Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

Trying to build your platform to sell your memoir book proposal? I was in that situation last year. This seminar will help writers brainstorm a variety of reported essay angles for their main personal story, and craft pitches for reported stories that include the right balance of research and connection to readers. We’ll talk about finding contacts for editors and then grabbing their attention. We'll examine sample pitches that helped me land research-backed essays in the New York Times, Guardian, Vogue and CNBC, all of which boosted my credibility as an expert, which in turn promoted my book.

This workshop is for all writers working in nonfiction, established or otherwise. The rigors of nonfiction lie in telling the truth, fact-checking the truth, and working with material evidence. The factually accurate in nonfiction is of utmost importance—but how do we write the factually accurate when facts can be slippery? How, and what, do we write when the history of a people hasn’t been kept, or has actively been erased? How can we acknowledge the murk and the inexact quality of memory on the page?

In this workshop, we’ll use Michael Taussig’s important summation of the work of anthropology—the “subject is not the truth of being but the social being of truth”— to help guide us through the lenses available in nonfiction. We’ll read some nonfiction that widens the scope of the genre, utilizes different lenses, and we’ll write in class using prompts inspired by our readings. Students will also workshop a piece. This class is for nonfiction work only.

In this workshop, we will read examples and begin drafting our own lyric essays. The lyric essay is a form that brings together elements of poetry, memoir, and creative nonfiction to invite a reader to an experience. Sometimes fragmented, the lyric essay allows us to draw from our own memories, impressions, ideations, questions and research to weave a narrative about our individual and collective experiences. We will write fragments in response to prompts and find strategies to weave them together into lyric essays.