Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

At the start of every great story is a question and the need to explore or understand better. In this class, we’ll explore how intentional research can enrich your creative work and give it depth, texture, and authority. Drawing from my background in journalism, I’ll show you practical ways to design a research plan, find reliable sources, and conduct meaningful interviews with relatives and strangers. Whether you’re writing an essay, memoir, profile, or novel, you’ll leave with tools to approach research as a creative, ethical and enjoyable practice.

Writers of all genres are invited to take part in an experiment designed to help you listen. In the midst of creating a work, it’s necessary to invest time in dreaming what it could be. Throughout our process, we may make statements, diagram plot, lay down tidy plans for where a work will go, what it will mean, and what it will sound like. But your best-laid plans might be concealing a more exciting path you haven’t imagined yet.. Perhaps you have begun to perceive it, but you have not wholly become conscious of it. In the days leading up to this seminar, you will have an assignment: listen to your work in progress. During the seminar, we’ll abstain from editing and instead listen to what our novel, memoir, essay, or poem has to teach us.

The tradition of nature writing goes back to the Romantics and before, most likely because we are creatures of place. In this hands-on and feet-walking session, we'll explore some of the 'natural' settings just outside of Lighthouse, using the landscape as inspiration, and see what we find, and what the world around us has to say. We won't be walking miles on end, but please wear comfortable shoes, a good hat, and sunscreen. We'll walk around the 39th Avenue Greenway for a time, and then settle back into the air conditioned comfort of 3844 York Street to share and perhaps dig a little deeper.

This course will demystify the TEDx process by helping writers find a TEDx organization taking applications, understand what organizers are looking for in your application, apply for a TEDx talk to be selected, and learn the difference between writing a TED talk script and an essay. I'll provide handouts with templates and links to helpful resources. My content will include personal anecdotes and interviews I've had with three TEDx show producers and two essayists who have given TEDx talks.

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.