Lit Fest 2025

If you’re ready to publish your book, but have no idea how do that, this is the class for you. We'll discuss different pathways for publishing a book; including finding an agent or working without one, submitting your manuscript to publication contests, or self-publishing. We'll learn how to query agents and publishers, how to find comp titles for your book, when you need to write a book proposal, and share useful websites and resources that will support you along your journey to publication.

Great dialogue is more about what is not said than what is said. This workshop explores how to listen to conversations, reveal character, and leave intentional gaps to make your dialogue something that doesn’t simply explicate or move plot. We’ll explore a few good examples and practice a bit. Intermediate or above. Nonfiction and fiction writers welcome. Plan to practice writing.

Is the sofa in your story gold or green? Does it matter? Yes, it actually does. In this seminar, we’ll work on creating specific details that add meaning and depth to your story. Specificity leads to subtext. Subtext leads to richness. The sofa is gold for a reason. Everybody wins!

One of memoir’s biggest challenges is managing the relationship between our voices now and who we were in the past. We spend years playing with the ideas in our memoirs, writing, rewriting, but when we get to the end we realize that the memoir we’ve written isn’t the book we wanted to write. This craft seminar will explore strategies for staying engaged in our own journeys, and doing that hard thing that the best memoirists have mastered: aligning who “you” are now with the “you” of the past on the page.

When you're writing personal essays and memoir, you want to make sure the story resonates with readers whose experiences aren't identical to your own. You need to create entry points and moments of recognition that keep people connected and turning the page. In this craft seminar, we'll walk through five strategies to connect your work with a wider audience. We'll look at relevant examples and work through a few writing prompts.

Who, reading Melissa Febos's memoirs, could fail to imagine her storytelling, seafaring, nightmare-plagued father? Who, reading Meredith Talusan, can forget her doting grandmother? When we write memoir, our characters are often drawn from the people we love, the people we know best—those about whom we may have said our whole lives, “They’re such characters!” So why is it that sometimes those characters appear the blurriest in our drafts? Is it possible that how close we are to someone might be the very thing that complicates turning them into an effective character? Drawing from work by writers like Sarah Broom, Kiese Laymon, Alicia Elliot, and more, we’ll analyze how they achieved the distance necessary to bring their all-too-real family members to life as characters on the page and discuss writing exercises useful for rendering our own.