Instructor Thao Thai is the author of Banyan Moon, the July 2023 Read with Jenna title, Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and Book of the Month selection. A recipient of the 2024 Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Southern Living, Elle, Lit Hub, and other publications. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and an MA from the University of Chicago. She also publishes romance novels under the pen name, Nora Nguyen, where her debut novel was named one of NPR's 2024 Best Books of the Year and Amazon's Editor's Picks. Her forthcoming novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, will be released in August 2026. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and daughter.

Why work with Thao Thai?

Thao Thai is uniquely positioned to guide writers through the complexities of the family saga. Her bestselling debut, Banyan Moon, traces three generations of Vietnamese women across decades and continents, weaving questions of inheritance, identity, and belonging into a tightly plotted narrative. Her forthcoming novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, follows two estranged sisters on a quest to uncover their family's fractured past. With deep experience crafting multigenerational stories that balance ambitious scope with intimate emotional stakes, Thao brings both the craft knowledge and editorial insight to help you shape your own family saga into a compelling, cohesive work.

Who is this one-on-one mentorship for?

This fiction mentorship is designed for intermediate to advanced writers who have a strong concept and a significant percentage of their novel already written. If you are working on a cross-generational family saga and need expert guidance to bring your ambitious manuscript together, this 1-on-1 writing mentorship will give you the dedicated support and craft strategies to move forward with confidence.

Who Should Apply?

This mentorship is ideal for you if:

You have a family saga in progress — whether that's 50 pages or 250 — and you feel ready for serious, sustained work on the manuscript. You're juggling multiple timelines, points of view, or generations and need help weaving them into a cohesive narrative. You have a strong concept and compelling characters but feel stuck on structure, pacing, or transitions. You're a self-motivated writer who thrives with accountability, expert feedback, and a trusted reader in your corner. If any of this sounds like you, we encourage you to apply. Payment plans are available.

What to expect:

Immersive family sagas offer new ways for readers to understand their place in the world by investigating the close-knit, fraught connections between generations. Often expansive, with ambitious sprawl and webs of compelling characters, family sagas trace questions of inheritance and identity through tightly plotted storytelling. At their best, family sagas are transportive works of grace that cling to a reader's imagination, offering escapism, entertainment, and insight.

The process of structuring a family saga is another matter altogether. To write a cross-generational—sometimes cross-continental—work, a writer must balance many craft strategies at once. They must understand how to write historical fiction, how to put characters in conversation and conflict with one another, how to transition from chapter to chapter, and how to create an overarching narrative resonance that touches every generation described. The reward is enormous, but often, writers need more support and strategies to fit the pieces of a large-scope story like this together.

In this online writing mentorship, you will receive specific feedback from Thao on your manuscript in progress, as well as writing exercises to move the book forward. Thao will recommend books, articles, and other craft resources to help you consider the conventions of the family saga. Additionally, Thao will be available to coach you through any blocks or issues that arise in writing your novel. This 1-on-1 fiction mentorship provides the kind of sustained, individualized attention that a creative writing workshop alone cannot offer.

Click HERE to Apply Now. Early applications are encouraged as space is limited.

What are the writing goals?

In this course, mentees will walk away with the majority of a completed family saga manuscript, along with tangible strategies for finishing the book, including a working outline. Thao will provide line-level feedback as well as high-level suggestions and thoughts for the arc of the novel as a whole.

Readings

Readings will include books like Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, among others.

Why a 1-on-1 Mentorship?

A family saga is one of the most ambitious undertakings in fiction — and ambitious work deserves more than a few weeks of workshop feedback. This 6-month mentorship gives you something rare: a sustained creative partnership with a bestselling novelist who knows your manuscript inside and out. Unlike a group class, every session is tailored entirely to your book, your challenges, and your goals. Thao will be with you through the messy middle, the structural breakthroughs, and everything in between, providing the kind of deep, ongoing editorial guidance that transforms a promising draft into a finished novel.

Click HERE to Apply Now. Early applications are encouraged as space is limited.

What Does the Mentorship Look Like?

Over the course of six months, you and Thao will meet regularly via Zoom to discuss your manuscript, set goals, and work through craft challenges as they arise. Between sessions, you will submit pages for Thao's review and receive detailed written feedback — both line-level notes and big-picture editorial guidance on character, structure, and narrative arc. Thao will also assign targeted readings from the family saga tradition and generative exercises designed to move your draft forward. The pace and schedule are flexible, built around your writing life, but the commitment is real: this is a working partnership designed to produce significant progress on your novel.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: Introduction and discussion of goals.

Week 2: Close readings of seminal family sagas.

Week 3: Generative exercises and revision tips.

Weeks 4–24: Writing submissions and feedback, assigned readings, strategies and support.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Writers will understand the how and why behind a family saga and have a solid foundation on seminal family sagas in the literary tradition.
• Mentees will have written at least half of a completed manuscript with solid characters, a defined narrative structure, and a sense of their opportunities and challenges as writers.
• Writers will create a working outline, which will be used to draft the remainder of their manuscript.
• Mentees will receive both line-level feedback and high-level editorial guidance on the arc of the novel as a whole.
• Writers will develop craft strategies for balancing multiple timelines, characters, and generational narratives within a single work.

What Mentees Can Expect At the End of the Program

Writers who complete this mentorship will leave with the majority of a finished manuscript, a working outline for completing the rest, and a clear understanding of their strengths and growth areas as a novelist. More than that, you will have spent six months developing the habits, craft instincts, and editorial eye needed to see your family saga through to completion — and beyond.

How to Apply

To apply, please submit a brief description of your family saga project, including where you are in the writing process and what you hope to gain from the mentorship. Please also include a writing sample of up to 20 pages from your manuscript in progress. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and we will follow up with accepted applicants. Ready to get started? Apply now! Payment plans are available.

PRAISE FOR THAO THAI:

“Thao Thai captures the complexities of familial love with an unflinching yet gorgeously lyric eye. Banyan Moon is an ambitious and masterful debut!" —Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas

“Heart-shatteringly beautiful. Banyan Moon is a love letter to keepers of secrets, to motherhood, family, and survival. Thao Thai is a major talent whose exciting, impressive, and poetic prose will grow into you, like a strong and lush banyan tree deeply rooted in the rich Vietnamese literary heritage.”—Nguyễn Quế Mai, internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child

“Banyan Moon is an intricately woven story of three generations of women, surviving and living each in their own way. This novel has everything you want: desire, betrayal, grit, tenderness, pride, love, and—most deliciously, most brazenly—the dirty secrets and sacred secrets we make and keep to protect what we hold dear.”—Meng Jin, author of Little Gods and Self-Portrait with Ghost

“A beautifully written, page-turning novel that explores the traumatic legacy of war and the intimacy of family conflict with fierce grace and psychological acuity. Banyan Moon is a celebration of life in all its forms and a joy to read.”—Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Exiles

“Tender, gripping, and heartbreaking. A haunting page-turner that reexamines lineage, motherhood, and what it means to be a survivor—in every definition of the word.  A welcome debut from a stunning voice who will forever impact the Vietnamese American canon.” —Carolyn Huynh, author of The Fortunes of Jaded Women

"Banyan Moon offers an honest and aching exploration of the gulf between generations—how we misunderstand those we love the most, the unintentional hurt we cause them, how we struggle to find the language to connect. But it’s also a novel of hope, a story of forgiveness, a reminder that even though we can never fully know the people closest to us, it is worth the try."—Tracey Lien, international bestselling author of All That’s Left Unsaid

"Thao Thai pierces the veil between the living and the dead in this haunted and beautifully rendered debut. This is a story about mothers and daughters, the chasm where misunderstandings accrue, and enduring tenderness despite the little hurts we may inflict on our loved ones. Most affectingly, Thai gives us characters who mourn lost origins, but who still get to decide what home looks like. A spellbinding and intricately layered story, Banyan Moon celebrates Vietnamese women."—E.M. Tran, author of Daughters of the New Year 

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE: