Lit Fest 2025

“Live in the layers, not on the litter,” Stanley Kunitz writes in his poem, “The Layers.” Through cultivating a practice of mindful writing, we can bring greater curiosity to the layers of our lives and more vivid, compelling, and powerful writing to the page. Writing itself can be its own path of mindfulness, training us to open our peripheral vision wider as we learn to listen to and glimpse what wants to be said. We’ll engage in some short writing and meditation exercises, and we’ll talk about writing to grow our freedom, gratitude, courage, and resilience.

Even though people think about sex all the time, and even have it occasionally, writers tend to shy away from the subject. Which is crazy. Because sex is the one experience that makes us all hopeful and horny and embarrassed and vulnerable. In this freewheeling afternoon, we’ll look at the work of Mary Gordon, James Salter, and other literary horndogs in an effort to figure out how to infuse our own sex scenes with genuine emotion and ecstatic sensation, not evasions and porn clichés. Arrive ready to lay your characters bare.

Come with an open mind, leave with pages and pages (and pages) of fresh writing! In this generative class, our magical box of props, prompts, and writing activities will infuse your writing with new energy, sending you in exciting new directions. Exercises will be in 3-5 minute sprints, each inspired by a different source of inspiration to explore. Open to writers of all genres who are looking for inspiration and fun.

In this seminar, we'll infuse law into our fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, without sounding like an info dump cut from Law & Order. Explore nuances in courtroom scenes, and add social justice as a timestamp. Law is human conflict. Whether history, classic tales, speculative, or contemporary stories, we'll find strategies to imbue your work with intriguing legal dimensions while using prompts from films, nonfiction, and fiction.

Trying to build your platform to sell your memoir book proposal? This seminar will give writers tools on how to brainstorm a variety of reported essay angles for their main personal story, craft pitches for reported stories that include the right balance of research and connection to readers, and find the editors’ contact and get their attention. We'll examine sample pitches that helped the instructor land research-backed essays in the New York Times, Guardian, Vogue, and CNBC which helped boost her credibility as an expert and in turn promote her book.

Many of us remember the pleasure of writing and receiving letters, the way an evolving correspondence could deepen our understanding of our correspondent and ourselves. In this generative poetry seminar, we'll activate our letter writing skills to create poems that tap into the dimensions of a letter. Using models by Victoria Chang, Eve Ewing, William Carlos Williams, Catherine Wing, and others, we'll explore the possibilities of the epistle—how it compresses exposition, makes room for complex relationships, allows for both distance and intimacy. Once we cross the threshold of speaker, audience, and premise, we’ll be on our way!

Come with a blank page, and leave with the vital elements of a brand-new short story. In this generative session, we'll try to outrun the inner critic, while drawing on the techniques of great writers to create compelling character, meaningful conflict, and economical depth.

When you write a story, do you find it hard to get things off the ground? Does your middle sag? Do you have problems sticking your ending? In this two-hour craft intensive, we'll consider how structure and shape can help resolve these problems, making your story more focused and more propulsive. We’ll discuss the elements of good beginnings, middles, and endings—the basic building blocks of structure—and figure out how to use these elements to move readers through your stories. We’ll consider story shape—both classic shapes and those which might already be inherent in our drafts, just waiting to be revealed. How might story shape suggest directions for your story? How might it be used to create surprise? Bring a project you’d like to work on, and come prepared to read, discuss, reflect, and write.

We'll be collaboratively reading through a Raymond Carver story line-by-line to see at the most granular level what goes into putting a story together. What does the reader need to know, and when? How does a story progress? How do we use symbolism in non-pretentious ways? We’ll save some time for writerly questions towards the end.

Whether you are writing a novel or a memoir, your narrative is made up of moving pictures. We’ll draw on inspiration from select movies, that show how the narrative language of cinema can help you craft a vivid, cinematic narrative. Plan to practice writing.

Fighting—with words, fists, or guns—is an unavoidable fact of human life. Which makes it pretty much unavoidable in our stories, a necessary feature of conflict, and when done right, with skillful build-up, a source of catharsis and climax. Learning how to write successful argument and combat will be the subject of this seminar, in which we'll analyze excellent examples and reflect on our own work in progress.