Nine weeks with Solomon Ardent and eleven other writers. We draft, read aloud, cut a quarter, and finish the essay you have been carrying for years. Taught at Northwind Institute since 2017.
Each module ends with a finished piece of writing — a paragraph, a draft, a section, a full essay. Nothing is theoretical. Everything is read aloud on Tuesday.
Module IWeek 02
The Honest First Sentence
By Friday you will have written, discarded, and rewritten the opening of your essay seven times. The seventh will be the one you keep.
Map the load-bearing walls of an 8,000-word piece. Learn where to put the staircase, where to leave a window, and which corridor the reader will quietly skip.
Interviewing strangers, returning to them, and making the room — the smell, the chair, the silence between answers — visible on the page.
7 lessons · 3h 50m
Module IVWeek 08
Editing With a Cold Hand
Cut 22% on the first pass. 11% on the second. By the end of the week you will know which sentences were lying to you the whole time.
Lessons
9
Duration
5h 04m
What graduates make
Three essays, one cohort each.
01
Soraya Mehta — Cohort 9 — The Atlantic, March 2025
A 6,400-word essay on the closing of her grandmother's tailoring shop in Karachi, structured as a slow walk through eight unfinished garments. Drafted in week 3, finished in week 9, sold to The Atlantic before she had a chance to print it.
02
Adelaida Pérez-Costa — Cohort 7 — Granta 168
An essay on the year her father stopped speaking, told entirely through what he ate. Three workshops, two rewrites, one 1:1 with Solomon. Granta took it in her first pitch.
03
Hiroshi Tanaka — Cohort 11 — Mercury Quarterly, Spring 2026
Reporting from a closed-down train station outside Sapporo, structured as a timetable. Hiroshi rewrote the opening paragraph eleven times during week 2 — the eleventh became the lede.
The cohort vs going it alone
You can write the essay alone. Most writers don't.
Capability
This course
Going it alone
Weekly written feedback on 3,000-word drafts
Included
—
Live workshop with 11 other writers
Included
—
1:1 with Solomon Ardent in week 5 and week 9
Included
—
Pitching guide and editor introductions on graduation
Included
—
Finishing the essay before the year ends
94.6%of cohort
11%of solo writers
From three cohorts
I had been carrying the same essay in a notebook for four years. In the second week of Cohort 9, Solomon asked me one question about it and I went home and wrote 4,200 words by Sunday. It ran in The Atlantic in March.