Lit Fest 2025

In this weekend memoir intensive, you’ll be invited to pursue your story with new curiosity: What about it feels most urgent or exciting to you? What idea, question, obsession, or truth are you inviting readers to explore along with you? This workshop is designed to help you identify the most promising threads of your story and consider several possible approaches to revision. Together, we’ll dive into your work and engage in lively, affirming craft conversations about voice, characterization, setting, chronology, structure, and more. We’ll discuss the complications of rendering the truth on the page, how to do so when memory is imperfect, and the role of imagination in memoir. And we’ll talk about how you can nourish the writing practice you want, so that you can continue developing and pursuing the stories that matter most to you. Accepted participants will submit essays or excerpts from longer works of 1,500 to 3,500 words by May 9.

An acceleration of equitably distributed precarity—which is to say existential threat that cannot be avoided by money or nation, genetic lotto, or brute force—has made it so more of our sentences begin with, “As I write this, [insert disaster] is unfolding.” As I write this, it feels cruel to accept ‘givens’: that the room we will enter together on June 7, 2025 will still be standing, that all who can fly there now will join us then, that we will arrive with the same questions and hopes for our poems, the same sense of imagined and future reader. And yet, the life of the poem is long. What pressures does the immediate ‘now’ we find ourselves in place on the packets of poems we turned in earlier? How might we allow those questions, whatever they may be this summer, into the workshop? What might they tell us of the vocation of writing poems? We will look at our poems through their relationship to time, through syntax and rhythm, self and other, as well as through the material present of the poem and the material presents it is not yet including. Line edits and formal questions will be raised alongside ethical ones, leading to greater articulation of each poet’s perceived responsibility. Agreement on the roles of poetry is not required nor even desired, but willing and willful wrestling with such questions will be central to our time together. Accepted participants will submit up to two poems by May 9.

Attempting to write a memoir can bring up feelings of overwhelm. This feeling comes about because your life — everyone’s life — is an unending flow of events and memories and experiences. How do you select and cut your material from that vast bolt of fabric? Your life can simultaneously feel like too much and not enough, giving rise to all kinds of fears about whether or not your story is worth telling, and how to tell it. We’ll explore the ways that the building blocks of memoir — scene, character, dialogue, and structure — can help us move through the overwhelm and find the heart of the story. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 9.

Good writers are good readers. In this workshop, we’ll focus on learning how to read each other’s work, and how to give critique that both helps and challenges each writer. Focusing on craft fundamentals including characterization, plot and voice, we’ll learn to ask the questions that can help locate and in some cases reimagine the parameters of a story. Each participant will workshop either a full story or an excerpt from a longer piece. Participation is at the heart of a good workshop, so please come to each session on time and having prepared thoughtful, detailed feedback. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 9.