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.

Publishing was a fast-changing industry even before consolidation, a global pandemic, and the advent of AI, so what does the publishing landscape look like now? Join four industry experts as they discuss how publishing has changed, what remains standard practice, what today’s landscape means for writers, and more.

Writers can become so compelled by the inner lives of their characters that they, the characters, become like fireflies trapped in jars. In this seminar we will talk about how to think about the physical in fiction—keeping characters in their bodies, in rooms, and on the face of the earth--and try our hands at exercises that help us think about gesture, interaction, action, and consequence. Your characters may never raise their eyebrows again.
This is the livestream version of this class, if you would like to attend in person, click here.

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.

The art of making satisfying villains, and the art of saying something new about bad, banal acts—all this can be tricker than it appears. How do we capture the reality of sinister characters without caricature? How do we dramatize bad behavior without glamorizing it or sermonizing, charting a course between theology and pathology? When is it worth separating bad people from bad acts? How do we steer clear of stereotypes? With so much real-life villainy afoot, with readers turning to books both for solace and for answers, these questions feel urgent as ever. Let's have a look at what successful stories have done, and how they've done it, and let's try a bunch of exercises together to make an old problem new.

Come and celebrate the hard work of the Poetry Collective graduates, hear some of their final work, and learn more about the year-long program.

Hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by The Bookies and get your book signed afterward.