Lit Fest 2025

Psychedelic writing plays with time and space and perspective, blurs waking and dreaming life, multiplies and distorts the possibilities of narrative. It’s lush and daring and monumental; it finds sublimity and absurdity in the ordinary; it cannot be contained by genre labels. Through hybrid readings that conjure the language and ethos of the psychedelic experience, we’ll consider strange and mysterious routes to the center of states that can be impossible to write straightforwardly or linearly: the infinitude of grief, the obliteration of the self through sex and childbirth, the weirdness of aging, cycles of trauma and desire, chronic pain, transition, spiritual transcendence. We’ll take inspiration from authors like Venita Blackburn, Anne de Marcken, and Helen Phillips, who explore themes of loss and transcendence by folding the world and their work into exquisite and inexplicable shapes on the page. This seminar will urge you to break form and turn words inside out as a means of describing self-shattering conditions and the realities of our twisted present—which, it often feels, can only be contemplated clearly through a warped lens.