Lit Fest 2025

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Come meet our very successful Book Project authors Nini Berndt, Gloria Browne-Marshall, Jan Thomas, and Jenny Dandy read from their work and talk about writing their books. Stick around for book signings and Q&A from William Haywood Henderson and others from the Book Project!