Lit Fest 2025

What does it mean to write critically about art in fiction or creative nonfiction? How can writing about art allow us to write more deeply about character and world? How can it allow us to explore ideas in ways we might not otherwise have access to? We'll look at a number of examples in both fiction and nonfiction, from authors including John Berger and Sheena Patel. Please bring something to write with, as this talk will be centered on generative exercises.
This is the livestream version of this class, if you would like to attend in person, click here.

“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.

What are the repercussions of writing about family and friends? What are our responsibilities to the truth as writers and how may that affect our family dynamic? Join a group of writers who have wrangled with these questions, and more, as they address the wide range of responses from loved ones and the balance that may be right for you as you work on your nonfiction or memoir.

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.