boys Party," "The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb"). Generative prompt: write the body — one physical experience of motherhood rendered with as much precision and as little judgment as you can manage. Workshop: pieces from Week 2 discussed.

Week 5: Ambivalence — The Thing We're Not Supposed to Say. Core question: how do you write honestly about ambivalence — the loss of self, the rage, the boredom, the love that coexists with all of it — without performing transgression or inviting misreading? Reading: Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (selections); Rachel Cusk, Outline (selections on motherhood and identity). Generative prompt: write toward the thing about motherhood you have never said out loud — you don't have to show anyone this one. Workshop: pieces from Week 3/4 discussed.

Week 6: Revision and the Larger Project — Where Does This Fit? Core question: is this a memoir, a novel, an essay collection, a hybrid? How do you know, and how does knowing change how you write? No new primary reading — instead, participants bring a revised piece and a one-paragraph statement of their larger project or intention. Workshop: final pieces discussed; conversation about next steps for everyone's work.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Strategies for keeping narrative interiority and agency when motherhood keeps pulling focus
• A working understanding of how fragmentation, nonlinearity, and form can carry maternal experience
• A framework for the ethics of writing about children, partners, and people who didn't consent
• Tools for rendering the physical body and emotional ambivalence without sentimentality or detachment
• New generative work produced across the six weeks, plus a revised piece and a statement of your larger project
• Instructor and peer feedback on your writing, with extended written feedback on a final piece

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class is asynchronous, meaning you complete the weekly assignments on your own schedule. There are no set meeting times to allow for greater participation; your cohort will consist of writers from different time zones, which allows for a wonderful diversity of voices.

Along with your weekly deadlines, there is plenty of interaction with the instructor and your peers within Wet Ink, our dedicated online classroom. Craft materials, lectures, reading assignments, and writing prompts are all available through the online classroom. Students also post work and provide and receive feedback in the online classroom.

You can finish the work as you see fit, week to week, which is perfect for any schedule. There are discussion questions each week inspired by the assigned readings and topics in the lecture notes. Students are encouraged to take these wherever they find most compelling and/or useful. The instructor engages with these discussions throughout the week, and you will receive feedback on all assigned writing activities.

HOW DOES WET INK WORK?

Wet Ink was built and designed specifically for online writing classes. Wet Ink is private, easy to use, and very interactive.

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $445 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.