Writing the Heart
Course About —
Writing the Heart is a writing practice built around storytelling, self-discovery, emotional honesty, and bringing your lived experience to the page. Some people join because they want to write memoir, personal essays, or books. Others come because they want a deeper relationship with themselves, a place to reflect honestly, or a meaningful creative community where they can slow down and reconnect with what matters. Both approaches belong here.
I’m a longtime memoir teacher and writer, so elements of storytelling and craft naturally weave into the classes. But this is not a rigid workshop focused on critique or performance. At its core, *Writing the Heart* is about discovering yourself through writing and bringing your full, messy, complicated human self onto the page.
Enrollment Options —
Online Zoom Classes
- Each online session lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes
- Meets twice per week
Location : Online Zoom
Dates : Tuesday, June 23, 2026 – August 27, 2026.
Length : 10 weeks
Tuition : $500
In-Person Boulder Group
- We’ll gather outdoors at North Boulder Park on Monday evenings to write together beneath the trees and open sky, surrounded by summer light, conversation, and the living world.
- Like the online classes, these gatherings are designed to help people reconnect with themselves through writing. Some participants may be working on memoir or personal essays. Others may simply want a place to slow down, reflect, and listen more carefully to their own lives.
Location : North Boulder Park
Address : 9th Street & Dellwood Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80304
Dates : Mondays, June 22, 2026 – August 10, 2026
Time : 6:30–8:00 pm
Length : 8 weeks
Tuition : $395
Note : No writing experience is necessary. Bring a notebook, a pen, a blanket or chair if you’d like, and your full messy human self.
What Happens in Class —
Each session follows a simple structure designed to help people settle into themselves and begin writing from a more honest place.
- Meditation: Brief two-minute meditation.
- Check-ins: From there, we do check-ins as a community. Participants briefly share how they’re doing, what’s moving in their lives, or what they’re discovering through the writing process.
- Reflection: I then offer a short talk or reflection. Sometimes this includes ideas about memoir, storytelling, emotional truth, memory, scene, voice, or the deeper meaning hidden inside our experiences.
- Prompt: After that, I give a guided journaling or storytelling prompt designed to help you access memory, feeling, longing, grief, beauty, joy, conflict, transformation, and the deeper themes moving beneath your life.
- Writing: We then write silently together for 20 minutes.
- Discussion: The final part of class is devoted to discussion and optional reading aloud. The atmosphere is supportive, thoughtful, warm, and human.
Who This Is For —
Writing the Heart is for:
- People who want a meaningful writing practice
- Beginning writers who want a place to explore themselves through journaling and reflection
- Memoirists and personal essay writers looking for fresh material and deeper emotional truth
- People moving through change, grief, healing, awakening, or reinvention
- Creative people longing for community and honest conversation
- Writers who want encouragement without harsh critique
- Some students in this group do not think of themselves as writers at all.
- Others have written entire memoirs inspired by prompts and discoveries that emerged in these sessions.
- And many people fall somewhere in between.
What You’ll Receive —
Through this practice, you will:
- Develop a steady writing rhythm
- Generate material for memoirs, essays, journals, newsletters, or creative projects
- Strengthen your voice and emotional honesty on the page
- Learn elements of storytelling and memoir craft in an accessible way
- Reconnect with memory, creativity, imagination, and feeling
- Experience the support of a thoughtful writing community
Why Story? —
I believe deeply in the power of story.
Not simply as entertainment, but as a way of understanding who we are, what we’ve lived through, and what our lives might be asking of us now.
When we tell the truth about our experience, something begins to move.
We remember ourselves differently.
We begin to see meaning where before there was only confusion or survival.
That is the deeper spirit of Writing the Heart.
You do not need to be polished or certain.
You only need the willingness to show up honestly and begin.
About Brad Wetzler —
Brad Wetzler is an award-winning memoirist, longtime magazine writer and editor, and teacher of transformational memoir and personal storytelling.
For more than thirty years, he has written about adventure, spirituality, psychology, travel, relationships, and the search for meaning in a complicated human life. He spent more than six years as a senior editor at *Outside* magazine and later worked as a contributing editor there for more than two decades. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Wired, Yoga Journal, Travel + Leisure, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and many other publications.
Brad is the author of the memoir *Into the Soul of the World*, published by Hachette Books, a story of adventure, loss, longing, healing, and spiritual awakening.
After years of adventure, heartbreak, healing, and spiritual exploration, Brad gradually shifted toward teaching writing not simply as craft, but as a path of self-discovery.
For years, Brad has taught memoir and transformational writing through workshops, retreats, coaching, and online communities. Some students come to become stronger writers. Others come searching for creativity, healing, clarity, or community.
Brad lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he writes, teaches, practices yoga, hikes in the mountains, and continues exploring the mystery of being alive.
Choose the format and section that feels right for you and come write with us.
Your life already contains the material.
This class helps you listen for it.
