Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

Plotting your novel doesn’t have to feel like pulling teeth. Writers will learn about the plot points roadmap—the five major plot points in every story that you need to know before starting your first draft. We'll talk about the three-act structure, theme as the touchpoint for every story, and how plot and character rely on each other and propel each other forward. We’ll identify the five major turning points in every plot that keep your story on track to the finish line (even if the story wanders a little in between).

Using fundamental techniques such as writing like a camera and tracking the sensory experience of a POV character, we'll learn how to write successful visionary movements such as hallucinations, delusions, distorted realities, daydreams, and interior fantasy lives. We'll study literary examples and film sequences as models for how to convince our reader they too are seeing and experiencing what the characters on the page think they are seeing and experiencing, when in fact it’s all in their head.

To the tune of all things protest song and poetry: In this generative workshop, we'll read poems, speeches, essays, and lyrics that offer a lens on liberation and resistance, while highlighting the personal voice and experience. We'll consider the long-held traditions of poetry as a tool for social change and examine our own relationships to that history. Participants will write from prompts and then, depending on time, share some of their writing. Appropriate for all levels of experience.

The latest novel from Booker Prize–winning George Saunders, Vigil, takes place in a single evening—the last one, in fact, for dying oil baron K.J. Boone. During his twilight hours, Boone finds himself transported to otherworldly realms populated by the living and the dead. And everyone he meets has an urgent story to tell. In this class, we’ll dissect Saunders’s meaningful storytelling choices. We’ll discuss his emotionally affecting style that takes bigger and bigger risks by the page. And we’ll experiment in our own writing with his craft techniques. Come ready to learn from one of our modern masters!

The minutia of our lives is a rich and wild and wonderful place. In this course, we'll look at a variety of writers—Joy Williams, Grace Paley, Lynne Tillman, Stephen Dixon, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders— to see how they mine the strangenesses of the everyday. In looking at these writers, we’ll identify places in our own work where the fascinating inner life of the work we do, the food we eat, the tasks we complete, the rules we have to follow, can become the thrilling, perplexing, nuanced, and propulsive heart that keeps us invested in a story.

Your fully developed literary voice is as individual as your brain, your intelligence, your sight. It will set you apart from all other writers. Taking inspiration from Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page and Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, we’ll examine your voice, discover its strengths and individuality, and ultimately help you break through to an even more distinct and complex voice on the page.

What happens when a poem takes its shape from an art installation, divination text, or folk calendar entry? In this class, we'll explore how poets borrow forms—structures adapted from non-poetic sources—to create surprising and generative constraints. Through a range of examples, we’ll explore how to identify promising forms in the world around you and adapt them for poem making.