1 session, May 11, noon-2pm EST

Online

$100

Enroll in this class.

It’s been called the “holy grail” of personal essay publications: the Modern Love column in the New York Times. Your best story. 1500 words. A potentially career-changing publication. We’ll talk about what it takes and how to get your piece noticed.

In this popular one-session course, we’ll talk about selecting stories, following the form, and the keys to making your essay stand out. We’ll also cover the ethics of writing about other people, and how to handle what happens if and when you do have a deeply personal piece published. 

And hey, even if your essay doesn’t get accepted by the editors, writing a Modern Love is a great practice in form, precision, and boiling down a story to its core. A lot of what we’ll cover here are skills that are useful in writing any personal essay.

Enroll in this class.

About the Instructor

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here, plus the forthcoming novels Dear Edna Sloane (Red Hen Press, 2024) and Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Amy's essays have appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, and Literary Hub. She has short fiction and poetry publications forthcoming in No Tokens and Pigeon Pages. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or @amyshearn.