Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026: Full Schedule

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9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Finding the Subterranean Story with Danielle Evans

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

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.

Speakers

Danielle Evans

Visiting Author

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Intimate Distance with Mat Johnson

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

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 →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Situation and Event with Brandon Taylor

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Brandon Taylor

Visiting Author

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans, and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: The BS Detector with Steve Almond

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Steve Almond

Visiting Author

Steve Almond [www.stevealmondjoy.org] is the author of a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers “Candyfreak” and “Against Football.” His first novel, “Which Brings Me to You” (co-written with Julianna Baggott) was made into a major motion picture starring... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: Who's Telling Your Story? with Christopher Castellani

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Chris Castellani

Visiting Author

Christopher Castellani's fifth novel, Last Seen, will be published by Viking in February 2026. He is also the author of Leading Men (Viking, 2019) for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. Searchlight... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Generative Fiction Workshop: Starting, or Starting Over with Rebecca Makkai

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Rebecca Makkai

Visiting Author

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers, one of the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Fiction

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Excavation with Andre Dubus III

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Andre Dubus III

Visiting Author

Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was published in June 2023, and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin, was... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Find Your Focus with Beth Nguyen

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Beth Nguyen

Visiting Author

Beth Nguyen is the author of the memoirs Owner of a Lonely Heart and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, as well as two novels. She has received a Guggenheim award and an American Book Award, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Paris Review, Time Magazine... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Mapping the Memoir with Emily Rapp Black

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Emily Rapp Black

Visiting Author

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (BloomsburyUSA); The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press), which was a New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary (Random House), a New York Times Editor’s Pick... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: Shadow Narratives with Rachel Louise Snyder

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

Speakers

Rachel Louise Snyder

Visiting Author

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade; the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing; No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us; and the memoir Women We Buried, Women... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

Advanced Weeklong Poetry Workshop: Draft Exclusion with Paul Muldoon

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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.

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 →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Poetry

Audience Advanced Workshop

9:00am MDT

No Genre/All Genre Generative Lab with Eileen Myles

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

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 →

Friday June 19, 2026 9:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Poetry, Multi-Genre

Audience Advanced Workshop

12:00pm MDT

Lunchtime Business Panel: The Current State of Publishing—Agents and Authors Dish

Friday June 19, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

TBA

Panelists include: Elizabeth Copps (Copps Literary Services), Anjali Singh (The Anjali Singh Agency), Megan Posco (Posco Publicity), Jane Friedman, and Evanthia Bromiley.

Publishing has always had its share of gatekeeping, but the landscape has never looked quite like this. AI is reshaping how stories are written, sold, and evaluated; hybrid publishers are dangling legitimacy at prices that should give any writer pause; and bots, scams, and social media fraudsters are multiplying faster than anyone can track. In this candid panel, agents and authors cut through the noise — what's real, what's predatory, and how to tell the difference. Come with questions. Leave with your wallet intact.

Speakers

Evanthia Bromiley

Faculty

Evanthia Bromiley is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of scholarships from the Aspen Institute, a Lighthouse Fellowship, a Lisel Mueller scholarship, and Elizabeth George and Carol Houck-Smith awards. She is the 2025 Grace Paley Fellow for... Read More →

Elizabeth Copps

Agent

Elizabeth Copps is a literary agent and founder of Copps Literary Services based in Denver, Colorado. With 15 years of industry experience, Elizabeth began her publishing career in 2010 when she moved from Florida to New York City and discovered her passion through an agency internship... Read More →

Anjali Singh

Agent, The Anjali Singh Agency

Jane Friedman

Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; her... Read More →

Megan Posco

Megan Posco is a nonfiction book publicist who founded Posco Publicity in 2022 after several years working in-house at publishers including Hachette and Harvard University Press. The books she publicizes are primarily written by journalists and academics, about issues related to criminal... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT
TBA 3844 York Street, Denver, CO 80305

Publishing/Career, Multi-Genre

Audience Lunchtime Business Panels

12:00pm MDT

Lunchtime Business Panel: The Current State of Publishing—Agents and Authors Dish (Livestream)

Friday June 19, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Evanthia Bromiley

Faculty

Elizabeth Copps

Agent

Anjali Singh

Agent, The Anjali Singh Agency

Jane Friedman

Megan Posco

Friday June 19, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT
Virtual

Publishing/Career, Multi-Genre

Audience Lunchtime Business Panels

1:30pm MDT

Advanced Structure Lab: Break the Story Free with Dean Bakopoulos

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this seminar designed for screenwriters and prose writers of all levels, we’ll use dramatic structure to help us get unstuck. Bring along a draft that’s failing or an idea that’s not finding a form, and we’ll explore the intricacies and opportunities of narrative structure. Over the course of this week, we’ll utilize a four-part system Bakopoulos developed while writing television pilot scripts (but that YOU can apply to any form of narrative writing—short stories, memoirs, novels, screenplays, TV scripts, plays etc.) to move past any literary obstructions you’re battling.

While no system is a magic potion that can take away the agonies of creation, this character-based approach to structure allows you to rethink the possibilities of your project. We'll discuss characters and their journeys towards liberation, as well as the notion of dramatic escalation, the tension between exposition and plot, the construction of compelling scenes, and the importance of unexpected dialogue and minor characters. We’ll watch scenes from great television pilot episodes and feature films as examples to illustrate these principles;we’ll also read a few passages of prose.

We’ll take part in at least one generative exercise per session; by the fifth day of the course, you will have a shiny new four-part outline that will help you successfully revise, or finally draft, a stuck project.

*Dean's weeklong seminar is two hours each day and does not include one-on-one meetings. The tuition is also adjusted (down) from the typical weeklong workshop.

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 →

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Dramatic Writing

Audience Advanced Workshop

1:30pm MDT

Absolute Fiction

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In an age of both metafiction and high fantasy, writers have grown shy of writing realistic experiences wildly different than their own. Why have we lost the confidence to utterly make shit up and say it with authority? How can we get it back?

In this seminar, we’ll talk about writing away from the self and the lived experience, the research that makes such stories believable, and the narrative possibilities that give us control over completely fictional worlds. We’ll touch on the ethics, difficulties, and occasional necessity of writing genders, races, sexual orientations, abilities, ages, religions, etc. different from our own, and we’ll focus more deeply on how to make stories up out of whole cloth and fully inhabit characters who aren’t you.

This is the in-person version of this event.

Speakers

Rebecca Makkai

Visiting Author

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Absolute Fiction (Livestream)

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Virtual

Speakers

Rebecca Makkai

Visiting Author

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Virtual

Fiction

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Strange Beasts: Wild Structures and Architectures

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

In this class we will examine works that use their architecture, or structure as a vessel to carry and deliver meaning. We might examine the works of Italo Calvino, Anne Carson, Max Porter, Bernardine Evaristo, and Olga Tokarczuk…among others. Bring a story in which the architecture is asking: how might I be wilder?

Speakers

Evanthia Bromiley

Faculty

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

The Propulsive Narrative: Creating and Maintaining Momentum

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

You have a great premise. Maybe a gripping first chapter. But now your characters are wandering around contemplating the scenery, and you can't seem to make them do anything else. Sound familiar? If you want to write the sort of story that a reader cannot put down, you need to create urgency on every page. We’ll look at tools employed by writers of thrillers and suspense novels and explore strategies for creating a propulsive read no matter what sort of book you are writing.

Speakers

Tiffany Quay Tyson

Faculty

Tiffany Quay Tyson is the author of two novels, The Past is Never and Three Rivers. The Past is Never is the recipient of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the 2019 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the 2019... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Behind the Frame: To See, To Feel, to Know

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Sometimes even the most familiar or memorable photographs mask the emotional truth of a moment. In this seminar, we’ll look at both new and well-known images from historical moments that capture or fail to capture the stories that exist behind them. Students will explore the relationship between visual representation and emotional gradation through discussion and experimental written exercises.

Speakers

Rachel Louise Snyder

Visiting Author

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Nonfiction/Memoir

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

How To Be an Asshole

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Stories need villains and brutes, scoundrels and jerks, creeps and lowlifes. Collectively, let’s call them assholes. They create conflict, suspense, and intrigue. They’re often the most interesting characters in a story. But writers are, generally, nice people. How do we put ourselves into the mind of the asshole? How do we give them their humanity without denying their depravity? Let’s explore how to be an asshole (on the page) by exploring their mindset and ways to write it without becoming one ourselves. This will be a discussion-based class with examples by the masters and directed exercises.

Speakers

Nick Arvin

Faculty

Nick Arvin is the author of In the Electric Eden, Articles of War, and The Reconstructionist. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal and has been honored with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Library Association... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Lens

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

What the heck is lens? It’s merely a vital element of craft utilized on every line of every page of your writing. It helps you find meaning in detail, action, vision, and it allows space for subtext. Why is the sofa in your scene gold? If you don’t know, then it’s time to learn how lens works. In this class we’ll read great examples of lens (actually, any page of good writing can show us), and we’ll work through exercises to sharpen your own.

Speakers

William Haywood Henderson

Faculty

William Haywood Henderson earned a BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA in creative writing from Brown University, and attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing. He is the author of three novels: Native, The Rest of... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

1:30pm MDT

Unlock Ideas with Maps

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Drawing inspiration from maps—real and imagined—in this generative workshop we’ll explore how to unlock memories, create worlds, and discover details we may not have thought of otherwise. We’ll consider recent and ancient cartographic maps but also search for what’s revealed in the often unmapped, such as radio waves permeating the air, light cast by street lights or wind chimes in a neighborhood. We’ll discuss how authors create narratives for prose and poems on the concept of maps and write from prompts based on maps we create (no artistry needed) and those we study.

Speakers

Malinda Miller

Faculty

Miller is a writer, teacher and editor who feels most at home at the top of Weston Pass in Colorado or in the Nevada desert where her family had a ranch just off Highway 50, aka the Loneliest Highway in America. She's an instructor for the Lighthouse Young Writers Program and facilitates... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Writing Process, Multi-Genre

Audience Craft Seminar

3:45pm MDT

Lit Fest Closing Party

Friday June 19, 2026 3:45pm - 7:30pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Help us toast the closing of another year of Lit Fest with delicious food and drinks alongside friends both new and old.

We will have a Sober Space available on the second floor during this event. This is a welcoming, inclusive gathering place for people in all forms of recovery or anyone who wants to have a space to connect without alcohol during Lit Fest 2026. There will be snacks, NA beverages, writing prompts, and conversation starters available during this time.

For more resources and recovery meetings close to Lighthouse, you can visit: https://www.yorkstreetclub.com/Schedule

Friday June 19, 2026 3:45pm - 7:30pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

All Genres

Audience Event

4:00pm MDT

Two-Day Intensive: The 48-Hour Story or Essay

Friday June 19, 2026 4:00pm - 7:00pm MDT

Lighthouse Writers Workshop

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.

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 →

Friday June 19, 2026 4:00pm - 7:00pm MDT
Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Fiction, Multi-Genre