Easthampton, MA
About us
Somehow School is a creative writing studio for kids and teens in Western Mass. We offer after-school programs during the school year, including small-group creative writing workshops, college application essay workshops, essay tutoring, creative writing tutoring, courses for homeschooling groups, and custom programming for schools.
Our writing classes are interdisciplinary, engaging with visual art, music, ecology, and obsolete technology. Each class begins with an “experiment”--write a short story with no nouns, or translate bird calls into words, or write a poem that can be read backwards or forwards. Our experimentation-focused approach helps students stop worrying about writing “correctly” and instead start to see language more like clay--a material they can build with.
Though we love to help brainstorm, at Somehow School we never dictate what students should write about or how. Instead, we help each student set and then achieve their own creative goals, whether they want to write a short story in text-message format or a screenplay about dogs in outer space.
About the instructor
(they/them or she/her)
Somehow School Founder
Nora Claire Miller is a writer and educator with more than a decade of experience teaching creative writing to kids and teens. Nora holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from Hampshire College. They have taught after-school poetry classes in Pittsfield public schools through The Mastheads, led youth programs and camps with the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the Iowa Youth Writing Project, the Junior High Writing Conference, and the Grant Wood Arts Colony Summer Camp. In addition to teaching writing, Nora has also adjudicated submissions for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and served as an admissions reader for the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. They have also privately tutored high school students in creative writing and college-application essays.
Nora’s debut book Groceries won the Fonograf Editions Open Genre Contest (selected by Srikanth Reddy) and will be published in October 2025. Their poems and essays appear in venues such as The Paris Review, Chicago Review, and Bennington Review.
Nora lives in Western Massachusetts with their partner Kelly Clare and their cat Ramona. When they’re not teaching or writing, Nora can usually be found gardening or taking apart an old computer.
Frequently asked questions
What are your after-school creative writing workshops like?
Sessions typically start with a quick writing prompt or game followed by a related lesson and group discussion. Then, students spend time on a long-term project of their choice--whether it’s a short story, a collection of poems, a graphic novel, an op-ed, a play, or something else entirely.
For students who already know what they want to write, we provide the support to make that happen, whether that’s feedback, encouragement, or even just a quiet space to write.
For students who aren’t sure what to write, we help brainstorm or give tried-and-tested writing prompts (we’ve got hundreds!).
How many students are there per class?
Our workshops have an eight-student cap.
What’s tutoring like?
For some students, one-on-one instruction works better than taking a group class. We provide custom instruction in everything from writing poems to novels to creative nonfiction. We also do college application essay tutoring.Tutoring takes place at our 83 Main St. location. We also tutor students virtually.
What are your college essay workshops like?
We offer a weekly workshop for high school seniors who are actively working on their college application essays.
These days, college applicants need to do more than just write polished essays. They need to write essays that will stand out from the AI-written masses. With ChatGPT, anyone can make an essay look polished on the surface. But it’s much harder to do the thing schools are looking for--to tell them an authentic story about who you are and what you’re about.
At Somehow School, we help high school students who are applying to college write memorable, authentic essays that don’t sound like they were written by a robot.
I heard you don’t care about spelling or grammar??!
It’s true--in our creative writing workshops, we tell students not to worry about spelling and grammar while they’re writing.
Stopping to look up every word or adhering to complicated rules can throw off the creative process. Plus, we live in a world with spell-check--it’s easy to make corrections later.
Language is a socially constructed system that is continuously evolving. We rewrite its rules every day, and young people are often a key part of that process.
We know our students have plenty to say, even if they can’t spell all the words or write them in the kind of grammatical English expected in most schools. By removing barriers to writing, we help students build confidence and skills at the same time.
Where are you located?
83 Main St., Easthampton MA, 01027
What’s your space like?
Somehow School is located in a historic storefront built in 1848. Our classroom is 500 sq. ft. with 12-foot ceilings and an exposed brick wall and a view of Mt. Tom out the window. We have a variety of places to write in the room, including a seminar table and comfy armchairs.
What if my kid is sick? What’s your policy on missed classes?
Please keep your kid at home if they’re sick! If a student misses a week due to illness, email us at info@somehowschool.org to request a voucher for a free week in their next Somehow School course. What’s your refund policy?
For eight-week workshops If a student can no longer attend and the workshop has not yet started, we’ll provide a full refund.
If a student has attended two classes or fewer in an eight-week workshop and then must drop the class, we’ll provide a 50% refund.
If a student has attended three classes or more, we can no longer provide a refund if they drop the class.
Why are you called the Somehow School?
“Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands near the sea –”
-Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson used to write poems on whatever was lying around--scraps of envelopes, or the backs of recipes. Because the pieces of paper were all different shapes and sizes, the poems changed to fit their containers--some poems shrinking to only a few words long, some lines stretching across whole envelopes.
The way you write something changes what you write. Writing a story by hand, you’ll use different words than you would on your smartphone. Typing with a typewriter is a totally different experience than typing on a computer.
At Somehow School, we pay attention to these differences and use them to grow our writing practices. We experiment: what happens when we write a poem in all caps while listening to music? What’s it like to write a poem all in lowercase while sitting in complete silence?
Somehow, the writing will get written. At Somehow School, we focus on the how.
In the age of AI, why is it important for kids to practice creative writing?
AI has made un-creative writing much easier. A robot can spit out a five-paragraph essay or even write a mediocre novel.
But good writing, the kind of writing you remember, is built on surprise--on combining words in new, exciting ways. Good writing breaks the rules. Good writing is a little strange just like people are a little strange. It’s what makes writing (and people) interesting.
An AI, meanwhile, can only imitate what it’s already seen. It can’t think outside the box, or come up with new ideas.
Somehow School helps young writers build the skills AI will never have--to communicate creatively, to think critically, and to imagine a better world.
Do you provide materials?
We provide all materials for students to use during classes, including pens & pencils, notebooks, very old laptops, and typewriters.
Why do you use old laptops and typewriters in your classes?
We provide outdated but functional laptops (and occasionally typewriters) for students to write with during workshops. Using old machines provides a sense of novelty while also limiting distractions; you can’t browse the internet on them. This practice also helps prevent e-waste and encourages students to think sustainably about technology.
How old are the laptops?
Mostly MacBooks from 2009. 2009? Aren’t those basically inoperable?
These computers can’t function on the modern internet. But we don’t use the modern internet in our classes. At Somehow School, students use Microsoft Word 2008 to write. Each student is issued a flash drive upon which to store their Word documents. Everyone will also have the opportunity to email their files to themselves after each class, and to print their files out during each class. And Somehow School staff back up the students’ flash drives weekly on a more modern computer.
Do you offer reduced tuition or scholarships?
We recognize that our fees aren’t affordable to every family. To address this, we plan to transition to a sliding-scale tuition model. In the meantime, we’re able to offer a limited number of need-based scholarships.If you can’t afford our fee but want to enroll your child in a Somehow School program, email us at info@somehowschool.org with “scholarship request” in the subject line. In the email, let us know which class your child would like to enroll in, and an amount you’d feel comfortably able to pay for the class, even if it’s zero dollars. We’ll write back and let you know if we’re able to accommodate your request.
Accessibility
Our entrance is on the ground floor, but there is a short step leading to the front entrance. There is also a short step leading to the restroom.
To protect against COVID-19 and other airborne illnesses, the space is equipped with a high-quality air purifier that provides 24/7 HEPA filtration. Students are not required to wear masks in workshops, but KN-95s will be made available for free for anyone who wants one. Nora, our main instructor, typically wears a mask while teaching.