Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

Often, the process of drafting fiction is one of uncovering: What is it we actually mean to be writing about, and how can we bring that thread to the surface in revision? At the same time, one of the great pleasures of reading is the consideration of suggestions or questions that remain just beneath the surface of the text.


In this workshop, we'll consider the “layers” of a story, and we’ll explore how some of those subterranean layers can guide us toward structures and narrative arcs that serve the project. We'll negotiate the balance between what works best when said directly and what works best when it’s left to be discovered by the reader. Each workshop will open with discussion of a published short story and a brief responsive writing exercise; then we’ll move to an in-depth discussion of work submitted by participants.

Novels are long, often unruly, and inherently ambitious projects that require the writer to be both intimate with and distant from the text. It's easy to type a bunch of pages, but it’s hard to make them captivate the reader and ensure that the journey adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This course will explore the tools needed to bring your novel-length manuscript to life in its strongest form. Your novel has strengths: we'll explore how you can build on them. Your novel has weaknesses: we'll identify them and create strategies for you to overcome them. Together, we'll reveal what your novel is actually about, as opposed to what you planned for it to be. We’ll examine its hidden structures, and we’ll enable your characters and their struggles to come alive on the page.

In this weeklong workshop, we’ll explore the intimate relationship between situation and event in narrative using work submitted by participants. The goal is to gain a stronger understanding of and appreciation for the underlying or pre-existing dramatic context that gives meaning to plot, character actions, and even the structure of a piece. We’ll use this stronger understanding to develop a more thorough conceptualization of our work so that we can make exciting, unexpected, and more meaningful choices in our stories.

We’ll be working with the below definitions:

Situation: All of the facts that comprise the starting condition of a character’s life at the beginning of a given story, novel, scene, or act. We may understand situation as another word for circumstance raised to the level of dramatic action and intent.

Event: The event is the happening or the trigger shot of a given scene, story, or novel. There are capital E Events and little e events. But regardless, both kinds of events should be drawn out of the very bedrock of your narrative and dramatic situation.

Writing is decision making, nothing more and nothing less. What word? Where to place the comma? How to shape the paragraph? Join Steve Almond for a workshop focused on improving the decisions you make in your writing. By looking critically and carefully at other people’s work, you’ll walk away with a better sense of how to improve your own. The idea is not to slow your rate of composition via compulsive revision, but to instead make better decisions in the first place and to recognize quickly when you haven’t.

The most important decision a writer makes is who tells their story. In this workshop, we will examine each other's manuscripts primarily through the lens of point of view and by using the concept of narrative strategy, but we will also take each manuscript as a whole and discuss how all the craft elements are working together. The primary question we will ask is, "How can the manuscript be a stronger, deeper version of itself?" This workshop is open to short story writers and novelists with stand-alone excerpts.

In this generative workshop, we’ll either begin brand new pieces, or begin a brand new version of an old piece. In either case, we’ll use our clean slates to find startling originality, optimal angles of approach, and the energies that will carry a story or novel through to the end. We’ll write both in class and outside of class and (voluntarily) share what we’ve written. In the last two days of class, we’ll squeeze in mini-workshops on everyone’s opening page. Accepted participants do not need to come in with an idea of what to write, although they may.

Characters are the most basic part of writing fiction, but just how do you create fictional people that will win readers over with their authenticity and verve? We'll study how masters such as Kent Haruf, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Ann Patchett introduce major and minor characters, talk about "spark plug characters" and how to create them, learn how to collect character details in a writer's notebook, and discuss the importance of giving your characters skills.

Kelly Link and Susanna Clarke write stories in which the extraordinary emerges from the ordinary in an elegant, intimate, and unsettling manner. We’ll explore key techniques that shape their short fiction, such as finely calibrated voice, well-placed rupture, and invitation into mystery. Discussion of excerpts will lead into generative exercises, encouraging writers to experiment with modulating voice and narrative distance, layering the uncanny into the everyday, and crafting tension through implication. Participants will have opportunities to share their inspired yet distinct approaches to estrangement and enchantment.

Even when you think you know where the draft of your story or poem is headed, its "real" ending is often lurking somewhere beneath the surface. In this discussion class, we will close-read the endings of two works of fiction and poetry on the spot (no advance reading required). The goal is to figure out not only how/if these endings "satisfy" but what "satisfaction" actually means for them and for our own projects.

A story in which characters don’t suffer (or don’t suffer enough) is a story that’s easy to put down. In the most compelling stories, characters struggle mightily. They grapple with impossible dilemmas. They face their greatest fears. And just when you imagine they can take no more, things get undeniably worse. We’ll look at examples from literary fiction and commercial fiction. We’ll discuss ways to put characters in peril and keep them there for the sake of crafting a compelling story.

Analyzing moments from the films of Andrea Arnold, comics by Katrina Vogl, poems by Marie Howe and prose by Denis Johnson, Jo-Ann Beard and Lucia Berlin, as well as others, we will examine what might make the seemingly quotidian significant through a series of targeted craft exercises.

Ready, set, write! In this generative class, we’ll write a short story or essay over two days. Using targeted exercises and a few insider tricks, we’ll work on particular elements of short stories/essays (both traditional or nontraditional) to form new characters, settings, story arcs, dialogue, action, interiority, and more! Come with a basic story idea and leave with a complete(ish) story to continue perfecting on your own. Open to all short prose genres.