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Lit Fest 2025
Audience: Craft Seminar clear filter
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Wednesday, June 11
 

9:00am MDT

Non-Linear Structures from Non-Western Storytelling (V)
Wednesday June 11, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Zoom
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Western storytelling traditions decree that a linear structure (along with the three act structure, the hero’s journey, and a rising self-esteem arc) are mandatory features of any satisfying story. This program challenges that assumption by exploring non-linear structures, specifically cyclic and nested structures, using examples from non-Western stories and films.
Writers will come to understand how these non-linear structures allow for thematic stacking, embracing of moral complexity, and a synthesis between form and content to explode the idea that a straight line is the best way to tell every story.
Speakers
avatar for Henry Lien

Henry Lien

Instructor
Henry Lien is a 2012 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, Seattle. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Peasprout Chen middle grade fantasy series, which he began writing under the guidance of George R.R. Martin, Kelly Link, and Chuck Palahniuk at Clarion... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 9:00am - 11:00am MDT
Zoom
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Dramatic Writing   YA/Children's

1:30pm MDT

Novel Whispering: How To Finish a Novel
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Have a novel that you just can’t finish, or finish well? Considering writing a novel and want an insight to how to actually complete one? In this seminar, we'll identify hurdles in completing the process of novel creation and how to get over them. The event will provide participants with practical techniques to kickstart their manuscripts such applied story structuring, thematic tuning, character mirroring, and more.
Speakers
avatar for Mat Johnson

Mat Johnson

Visiting Author
Mat Johnson is a Philip H Knight Chair of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications included the novels Invisible Things and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction

1:30pm MDT

A Premise is Not a Promise: Thriving After the First Sentence
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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You’ve gotten to the desk, opened the blank page, and written a new and stunning first sentence. Maybe it involves a crying yeti, or a forklift, or a forklift driven by a crying yeti. Regardless, your pen is fully prepped for sad cryptids and warehouse machinery. And there’s the problem. Sticking to a premise can force your writing down a single, limited path of telling. In this seminar we’ll learn how to treat any premise as an ever-branching path of rewarding surprise. By encouraging discovery and unexpected connections, we’ll become better equipped to thrive long after that first sentence.
Speakers
avatar for Alexander Lumans

Alexander Lumans

Instructor
Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction. He received fellowships in 2015 and 2024 for expeditions with The Arctic Circle Residency and he was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Hybrid

1:30pm MDT

Write Livelihood: Making a Living as a Writer (V)
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
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How do we support our writing habit without wearing ourselves out in our day jobs so much that it’s hard to write? Let’s talk about off-the-beaten path possibilities for Right Livelihood (the Buddhist term for work that serves the world) for writers, including translating what we know as writers into helping others grow their creativity, day jobs that don’t have anything necessarily to do with writing, cobbling together freelance work with enough time to write, or rearranging our time in our current work-life balance. We’ll also do writing prompts together to conserve with our callings and brainstorm possibilities and next steps.
Speakers
avatar for Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Instructor
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D, the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam's Well, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a nonfiction book on the Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid   Dramatic Writing

1:30pm MDT

Close, Close (Close) Third Person
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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In this class, we'll talk about "close third person" point of view, and how to really embody a character’s innermost psyche and motivations. How can you heighten emotion in your writing through the closest point of view possible? In this class, we'll discuss the particular demands of close third POV by exploring elements such as free indirect discourse, the perception layer, psychic distance, "head-hopping," interiority, and embodied physical action.
Speakers
avatar for Erika Krouse

Erika Krouse

Instructor
Erika Krouse has taught at Lighthouse since 2008; she is a Book Project mentor and a winner of the Lighthouse Beacon Award. Erika's most recent collection of short stories, Save Me, Stranger, is out with Flatiron Books in January 2025. It has garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Poetry   Hybrid   YA/Children's

1:30pm MDT

The Situation and the Story (V)
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
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In her craft book The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick differentiates between what a work is about on its surface and what it is "about" more deeply; the themes and motivating questions that allow it to contribute to our understanding of others and ourselves. This class will focus on how to identify the relationship between situation and story in both fiction and nonfiction, offering strategies for clarifying that relationship in our own work and concrete tips on how to build in both elements at the level of the prose. Writers can expect to participate in large group discussion, short break-outs, and a writing exercise.
Speakers
avatar for Natalie Hodges

Natalie Hodges

Instructor
Born and raised in Denver, Natalie Hodges has performed as a classical violinist throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. Her first book, Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir

1:30pm MDT

How to Hook a Reader in Your First Ten Pages
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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It doesn’t matter how good your book is overall if your first ten pages don’t hook the reader. Most agents request the first couple pages to see if they want to read the rest of the book, most readers in a bookstore will give the opening pages a try to decide if they want to buy your book, and the Look Inside button on Amazon allows readers to check out your opening pages. In this class, we’ll discuss a variety of ways to ensure your opening pages are effective. Open to fiction and memoir writers of all levels. Writers should bring their first ten pages either on their computer or printed out for their reference only (meaning, no copies to distribute, just a copy for themselves to make changes to and reference).
Speakers
avatar for Rachel Weaver

Rachel Weaver

Instructor
Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a "Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now". Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014, by IndieBound as an Indie Next List Pick, by Yoga Journal... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Hybrid

1:30pm MDT

Story as Scrapbook: Structuring Prose with Documents, Letters, Journal Entries, and Articles
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Sometimes the best way to create the big picture of your story is to incorporate artifacts that illuminate an aspect that straightforward narration alone can’t offer. We'll look at examples from fiction and nonfiction that include journal entries, letters, documents, reports, and other artifacts in books by Justin Torres, Alexander Sammartino, Tess Gunty, Eowyn Ivey, Maureen Staunton, and more and explore how and when to use scrapbooking technique to craft our stories.
Speakers
avatar for Jenny Shank

Jenny Shank

Instructor
Jenny Shank's short story collection, Mixed Company, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award (General Fiction). Jenny Shank's novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Hybrid

1:30pm MDT

10 Photos and a Dog
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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In this craft talk, we'll discuss the relationship between poetry and photography. We'll go through a slide show of photos taken by the instructor and how that practice influences their poetry practice, and we'll ruminate a bit about how photography has influenced the history of writing. What’s the difference between writing and photography, since photography has existed. Anyone who wants to take part in the practice of the talk, please bring five photos you’ve taken or ones you feel taken by, not too complicated, and be ready to work with them in a hands-on fashion.
Speakers
avatar for Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles

Visiting Author
Widely renowned, poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist, Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work, in the words of the New York Review of Books, “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.” Myles is the... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Hybrid

1:30pm MDT

Poems for Garden and Forest
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Let’s write poems inspired by the world around us! Excerpting DH Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers! and poems in Camille Dungy’s anthology Black Nature, we’ll write poems of creatures, plants and places. As Dungy herself writes in “Language,” nature can be a key to the cipher: “The way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat / Of the sky and the coyote’s yip knocks / it shut.” Bring your bats, ants, tomatoes and daffodils, and we'll go wild.
Speakers
avatar for Lynn Wagner

Lynn Wagner

Instructor
Lynn Wagner is the author of No Blues This Raucous Song, which won the Slapering Hol Chapbook competition. She received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she won the Academy of American Poets prize. She has earned fellowships to the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Poetry

1:30pm MDT

Why Rhyme (V)
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
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Poets have long known that rhyme is an effective tool that can enhance the overall meaning and impact of a poem. When used well, rhyme not only brings together unexpected words, but can also make a poem more ear-pleasing and creates a kind of expectation and aural satisfaction. Is rhyme a thing of the past, is the pendulum due to swing in the other direction; or might there be room for a variety of types of rhyme applicable to contemporary poetry? In this course, we’ll consider these and other questions.
Speakers
avatar for Jodie Hollander

Jodie Hollander

Instructor
Jodie Hollander was raised in a family of classical musicians. She studied poetry in England, and her work has been published in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, PN Review, The Dark Horse, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The New Criterion, Australia’s Best Poems of... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 1:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
Zoom
  Poetry

4:00pm MDT

Create a Moment, Create a World
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
Register
How can I evoke a world/situation/character/voice/emotion/idea swiftly and potently? These are questions that fiction writers are always asking, but flash fiction brings particular urgency to them. Participants will explore samples of flash fiction and then experiment with the form themselves. We’ll consider questions such as: How can a piece achieve arc and resonance in such a short space? How does one attain the precision of language essential to this form? What can this form offer the reader in lieu of the satisfaction of a longer narrative? How can the lessons learned by trying our hands at flash fiction be applied to longer works?
Speakers
avatar for Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips

Visiting Author
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her novel... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction

4:00pm MDT

Fiction Stuckshop
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
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As writers we often hear about books supposedly written in one brilliant, continuous burst. But what if some stories don't burst so much as they dribble? What if some novels resist and evade, or just wander out into a field and collapse? In this workshop we’ll attempt to resurrect promising pieces of fiction that have somehow gotten stuck. We’ll experiment with techniques that have gotten fellow writers out of similar jams, and try to “re-see”our own work as well as our barriers to it. Come willing to write and experiment.
Speakers
avatar for Amanda Rea

Amanda Rea

Instructor
Amanda Rea's stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Best American Mystery Stories, One Story, American Short Fiction, Freeman’s, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, New South, Lit Hub, and... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction

4:00pm MDT

The Animal Kingdom (V)
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom
Register
Animals? Don’t they usually belong in children’s fiction or young adult classics? Talking animals? Now we’re in the realm of fantasy. But animals can add depth and character engagement in literary fiction, as well—as embodiments of the natural forces we generally consign to “setting,” or as mirrors to our humanity, or as companionship when a character is otherwise alone and inert in terms of action. In this seminar, we'll explore how to incorporate the animal world—with varying degrees of consciousness—into our stories by examining great literature and discussing our own relations with the rest of the kingdom.
Speakers
avatar for Daniel Levine

Daniel Levine

Instructor
Daniel Levine is the author of the novel Hyde, a New York Times Editor's Choice and one of Washington Post's 5 Best Thrillers of 2014. He studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Brown University and received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida. He has taught... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Zoom
  Fiction

4:00pm MDT

Freelance Writing: Getting Started and Building your Career
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
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How do you query editors at websites, magazines, and newspapers to achieve your first assignment, and what habits can help the first one lead to more? We'll discuss ground rules for freelance writers, learn how to find venues open to new writers, study examples of query letters and write our own. We'll discuss useful resources for freelancers, including newsletters and websites that list venues open to pitches, and share info about pay rates and writer’s guidelines. Jenny has been a freelance writer of essays and articles about books, music, sports, and travel for decades, and looks forward to addressing the particular interests of each student.
Speakers
avatar for Jenny Shank

Jenny Shank

Instructor
Jenny Shank's short story collection, Mixed Company, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award (General Fiction). Jenny Shank's novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Hybrid   Publishing/Career

4:00pm MDT

Endings: How to Wrap Things Up
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Very often, writers get to the two-third or three-quarter mark in a work and bog down, sometimes abandoning it to move on to something shinier. Why does this happen? It's a place at which we move from raising questions for the reader to needing to answer them. This change in mode requires a different set of tools than the beginning of a story, while needing to appear part of a seamless whole. In this workshop, we'll look at how to wrap up loose ends, decide which things we can leave dangling, and what elements make a strong closing sentence.
Speakers
avatar for Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal

Instructor
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winning alternate history novel The Calculating Stars, the first book in the Lady Astronaut series which continues in 2025 with The Martian Contingency. She is also the author of The Glamourist Histories series, Ghost... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Fiction   Nonfiction/Memoir   Hybrid   YA/Children's

4:00pm MDT

Up Front: Exploring and Making Poem Titles
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse
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Usually, the title is the first thing you read of the poem on the page. In this class we’ll explore at least five different ways to make a poem title and escape the uninspiring addition of an appendage or the mere label. Using models from Thomas Lux, Yusef Komanaaka, Wallace Stevens, Mary Ruefle and more we will play approaches to create context, clarify focus and subvert meaning.

Bring two poems you have written but may be unsure about as well as any stray titles you may have.
Speakers
avatar for Lynn Wagner

Lynn Wagner

Instructor
Lynn Wagner is the author of No Blues This Raucous Song, which won the Slapering Hol Chapbook competition. She received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she won the Academy of American Poets prize. She has earned fellowships to the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts... Read More →
Wednesday June 11, 2025 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT
Lighthouse 3870 York Street Denver, CO 80205
  Poetry
 
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