Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

We’ll begin with a difficult task: do not outline your novel or novella or short story or essay or memoir. Do not think out the plot, the narrative arc, the protagonist’s journey, whatever you want to call it. Instead, try to find the story through an honest excavation of the characters’ total experience of the situation in which they find themselves. Do that, and the story will begin to write itself.


But how, precisely, does one go about this “excavation”? And how, technically speaking, can we ignite a story into “writing itself”? Come to this workshop, and we’ll demystify those writerly tools and skills that, time and time again, if they are sharp enough, and if the writer can summon enough daily faith and nerve, can penetrate the mystery of story itself.


Fiction, as well as creative nonfiction is welcome. We will be doing in-class writing exercises and workshopping each participant’s submission.

Maybe you’ve been wanting to try writing creative nonfiction. Maybe you have been writing it but are feeling a little bit stuck. Maybe you’re restless, curious. Maybe you’re wondering how to create a cohesive work out of a lifetime of material. Where to start? How to shape it? This generative workshop is geared toward inspiration, starts and restarts, and rethinking nonfiction, at any level. Whether you’re interested in memoir, essays, memoir-in-essays, or anything in between, you’ll find guidance, support, writing prompts, and discussion aimed at helping you figure out your writing process. We’ll talk about ideas, structure, perspective, ethical concerns (how do we know what we should write? how do we write about other people?), and more. This workshop is all about gaining greater focus and understanding as we generate work and ideas in a fun and supportive environment.

Art is architecture; art is artificial; art is...? The biggest challenge for any writer of narrative is finding the map from beginning to end. This workshop is designed for writers working on book-length memoirs who wish to delve more deeply into the issues of structure, style, and voice: these three craft points will be our focus, as they make up the net that holds a narrative together in a propulsive, engaging, immersive, and beautiful way. The goal of this workshop is to take your completed manuscript to the next level. We'll also discuss different avenues of publication.

Behind every piece of narrative nonfiction there exists a dual narrative. This partnership of story with meaning is often the blend that provides memoir, personal essay, and narrative nonfiction pieces with both tension and emotional consequence. There is the story as it exists on the page, and then there is the shadow narrative, whispering behind that story, trying to make sense of it. In this weeklong workshop, students will be asked to explore these dual narratives in their own work and in published works from contemporary practitioners such as Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Eula Biss, Richard McCann, and others. Particular attention will be paid to voice and point of view.

This craft seminar aims to demystify the process of writing a memoir. We'll talk about structure, perspective, ethical concerns, and more, including how to begin and how to continue. Let's deal with the anxiety together, and we’ll leave with the confidence and tools we need to write personal essays and memoirs!

Contemporary memoirs are organized in many ways, from experimental to traditional three-act. But when it comes to structure on a page-by-page and sentence-by-sentence basis, there are some tenets most published memoirs follow. Come learn to discern the difference between sharing memories and creating a story, how to structure your memoir using scenes and transitions, how to work with causality, how and when to skip big chunks of time in a memoir, and more. We’ll look at examples from memoirs by Carmen Maria Machado, Anthony Bourdain, Daisy Hernández and more.

Hybrid writing often emerges from and recontextualizes documentary material, such as personal archives, news reports, legal documents, and scientific papers. In this seminar, we’ll explore how such sources can be transformed—and become transformative—in cross-genre writing. Through short readings and discussion, we’ll consider when and how writers can use documents to question the authority, perspectives, and legacies of received narratives. Reflective exercises will help participants identify potential topics for research, outline source materials, and imagine hybrid projects that blur the boundaries between fact, history, memory, and speculation.

If you write about real people, sometimes they get mad at you. Your memoir, novel, short story, essay, or poem may cause problems ranging from family tiffs to actual lawsuits. All of us wonder if it’s okay to write certain stories, and further, what to consider when publishing them. What’s off limits, and who gets to decide? What types of things should you worry about? If you write fiction, are you immune? (Short answer: no.) How can you tweak your text to safeguard your work? You’ll leave this class with practical, concrete tools to protect your writing without compromising your vision.

In the craft book Tell It Slant, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola ponder the question memoirists face again and again: Does nonfiction mean “no fiction”? What do we do when we don’t remember or know all the details? How do we handle the fact we are all inherently unreliable narrators? “Perhapsing” is a term coined by Lisa Knopp to describe one technique a memoirist can employ to signal to the reader that they are now speculating. We will experiment with this strategy (and others) while focusing on how to simultaneously establish and maintain intimacy and trust with the audience.