The Core Curriculum
The MFA, brought into
The MFA, brought into
the modern era.
Twelve courses. Two terms of twenty-six weeks. One academic year. Each course runs four weeks — recorded lessons, a live session with the instructor, a graded assignment, and an examination that enters your transcript.
| Code | Course | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Term I — Foundations Weeks 1–26 | ||
| AA·101 | The Architecture of Story | Structure, causality, act design — the load-bearing shape beneath every finished book, and why most abandoned drafts collapse in the same place. |
| AA·102 | Character & Interiority | Desire, contradiction, and the interior life. Readers follow people, not plots; this is how you build one worth following. |
| AA·103 | Scene & Sequence | The unit of story. Entrances, turns, exits — and the sequencing that carries a reader from one to the next without noticing. |
| AA·104 | Voice, Style & Point of View | Sentence-level music, diction, psychic distance, and the consequential choice of who is telling this. |
| AA·105 | Close Reading the Moderns | The canon studio. Contemporary novels taken apart chapter by chapter — the reading habit that separates writers who improve from writers who stall. |
| AA·106 | The Writing Practice | Habit, drafting stamina, and process design. The professional's unglamorous engine, taught as a discipline rather than a personality trait. |
| Term II — Execution Weeks 27–52 | ||
| AA·201 | The Novel Engine | Long-form architecture: outlining that survives contact with a draft, midpoint physics, and the second-half problem. |
| AA·202 | Dialogue & Subtext | What people say, what they mean, and the working space between the two. |
| AA·203 | Setting, World & Atmosphere | Place as pressure rather than backdrop; research worn lightly; the atmosphere that makes a book feel inhabited. |
| AA·204 | Revision & the Second Draft | Diagnosis before surgery. Developmental passes, line work, and the professional judgment of when a book is finished. |
| AA·205 | The Professional Author | Publishing paths, rights, contracts, money, and the shape of a career — taught with numbers, not mystique. |
| AA·206 | Capstone Studio | An examined work: completed, submitted, assessed, and entered on the transcript. |
Progression
You always know
You always know
where you stand.
Your student record sits at the center of the Academy: courses, prerequisites, assignments, examinations, rank, and progress — kept like a proper transcript, because it is one.
- Term I and its examinations confer Apprentice Storyteller
- Term II and the Capstone confer Journeyman Storyteller
- Professional and Master are earned through published work and the cohort path
Admissions
Doors open April 2027.
The founding Spring Term admits by application from the waitlist. Join it and you will hear from the Dean directly when the window opens.