Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026: Full Schedule

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9:00am MDT

No Genre/All Genre Generative Lab with Eileen Myles

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

In this weeklong seminar, poets, fiction writers, and memoirists (and even non-writers) will re-consider and even de-rail their works in progress (or write new ones) informed by some new approaches, formal constraints, good talk, and engagement with other art forms. We’ll write at least four pieces this week, taking cues from the history of poetry and prose, music, photos, and film, and we will effectively banish the lines that separate these forms of expression in order to instill our own work with the real breadth of this postmodern world. Bring a song, a problem (aesthetic or personal), or at least one significant photo, stuffed animal, flyer, something—a piece of real or artificial fruit. The goal is to create a live working environment, a studio effect, in order to generate more work and to get reinstalled or re-awakened in our writing process.

*Since this is a generative class and can accommodate a few more people, Eileen cannot meet one-on-one with each participant, but they tend to be around Lit Fest and there are ample opportunities for additional talks.

Speakers

Eileen Myles

Visiting Author

Eileen Myles the author of more than twenty books, including a “Working Life,” For Now, Evolution, Afterglow (a dog memoir), Chelsea Girls, and I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1974-2014. Myles’s many honors include four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

9:00am MDT

Writing for Young Adults

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT

Virtual

Description forthcoming

Speakers

Kelsey Day

Faculty

Kelsey Day is a young adult author and queer Appalachian poet. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Orion Magazine, Freeman’s and more. THE SPIRAL KEY is their first novel for young readers. You can find them online at KelseyDays.com or on Instagram @KelseyDays.

Monday June 15, 2026 9:00am - 11:30pm MDT
Virtual

YA/Children's

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Bait the Hook: Your First Few Pages

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

The first few pages of a story are the tryout; after that, the reader makes a decision to keep reading or move on. How can you “hook” your readers and immerse them in your narrative world? What techniques do you need to create a firm writer-reader contract? In this content-heavy class, we’ll explore hooks and expositions (a.k.a. beginnings): how to introduce your characters, ground your readers in your novel/memoir/short story/essay, and begin the art of narrative intrigue. Bring your ideas to class, and leave with new beginnings you can use immediately. Open to all prose writers.

This is the in-person version of this event.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Bait the Hook: Your First Few Pages (Livestream)

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Erika Krouse

Faculty

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction, Multi-Genre

Type advanced, intermediate, intro
Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Every Sentence an Ocean: Concision and Compression in Flash-Fiction

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

As anyone who’s ever sat down to write a flash story or essay knows, it can be incredibly difficult to fit an entire narrative into 1,000 words or less. Even more difficult: lacing that narrative with enough tension and emotional complexity to make your readers feel like they’ve devoured a much longer work. In this two-hour craft seminar, we’ll break down George Saunders’ 1995 flash fiction masterpiece “Sticks” on a sentence-by-sentence level to examine and emulate how he packs an entire ocean of complexity—and decades of narrative time—into just 392 words.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

From Morally Gray to Black: Creating Flawed and Unscrupulous Protagonists

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, claims: “The best way to create a memorable character is to make them both repellent and fascinating at the same time.” Indeed, more crucial than the likability of a protagonist is his/her charisma—even if that charisma only serves to hide complicated or even depraved psyches. In this class, we’ll explore some morally questionable protagonists from authors such as Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, and Flannery O’Connor. We’ll then try our hand at creating some of these fascinating, and sometimes terrifying, characters in our own work. The class will combine readings, writings, and discussions, and when we're finished you should be comfortable writing from the POV of not-so-sympathetic characters.

Speakers

Jon Bassoff

Faculty

Jon Bassoff is the author of ten novels, including his latest, The Memory Ward (Blackstone Publishing). His mountain gothic novel, Corrosion, has been translated in French and German and was nominated for the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, France’s biggest crime fiction award... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Novel Whispering

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Have a novel that you just can’t finish, or finish well? Considering writing a novel and want an insight into how to actually complete one? In this seminar, we'll identify hurdles in completing the process of novel creation, and we’ll learn how to get over them. The seminar will provide participants with practical techniques to kickstart their manuscripts, such as applied story structuring, thematic tuning, character mirroring, and more.
This is the in-person version on this event.

Speakers

Mat Johnson

Visiting Author

Mat Johnson is a Philip H Knight Chair of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications included the novels Invisible Things and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Novel Whispering (Livestream)

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Mat Johnson

Visiting Author

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction

Type advanced, intro, intermediate
Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

From Patient to Protagonist: Claiming Agency in Your Own Story

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Illness can make us feel passive, but memoir requires an active center. In this session, we’ll practice techniques for crafting a narrator who drives the story—even when circumstances are beyond their control. In this class, we’ll read brief examples and then draft scenes that externalize symptoms through action, imagery, and interaction. We’ll practice crafting vivid, fresh metaphors and sensory details that convey what it feels like to inhabit a changed or challenged body.

Speakers

Rachel Weaver

Faculty

Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now and which won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. She is on the faculty at Wilkes University’s low-residency MFA program in addition to teaching Lighthouse... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Squash For Golfers: Line Movement in Prose and Poetry

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

The defining characteristic of verse, formal or free, is the fact that the line makes a turn (versus) at some point before it reaches the right hand margin. There are any number of reasons why and places where that turn might be made. This seminar will focus on developing strategies for improving our sense of the line ending through readings of poems by Erika Jong, Joyce Carol Oates, W.G. Sebald, Colm Toibin, and John Updike.

Speakers

Paul Muldoon

Visiting Author

Paul Muldoon is the author of a number of poetry collections, including New Weather (1973), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996), Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002)—which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Author Branding for Introverts and Impostors (V)

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Authors in traditional publishing, indie publishing, and self-publishing are all expected to do a tremendous amount of the lifting in their own promotion. This part of the job of being an author stirs lots of emotional issues for many authors. This session will explore how to identify your own brand as an author and harness the power of enthusiasm to bypass imposter syndrome and prioritize self-care while finding your audience. This course is taught by a painful introvert who manages to read as a gregarious extrovert.

Speakers

Henry Lien

Faculty

Henry Lien is a 2012 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, Seattle. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Peasprout Chen middle grade fantasy series, which he began writing under the guidance of George R.R. Martin, Kelly Link, and Chuck Palahniuk at Clarion... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Publishing/Career

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Creatures of Impulse: What Fictions Writers Can Learn From TV

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

This session will focus on the way popular TV series hook viewers, construct scenes, build characters, and structure episodes. We’ll examine how this can easily be adapted to add energy to short stories, memoirs, novels, and maybe even poems! We will likely use the pilot (first) episodes of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Atlanta, and Insecure as examples, so you may want to watch those in advance. I'll show a few clips in class as time and technology allows.

Register using this link:
https://lighthousewriters.org/workshop/creatures-impulse-what-fictions-writers-can-learn-tv?session=8993

Speakers

Dean Bakopoulos

Visiting Author

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the novels Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Summerlong (Ecco/HarperCollins) and the forthcoming I Get Lonely in a Hurry. The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Dramatic Writing

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

How to Stop Worldbuilding and Start Worldconjuring

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writers wanting to build worlds are met with difficult questions: Should I describe the city’s sewer system for ten or twenty pages? How much to explain Frontier Utah’s rural bartering system of spiderwebs? These are also the wrong questions. As writer Lincoln Michel says, “Worldbuilding imposes. Worldconjuring collaborates.” In this seminar, we’ll challenge current paradigms for worldbuilding; instead, we’ll craft settings and circumstances through the power of detail selections, rule systems, and essential mysteries. Together, we’ll ask much better questions: in your new world, what do readers need to know and what do readers want to know?

Speakers

Alexander Lumans

Editor

Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction. He received fellowships in 2015 and 2024 for expeditions with The Arctic Circle Residency and he was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

To Flash Back or Not to Flash Back

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Good characters come with a past, but is a flashback the only way to let readers know about essential details from before the story’s start? Not necessarily. We’ll look at examples from writers who eschew flashbacks but still give readers a rich sense of a character’s past life, including excerpts from Kent Haruf, Jane Austen, and more. If you choose to use flashbacks, how do you do it well? We’ll look at the way experts including Willy Vlautin, Susan Straight, and Percival Everett slide gracefully in and out of flashback.

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 →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Collage as Poetic Practice

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

What can poets learn from the techniques of collage? In this image & text based seminar, we will discuss and practice collage in both written and visual mediums. Come ready to experiment and to play with textual fragments, images, scissors, paper, and glue. Participants, please bring collage materials (things to cut up).

Speakers

Andrea Rexilius

Faculty

Andrea Rexilius is the author of: Sister Urn (Sidebrow, 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks Séance (Coconut Books, 2014... Read More →

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

4:00pm MDT

Letting the I Ching Help You Write Your Story (V)

Monday June 15, 2026 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT

Virtual

Philip K. Dick claimed that he did not write one of his greatest novels, The Man in the High Castle, by himself. Dick discovered the I Ching when he began the novel and he claimed the I Ching co-wrote the novel with him. The I Ching is a 3,000 year-old collection of 64 poems. It can be read as philosophy but is most famous as an oracle, using a method of casting coins or yarrow stalks. This workshop guides students through the process of consulting the I Ching to guide the course of their story.

Speakers