Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

How does a story move? What constitutes successful movement, and what can we learn from moments where the story fails to achieve its own goals? With particular attention to plot, structure, character evolution, and logic, we’ll use this critique-based workshop to examine these questions as they pertain to participants' short stories or excerpts from longer work. We’ll begin workshop by having each participant read aloud one sentence from their work, to remind us of the spell of their fiction, and then we will discuss what we found to be persuasive, and what we found to be less so, with the aim of offering a path forward for revision.

Engaging in play strengthens our linguistic abilities and our capacity to imagine other ways to move through a day (or a life). This workshop will bring people together to play with language as a group and as individuals. We will work to lift ourselves and each other out of ruts worn into our minds. We will pick up strings of words and ask "What would happen if we took this in a different direction?" We will surprise and be surprised in turn.

Through games and other playful writing exercises, you will generate language that you can bring home with you to spark new work. In some cases you may create an entire poem during the workshop itself. The games and exercises are designed to delight and to be shared widely. You can play them later with friends when you (or they) need to connect with a wildness within.

It is probably going to be weird and it is almost certainly going to be fun.

Panelists include: Camille Bromley (NYT Opinion Special Projects), Alexander Lumans (American Short Fiction), Holly Amos (Poetry), and Jane Huffman (Denver Quarterly)

Publishing a poem, essay, news piece, or short story can be a huge accomplishment on its own, but it can also be the first move in a much longer game. This panel brings together editors from literary magazines, newspapers, and major outlets (including an editor from American Short Fiction, a special projects editor from New York Times Opinion, an editor from Poetry, and an editor from Denver Quarterly) to talk about what they're looking for, how to get their attention, and what a single well-placed piece can set in motion. One Lighthouse writer published just such an essay in the Times, and watched it become the foundation of her book published in February. Come hear how that happens, and how to start building your own trail of clips, credits, and opportunities.

This immersive workshop invites writers of all levels to explore the vibrant intersection of visual art and the written word. Ekphrastic writing, poetry, or prose is directly inspired by works of art, and it offers a powerful way to deepen perception, escape the linear mind during drafting, and evolve originality and surprise in one’s artistic voice. Through guided in-class exercises and prompts, we’ll explore visual ekphrasis, as well as experimental forms of audio and somatic ekphrasis to generate new fiction. Participants will receive first-blush feedback on their work, and opportunities to share will be available to those who would like to do so.

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.

Poems have their own lives and their own minds, it seems. At some point, even with our best intentions, we may encounter resistance from the poem. Or worse, the poem may revolt and fall apart. So perhaps, the poem is like a young adult: It wants to say something and needs the freedom to do so. For this to happen, we as poets must set aside our expectations and predeterminations of what a poem “should be.” Perhaps we need to get out of the way and let the young poem find itself, its shape, its own life. This is to say, we mustn’t be afraid to let the poem try things and fail. We must encourage its curiosity and courage.

In this workshop, we’ll see what happens when we get out of the way and follow the poem’s desires. We’ll set aside our ideas about right and wrong. Instead, we’ll ask, what happens when we completely alter the punctuation? What happens with short lines versus no line breaks at all? What happens when the text sprawls across the page freely or sings from a cozy corner? We will embrace missteps as part of the process, all in pursuit of the question, What does the poem want?

Participants will need a notebook dedicated as a “thinking journal” to write in and, outside of class, a computer and an open mind to listen sensitively and judgment-free to our young poems.

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.