Lit Fest 2025

Food connects us to our origins as well as to people beyond our immediate families. It has a language of its own, telling many stories with many ingredients—not all jolly and nostalgic but also complex and multilayered, sometimes hard and heavy. In this course, we'll gather around a table to nourish ourselves with many food stories and learn from a wide range of dishes and their narratives.

“It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons,” Jonathan Franzen once said about managing to write with emotional detachment and lucidity about his family. We can be faced with myriads of emotions when working on an essay, memoir, or family history making it challenging to see parents or siblings as complex human beings with unique and valuable perspectives. We’ll approach family-related projects from a place of deep curiosity and explore writing about those we know as if they were intriguing strangers. We’ll discuss interviewing methods to initiate deep and meaningful conversations, and self-care tips.

In these days of environmental, military, social, and—for some—personal upheaval, the feeling of equanimity can be illusive. The Buddha said that if we want to be happy, we need to be able to stand like a great tree amid praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow. We’ll look at a forest of such trees comprised of ancient and contemporary poems that manage to convey equanimity—not by looking away, but by seeing clearly and articulating that seeing onto the page. We’ll consider various approaches and begin the creative process of writing our own equanimous poems.

Sometimes in the effort to avoid melodrama, we avoid, well, drama. How can you create a conflict that matters to both you and your reader? We’ll discuss elements of compelling conflicts such as dilemma, inner and external struggle, conflicting codes and quests, dramatic questions, and thematic change. Come with a problem, and leave with a dramatic, story-generating conflict. Class will consist of discussion, readings, and in-class exercises.

Poetry, from its earliest known incarnation, has been shaped of dreams. The very architecture of what we call a poem may originate in our innate capacity for dreaming. We’ll read and discuss the work of a range of contemporary poets who write successfully and movingly from their dreams, looking with a keen eye at the craft moves that have made the private experience of a dream into a shared and inspiring experience for a reader. Then we’ll experiment with shaping our own dream(s) into poems. Bring a dream (or two or three), written or held in memory.

Writers taking workshops with Steve Almond, Emily Rapp Black, Mark Doty, Danielle Evans, Amitava Kumar, T Kira Māhealani Madden, Claire Messud, Beth Nguyen, Jenny Offill, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin, join us on Sunday afternoon for quick introductions to your instructor and fellow classmates and a tour of the Lit Fest campus. Stay for the Lit Fest Kickoff Party!