Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026: Full Schedule

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9:00am MDT

Desire and Power

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Desire is a fundamental element of character-building, yet in too many drafts, character desires lack urgency or are too easily thwarted or fulfilled. In this seminar, we’ll discuss different ways to pump up the stakes and, even better, consider the sparks that can fly when multiple characters have multiple, competing desires. How can tension be built through power dynamics? What are the ways in which power might manifest? How might it be applied? And how and when might it shift, so that your characters—and your reader—are kept on their toes?

Speakers

Dino Enrique Piacentini

Faculty

Dino Enrique Piacentini grew up in Los Angeles, lived in San Francisco for twenty years, and has also, at various times, set down stakes in Houston, Oaxaca, Champaign, and Prague. His debut novel, Invasion of the Daffodils, about a Mexican-American family living on an island off the... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Haunted Landscapes: Writing Place as Presence

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this generative workshop, we’ll go about the project of animating setting as character. Through prompts and discussion, we’ll explore how landscape can embody memory, loss, and the uncanny—whether rural, urban, or imagined. Come ready to write!

Speakers

Hillary Leftwich

Faculty

Hillary Leftwich is a neurodivergent, multimedia writer and the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press, 2019 and Agape Editions, 2023 new edition), Aura (Future Tense Books and Blackstone Audio Publishing, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (forthcoming... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Two-Day Intensive: The Visionary Movement

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

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.

Speakers

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is a writer living on the East Side of Old Town Longmont in a Victorian bungalow one alley away from the train tracks. Her first novel Fig debuted from Simon & Schuster in 2015 and was selected by NPR as A Best Read of the Year before going on to win a 2016... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 9:00am - 12:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: Your Voice on the Page

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

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.

Speakers

William Haywood Henderson

Faculty

William Haywood Henderson earned a BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA in creative writing from Brown University, and attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing. He is the author of three novels: Native, The Rest of... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Two-Day Intensive

1:30pm MDT

Literary Ephemera

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this generative, multi-genre course, we’ll explore alternative approaches to storytelling, such as erasure, literary collage, photo captions and image-text hybrids. We’ll create narratives relying less on plot and more on association, juxtaposition and negative space. This seminar will be run like an art studio – with live prompts and plenty of cutting, pasting, erasing and replacing. Through examples, discussion and exercises, we’ll learn how everyday ephemera can jumpstart your writing, help you approach a project from another angle, or simply see your world differently. Bring your inner child, an open mind, and be prepared to play.

Speakers

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Faculty

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of the essay collection, Descanso for My Father, the memoir, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, and his newest, Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Autumn House... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Structure through Motif

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

A motif is a recurring element in a piece of art—an object, action, idea, sensation, or just a word or line. Saris. Doors opening and closing. Variations of the word “small.” And, like characters, motifs can develop over the course of a narrative, adding layers of suggestion and meaning. They can even serve as a narrative’s primary structural element. In this seminar, we’ll consider motifs that call to us; locate potential motifs in our own drafts; identify ways to tease out arcs for our motifs; and maybe even figure out how to use those motifs to build an entire story or essay around. Bring something short you’d like to play around with.

Speakers

Dino Enrique Piacentini

Faculty

Saturday June 13, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

I Shot the Sheriff: Writing True/Untrue Confessions

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Literary confessions generate sympathy, create immediacy, and solidify the confessor’s relationship with an empathetic reader. But how do you navigate the trickier aspects of confession: drama vs. self-indulgence, getting the reader to care, and scariest of all, what your mother might think? In this class, we’ll examine how the experts navigate their real and imaginary confessions, and plunder their secrets for our personal use. And then confess to it. Privacy will be respected; open to all genres.

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Faculty

Erika Krouse has taught at Lighthouse since 2008; she is a Book Project mentor and a winner of the Lighthouse Beacon Award. Erika's most recent collection of short stories, Save Me, Stranger, is out with Flatiron Books in January 2025. It has garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Literary Swagger: Writing Prose that Makes Readers Take Notice

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Have you ever read a passage in a book that made you want to applaud, howl, laugh, and most of all, underline? Some writers have literary swagger, and don’t think that people don’t notice! Swagger can arrive through confidence, humor, decisiveness, or intensity of feeling. Swagger happens when the voice of the prose rises to meet the pitch of the story in an important moment. In this class we’ll read examples from writers including Miranda July, Deborah Jackson Taffa, Olga Tokarczuk, Damon Young, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Kevin Wilson, and Hanif Abdurraquib and try writing knockout prose of our own.

Speakers

Jenny Shank

Faculty

Jenny Shank's short story collection, Mixed Company, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and the Colorado Book Award and her novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award in fiction.

Jenny's stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, McSweeney's, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Poets & Writers, Bust Magazine, The Guardian, Santa Monica... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Out of Character

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

TBA

Contrary to everything writers are told about crafting credible characters, this workshop will explore when and why your characters should do something “out of character.” Practicing techniques we’ll discuss in class, we’ll further develop characters, build tension, create conflict, and/or work toward revelation and resolution. We will use low-stakes fiction-focused writing exercises to explore the idea but creative nonfiction writers and memoirists will learn how to use the same concept in their work. All participants will learn who the people populating their pages really are.

Speakers

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Unspooling Local Lore: Bringing Your Setting to Life

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Even as many of us can quickly identify the eccentricities and mythology of places we’ve called home, it can be enormously challenging to fully capture a place on the page. In this two-hour, generative craft seminar, writers will have the opportunity to name, map, and explicate the urban legends, suburban gossip, and local lore that defines the towns and cities we call home, and, in doing so, bring the settings of our fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to life in more vivid detail.

Speakers

Chris Vanjonack

Faculty

Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Fort Collins, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in One Story, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. In... Read More →

Saturday June 13, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre