Lit Fest 2025

You finish a draft—then what? The text can seem impenetrable, but you know you need to open it to new possibilities. You can change a word, add a comma, reorder the clauses, but you know (deep down) that you’re not yet getting at what you know needs to occur in order to dramatize your idea. Noodling around on the surface won’t suffice. In this intensive, we’ll break the surface of our drafts and discover the potential for meaningful change. Writers will come away with an expanded understanding of their texts.

Freytag, get lost! In this weekend workshop, we’ll read, explore, and try a variety of short story structures that range from the alternative to the bizarre: the montage, the list, the instructional, the backward story, metafiction, the “Rashomon,” the floater, and much more! Emphasis will be on mass generation, rather than perfected and read-aloud-able work. Prose writers of any genre can expect example readings, brief discussions, and lots of exercises focusing on techniques you’ve never tried before. Come to class with one idea or fifteen; leave with exciting new writing and your mind on fire.

Working on a long poem, story, essay, play, or book? What will it take to finish? Can we do it—or at least create an actionable plan to finish—in a weekend? This intensive will provide solutions and strategies in the form of planning sessions, readings, discussions, writing exercises, charts, and other resources. We’ll cover the role of editors and feedback; myths and benefits of breaks; how to bypass blocks, fears and resistances; and where planning meets plain old knuckling down. Any genre welcome. This may be most useful for work between midway and “almost there.” Let’s find our way to the finish line together.

Participants in this two-day intensive will enjoy close reading and discussion of excerpts from Audre Lorde's poems and essays, accompanied by generative exercises designed for writers to begin drafting poems and lyric essays.

Samantha Harvey was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, which follows six astronauts aboard a space station circling our planet for twenty-four hours. Orbital is an eloquent meditation about the complex relationships between humanity, Earth, and their joined legacy. It’s Harvey’s richly layered and undeniably sublime prose that rockets her novel into the stratosphere of masterful description writing. In this intensive, we’ll read, discuss, and model various strategies Harvey employs to great reward. Together, we’ll elevate our own prose stylings and learn how to depict the most ineffable parts of the world around us.

In this Two-Day Intensive, we'll experiment with the stations of "The Midwife" and "The Medium" to catch/channel the writing and reVISION to come. Through hermeneutic listening and asking the Oracle for guidance, we'll traverse the looping spectrum of creativity and craft by employing divination techniques to practice accessing the Muse; we'll use tried and true divinatory methods like communion with Ancestor; the Tarot; bibliomancy; dream-work; automatic writing; and more, to then develop our own entry points and intersections with Inspiration and Idea based on our individual needs as writers and the unique requirements each particular project demands.

Neither readers nor writers want a story whose pacing is off: a story that stalls, sputters, or sprints ahead at breakneck speed. Every part of a story must have an intended and balanced pace—but how do we find that pace? The art of pacing is about the decisions we're making as writers, from sentence structure to showing and telling. This generative craft lesson will look at concrete examples and writing prompts. Intermediate and advance writers thinking about the pacing in their nonfiction work are welcome.