Lit Fest 2025

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.

Using oracle cards as writing prompts, we’ll explore messages and clues from the universe through divinatory free writing, unlocking our truths with guided cards as our mentors. We’ll use various techniques to shape our raw writings into crafted poems until we find at least one fragment that resonates deeply. Through the power of words and the oracle's wisdom, we’ll push back the veil between this world and the realm of spirits, using our intuition and awareness as an alchemical process to embrace what arises from the unknown.

Various Oracle decks will be used during the workshop, so cards are not a requirement.

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.

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.

ChatGPT is awful. It’s a plagiarist, it lies and fabricates, it will run us out of our jobs… but it’s also free, exploitable, non-human labor! AI can be the answer to our harried dreams: a sometimes-reliable entity to perform research, consolidation, organization, and administrative tasks that would otherwise take us hours or months to do. What are the many ways a writer can use recent technologies to save ourselves valuable time and labor? How much can we trust it, and what are the ways we really shouldn’t? No technical knowledge needed; your instructor doesn’t have any, either.

William Carlos Williams said, "A poem is a machine made out of words," and this is a course in mechanics. We'll look at a few of the different machines that poets have developed over the millennia—and why they still purr and hum—then use the late, great Robert Fitzgerald’s method to mark them up. This course is for anyone who wants to have a better understanding of the nuts and bolts of how metrical poems (and free verse, which is also a set of forms) actually work at the syllabic level. Bring pencils... and pliers.

Metaphor is the art of drawing connections between things to create new meanings. In this workshop, we'll learn to identify the metaphors in our writing, explore ways to cultivate new associations, and generate new possibilities. Bring a draft of your writing—it will be your starting point for our journeys into the latent imagination.

Different languages and literary traditions invite and make possible the use of different craft techniques. Fortunately, the US literary landscape is gradually holding more space for works in translation, though they still comprise a small percentage of the market. In this course, we'll study craft techniques used in some very recent publications in translation and discuss what we can learn from both the authors and the translators to adopt into our own writing practices.

John Milton called rhyme "the invention of a barbarous age." But the closer we look, the more mysterious and fascinating it becomes. If we think of rhyme as the entire universe of similar sounds among words, we soon realize that rhyme includes not only "cat" and "bat," but also "cat" and "coat," along with "cat" and "hand"... and things just become more and more complex from there. Rhyme may be impossible to escape, and the real question is how to manage it. In this class, we'll explore the varieties of rhyme and how poets and even prose writers use it—or purposely avoid it—today. If you have the interest and the time / come learn about rhyme.

Discussing his background as a traveling Himalayan poet, our instructor shall share his efforts to build bridges across continents despite being from a small nation. The lecture will explore the unique Himalayan tradition of traveling saints and bards, who played a vital role in shaping the instructor’s world and helping him develop the resilience and inner spirituality needed to establish his niche as a poet. The lecture will turn to the universal, covering how to develop a unique voice, cultivate a clear identity, and position oneself within the literary world.

Grab a refreshment and hear readings from recently published works by Lighthouse faculty members.

Hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by The Bookies and get your book signed afterward.

Hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by The Bookies and get your book signed afterward.