Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

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.