Loading…
Lit Fest 2025
Audience: Craft Seminar clear filter
arrow_back View All Dates
Friday, June 6
 

9:00am MDT

Create Your Novel's Bible
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Wherever you are in the process of writing your novel, keeping tabs on when, where, and how characters do what they do is a Herculean task. In this hands-on seminar, you’ll learn how to highlight the craft components best suited to your novel, create a template, and complete a scene-by-scene breakdown for up to three chapters. Please bring a computer or notebook and at least the first three chapters of your work in progress! There will be a lot of writing; sharing is optional.
Speakers
JT

Jan Thomas

Instructor
J.E. Thomas spent her early summers stuffing grocery bags with books at the local library, reading feverishly, then repeating the process week after week. So it's not surprising that she thinks books and imagination are the best streaming service around. J.E. is an award-winning writer... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

9:00am MDT

Writing Beyond Walls: Resilience and Difficult Subject Matter
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Writing can feel overwhelming, especially with challenging themes. When daunting themes leave us frozen, that's when it's time to get your game plan on. In this workshop, we'll practice exercises to help navigate obstacles in our writing, whether mountains or molehills. We'll learn techniques to tackle both big and small challenges, making difficult subjects work for us, regardless of genre or skill level. All skill levels are welcome.
Speakers
avatar for Hillary Leftwich

Hillary Leftwich

Instructor
Hillary Leftwich is a neurodivergent, multimedia writer and the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press, 2019 and Agape Editions, 2023 new edition), Aura (Future Tense Books and Blackstone Audio Publishing, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (forthcoming... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

9:00am MDT

Tuning In: Using Music and Playlists to Develop Character in Prose
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
In this seminar, we'll explore how writers use music to convey their characters' desires, contradictions, fears, aspirations, and aesthetic sensibilities. We’ll discuss practical tips on using music in written narratives to serve a similar function as soundtracks in film and help view and develop our characters through another medium. We’ll even touch on copyright issues and how to artfully avoid infringing on another artist’s material without compromising your own creative intentions. Please bring a list of songs that relate to your current project. All genres welcome!
Speakers
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

9:00am MDT

Words that Woo: Literary Activism (V)
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Through storytelling, writers stir up the dust, call out injustice, and unsilence silences in words. Albert Camus wrote that the writer’s purpose is to keep civilization from destroying itself, and Alice Walker called activism the rent she pays for living. Maya Angelou, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel, and Ta Nahesi Coates are writers whose work could be considered activism. In this seminar, we'll explore how words can be harnessed for literary activism by reading excerpts from a range of nonfiction writers and discussing how words can craft an argument that might lead to action.
Speakers
avatar for Ellen Blum Barish

Ellen Blum Barish

Instructor
Ellen Blum Barish is the author of the spiritual memoir Seven Springs: A Memoir and the essay collection Views from the Home Office Window: On Motherhood, Family and Life. Her work explores themes of identity, family, and spirituality. You can find her essays and prose poems in Brevity... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Zoom

9:00am MDT

The Art of the Crónica (V)
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
The “crónica” has become the great genre of Latinx journalism. Diverse and broadly free, the crónica is an informative nonfiction piece that uses the resources and techniques of fiction. Crónica is as much about the facts as it is about the person who tells the story. Writers in this seminar can expect to learn what a crónica is, what it's not, and how to identify a good story for a crónica. We'll also write some in-class paragraphs of a short crónica, and writers will receive oral feedback from the instructor. Our references will be Rodolfo Walsh, Martín Caparrós, and Leila Guerriero.
Speakers
avatar for Javier Sinay

Javier Sinay

Instructor
Javier Sinay is a writer and journalist. His books include The Murders of Moises Ville (Restless Books, 2022–Nominated for Book of the Year, 2023 CrimeCon C.L.U.E. Awards/original title: Los crímenes de Moisés Ville), Camino al Este, Cuba Stone (in collaboration), and Sangre joven... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Zoom

9:00am MDT

Three Paths to Publishing Your Poetry Book
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
This seminar explores the three primary paths to publishing a book of poems: traditional (including independent and university presses), self publishing, and emerging opportunities in hybrid publishing. Each path has pros and cons, not only in terms of perceived prestige, but also in terms of cost, timeframe, and design and marketing support provided (or not provided) to the publishing poet. This class demystifies the options and provides clear next steps for poets seeking to publish a body of work.
Speakers
avatar for Radha Marcum

Radha Marcum

Instructor
Radha Marcum, MFA, won the 2023 Washington Prize for her forthcoming collection, Pine Soot Tendon Bone (2024). She was also awarded the New Mexico Book Award in 2018 for her first collection of poems, Bloodline (3: A Taos Press), about her grandfather's work building the first atomic... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

9:00am MDT

In Retrospect
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
In this class, we're going to explore how we frame the past in our poems. We’ll look at ways to leverage our present selves and perspectives in taking our readers back in time. We are adults, after all, and bring to the page the authority and irony of our distance and difference from the past. But there are also advantages to laying the past bare. We’ll also look at ways to strip away the biases and assumptions of the present and make a good faith effort to inhabit the past through the poem. This can lead to surprising emotional access and recovery.
Speakers
AS

Austin Segrest

Instructor
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

9:00am MDT

Author Websites 101: Your Guide to Designing, Branding, and Launching Your Successful Site
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Need an author website but don't know where to start? This seminar will guide you through designing and launching an effective author website. Using an in-depth bespoke questionnaire, you’ll clarify your unique branding and style to create a site that truly resonates with readers. From choosing the right platform to building user-friendly design and crafting engaging content, this session is packed with practical tips and hands-on advice to bring your digital presence to life. Perfect for authors at any stage who want a polished, professional online home.
Speakers
avatar for HR Hegnauer

HR Hegnauer

Instructor
HR Hegnauer is the author of When the Bird is Not a Human and Sir, as well as two chapbooks. She has read from her work widely at universities, conferences, bookstores, and in numerous reading series. After working at Palgrave Macmillan, she left to start her own business as a book... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

1:30pm MDT

Welcome to the Sh*t Show: Your Inciting Incident
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
The “inciting incident” is the narrative event that propels your whole story into forward motion. But what should the inciting incident be, and where? Does “inciting” also mean “exciting”? What makes it work, and what makes it flop? By exploring elements such as stakes and dramatic questions, we’ll look at ways to heighten that inciting incident to invite your reader into your protagonist’s lovable disaster. Open to all prose writers.
Speakers
avatar for Erika Krouse

Erika Krouse

Instructor
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 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

1:30pm MDT

Queer(ing) Images for Our Futures
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Samuel R. Delany has emphasized that science fiction gives us images not OF but FOR our futures; its power lies not in prediction but in manifestation. Extending this idea to speculative literature more broadly—and rejecting the notion that spec-lit is merely formulaic or escapist—what can we learn from its radical visions and thought experiments to help us contend with bigotry and existential threats? In this generative seminar, we'll discuss the pleasures and challenges of queer(ing) speculative writing; explore how to center historically marginalized images and imaginations; and dare to write toward a multiplicity of inclusive futures.
Speakers
avatar for Kanika Agrawal

Kanika Agrawal

Instructor
Kanika Agrawal is a queer Indian writer, editor, and educator. As a mad diasporic hybrid who developed over six countries on four continents, she works between and across languages, geographies, and disciplines. She received a BS in Biology and a BS in Writing from MIT. She then earned... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

1:30pm MDT

Erasures, Lacunae, and Voids: Writing What's Not There
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Sometimes what's not in a piece of writing is just as crucial to making it tick as what's explicitly spelled out. The holes in our work can serve as invitations for readers to fall more deeply into the text and start creatively connecting the dots on their own. By breathing deliberate space into the page, we can write more engagingly—and in deeper, more active collaboration with our readers. This craft seminar will offer generative opportunities to play with withdrawal, opacity, and negative space as valuable creative techniques.
Speakers
avatar for Sasha Geffen

Sasha Geffen

Instructor
Sasha Geffen is the author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, an analysis of queerness and gender nonconformity in the past century of popular music. Their writing attends to the intersections of gender, pop culture, the body, and technology, and has been published... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

1:30pm MDT

Creating Our Personal Language (V)
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
In this class, we’ll explore the unique power of personal language and its impact on creative writing. Writers will reflect on their relationship with language, incorporating words and phrases invented or uniquely used in their homes. We’ll analyze how these personal elements, alongside experiences of bilingualism or multilingualism, shape prosody, voice, and plot development. Emphasizing authenticity, writers will craft stories and poems that are distinctively theirs—pieces only they could write. This course deepens our connection to language and empowers us to create original work with personal and cultural depth.
Speakers
avatar for Oso Guardiola

Oso Guardiola

Instructor
Oso Guardiola received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Maytag Scholarship and the Arthur James Pflughaupt Prize in Fiction. His short stories have been awarded the 2023 Gulf Coast Prize for Fiction, the... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom

1:30pm MDT

I'll Follow You Into the Dark: Letting the Unknown Drive Your Personal Narrative
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
When it comes to personal essay and memoir, the idea of closure can be overrated. It's not always possible (or preferable) to achieve clarity or tie up loose ends. So why not embrace the unknowns instead? Some of the best creative nonfiction puts the unknown in the driver's seat, using it to build tension, create emotional resonance, and engage the reader as a fellow detective. In this seminar, we'll make a case for stumbling in the dark. We'll explore how to let questions drive your narrative, embrace discomfort on the page, dig into relevant examples, and work through a few prompts.
Speakers
avatar for Gina DeMillo Wagner

Gina DeMillo Wagner

Instructor
Gina DeMillo Wagner is the author of Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Memoir Magazine, Modern Loss, Self, Outside, CRAFT Literary, and other publications. She is a Yaddo fellow... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

1:30pm MDT

Structure and the Art of Not-Knowing in the Creative Nonfiction Book
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Structure is daunting for all writers of books, but creative nonfiction presents special structural challenges and opportunities. Chief among them is the problem of the author’s expertise and authority—in other words, her knowing. This holds true for memoir, criticism, and even reporting. What does the author know, and when does she know it? This question shapes nonfiction book structure. We’ll talk about how structure is built in different genres of nonfiction books, how to manage time, the hunt for the perfect (nonexistent) structure, and how writing from a place of curiosity, as opposed to expertise, disrupts critical authority and empowers both writer and reader. During our Q&A, questions about students’ individual projects will be welcome—if you share your structural problems, someone else will doubtless be helped by the discussion.
Speakers
avatar for Claire Dederer

Claire Dederer

Visiting Author
Claire Dederer is a memoirist, essayist, and critic. Her most recent book is the national bestseller Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Knopf, 2023), a New York Times Notable Book that was named a best book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Elle, Esquire, Kirkus, Electric... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

1:30pm MDT

The Art of Condensary
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
In this session, writers of all levels and all genres will unlock the art of writing with precision, eliminating unnecessary words to make every sentence pop. Through hands-on exercises and lively discussions, you'll discover how to tighten your work without losing your unique voice. Get ready to supercharge your writing skills and leave with the tools to craft compact, captivating pieces that leave a lasting impression.
Speakers
avatar for Alyse Knorr

Alyse Knorr

Instructor
Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and, since 2017, co-editor of Switchback Books. Her most recent book of poems, Mega-City Redux, won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is also the author of the poetry... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

1:30pm MDT

Site/Visit: Writing with the Land
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
What does it mean to be in conversation with our local landscapes in our writing? Part experiential learning, part creative practice, SITE//VISIT provides a space to learn about native plants and local ecology and translate embodied experience onto the page through play and improvisation. We’ll draw from the practices and work of artists and writers such as Cecilia Vicuna, CA Conrad, Jake Skeets, and others.
Speakers
avatar for Cass Eddington

Cass Eddington

Instructor
Cass Eddington is a poet, teacher, and editor originally from Utah. They are the author of the chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions, forthcoming January 2023) with recent work in Annulet, Deluge, DREGINALD, La Vague. They are a PhD candidate in the... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

4:00pm MDT

Dynamic Scenes
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Scenes are the engine that makes a story “go.” Right now you may be saying, yes, yes, I know how to write a scene, scenes are easy. But they’re really not, and many writers believe they’re writing a scene when they’re really writing summary or description or something else. So what's the difference between a dynamic scene that leaps off the page and a dull one that just lies there, snoring? In this class, we'll investigate scene-building techniques such as conflict-driven action, setting, situation, sensory language, dramatic pacing, surprise, tension, and suspense, so you can create that must-turn-the-page feeling.
Speakers
avatar for Erika Krouse

Erika Krouse

Instructor
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 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

4:00pm MDT

Write a Happy Story
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Dramatic stories tend to focus on negative events and bad things happening to all kinds of people. In this class, we'll flip the script and work through examples, exercises, and discussion to examine what it would mean to write a happy story, how to go about it, why we usually don't, and what happy story elements we can use to enrich our more typical, more unhappy stories.
Speakers
avatar for Nick Arvin

Nick Arvin

Instructor
Nick Arvin is the author of In the Electric Eden, Articles of War, and The Reconstructionist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The 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 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

4:00pm MDT

Developing Writing Habits
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
With jobs and family/personal responsibilities, sustaining a writing practice seems harder these days than ever before. We struggle to find the time and energy to find our way into our creative space. This course will offer prompts and habit-building techniques to help us sustain our writing practices, whether to exercise our muscles or to make it through long-term projects.
Speakers
avatar for Poupeh Missaghi

Poupeh Missaghi

Instructor
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, translator, and editor. Her debut book trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 and her second book Sound Museum was published in 2024 (Coffee House Press). Her most recent translation In the Streets of Tehran, a book of witness narratives, was... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

4:00pm MDT

Vocational Poetics: Working, Writing, Calling Out
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Most of us aren't able to support ourselves materially through what we would consider our “calling” (an idea that doesn’t recognize the inequities and issues of access shaped by capitalism, racism, and ableism). Lacking a single “vocation,” we may cobble together our livelihood through many sources. Beyond the fantasy of a consistent work/life balance, this lecture considers the root of vocation: both the labor of writing and the “calling out.” Through what forms and technologies are we able to be heard?
Speakers
avatar for Cass Eddington

Cass Eddington

Instructor
Cass Eddington is a poet, teacher, and editor originally from Utah. They are the author of the chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions, forthcoming January 2023) with recent work in Annulet, Deluge, DREGINALD, La Vague. They are a PhD candidate in the... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

4:00pm MDT

The Importance of Gaps (V)
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
The secret to a great story is not plot or fantastic characters but leaving gaps—that is, crafting spaces to allow the reader to lean in or enter your story to make connections on their own. In this seminar, we’ll examine techniques for crafting action, gestures, and dialogue that help readers take leaps with you or your characters. Plan to practice writing.
Speakers
avatar for Karen Auvinen

Karen Auvinen

Instructor
Karen Auvinen (she/her/hers) is poet, mountain woman, life-long westerner, writer, and the author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living, a finalist for the 2019 Colorado Book Award. Her body of work traverses the intersection of landscape and place, examining... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom

4:00pm MDT

"Tell Me What You Really Think: Writing Dialogue"
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
In prose writing, why is it a generally accepted rule that dialogue is so difficult to write? What unique struggles does dialogue present to a writer? How can we break down those difficulties into more manageable strategies that will then elevate our dialogue to seamless, riveting levels? In this class, we’ll discuss dialogue as an integral element of prose in an effort to demystify its elusive principles. We’ll read contemporary examples of writers who’ve cracked the dialogue code: from Joy Williams and N.K. Jemisin to Richard Price and Cormac McCarthy, among others. We’ll also practice different approaches to dialogue by modeling after others’ work and through various writing prompts. For all levels of prose writers. Come ready to talk the talk!
Speakers
avatar for Alexander Lumans

Alexander Lumans

Instructor
Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction. He received fellowships in 2015 and 2024 for expeditions with The Arctic Circle Residency and he was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205

4:00pm MDT

Asking Questions (V)
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
This workshop is based on the idea that creative writing is about inquiring. Is a poem a question? What can a poem ask that can't be asked in everyday life? How might we shape a poem's rhythms to open to inquiry? What images open the poem to curiosity and even uncertainty? Would you like to join us in shaping an interrogatory poetry?
Speakers
avatar for Elizabeth Robinson

Elizabeth Robinson

Instructor
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry. Her most recent books are Three Novels (Omnidawn), Counterpart (Ahsahta), and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing). Robinson’s mixed genre meditation, On Ghosts (Solid Objects), was a finalist for the Los... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom

4:00pm MDT

A Talk Against Goodness
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
This is a talk about craft, its embedded politics, and the production of a poet in the US.
Speakers
avatar for Solmaz Sharif

Solmaz Sharif

Visiting Author
Solmaz Sharif is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) which Publisher’s Weekly praised as “complex and confident” in a starred review. Her first book, Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
 
Share Modal

Share this link via

Or copy link

Filter sessions
Apply filters to sessions.
Filtered by Date -