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 Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying "Hey! I've been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes.”

In Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” the dialogue creates character, humor, tension, and meaning. How might we invite other voices into our poems as a way to open new opportunities? In this generative workshop we will read and discuss poems that make use of quotations and dialogue as counterpoints to the voice of the speaker, exploring what extra voices make possible, and using these techniques as springboards for our own work.

Whether your reference point is Shakespeare or Diane Seuss, Gwendolyn Brooks or Claude
McKay, Natasha Trethewey or Tyehimba Jess or Gerard Manley Hopkins, you have heard of this poetic form. There’s a reason the sonnet has persisted and permutated over hundreds of years— it’s versatile and malleable enough to handle whatever you want to throw at it. In this craft seminar, we’ll look at sonnets old and new, rhymed and unrhymed, experimental, contrapuntal, broken, ghostly, and more, and we’ll try our hands at making one ourselves.

In this class, we’ll experience the power of deep reading. Before class, you’ll be given two poems that serve as jumping off points to explore and be inspired by master poets of exceptional craft. Previous years have featured long poems by BH Fairchild, Larry Levis and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. We’ll explore both the measured unfolding of a longer poem and the lyric compression of another. Exercises, experiments, and your own poems will follow.

Structure should never be an afterthought for poets and writers—in poetry it often is the whole point, and in story it is the spine that lets a story stand upright—in this generative seminar we will work to create the frame and foundation for your own great poems and stories (and essays). We will begin with some core architectural strategies and choices that help shape compelling work across genres: tension arcs, complications and crisis turns, scene and image sequencing, and the purposeful use of propulsive detail. Seth is an award-winning poet and fiction writer and has taught both genres for decades. This seminar will help participants build pieces that move with intention and hold their weight. Through (very) short readings, craft discussions, and hands‑on exercises, writers will experiment with scaffolds that invite discovery and revision strategies that bring clarity to the page. Suitable for all levels.

How might Romanticism translate to our time? In this workshop, we'll carry its core precepts—spontaneity, accessible language, the connection between nature and human creativity, the power of individual imagination—into contemporary poetry. Drawing on Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake, we'll make our own departures into visionary lyricism.