Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

The popular image of the poet is as a dasher off of poem drafts. So manic and mercurial are poets’ imaginations that not even champion typists can keep abreast of them. If there’s a problem, it’s something to which they can return in a quiet moment way down the road. The focus of this week will be to set ourselves against this popular image, to make every moment a quiet moment, to fix problems as they arise, to revise even as the poem’s vision for itself is slowly coming into being and, in the end, to cut down on a lot of unnecessary work. The key to this approach is to write the poem one line at a time, to allow one idea to lead to another, and to avoid getting ahead of ourselves. When we implement this approach, the poem is now, paradoxically, more likely to bring us to a place of genuine immediacy and vitality which had hitherto been illusory.

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.

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.

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).

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.