Calling all nonfiction writers to Lit Fest 2026! This comprehensive guide is designed to help you get the most out of our workshop offerings. Between two-day intensives, craft seminars, events, and panels, there's sure to be something for everyone. Visit our festival pass offerings to explore the week to the fullest, and check out our official Lit Fest 2026 Guide for an entire overview.
Two-Day Intensives
Saturday, June 13 - Sunday, June 14
Your Voice On The Page
With William Haywood Henderson
Your fully developed literary voice is as individual as your brain, your intelligence, your sight. It will set you apart from all other writers. Taking inspiration from Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page and Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, we’ll examine your voice, discover its strengths and individuality, and ultimately help you break through to an even more distinct and complex voice on the page.
Wednesday, June 17 - Thursday, June 18
Bridges To Elsewhere: Using Tone, Language, And Context To Defamiliarize The Everyday Moment
With Evanthia Bromiley
Exceptional narrative turns are an intimate experience. We encounter emotions alongside a character, feel as she feels, move as she moves, and in the best scenes, experience moments of radical empathy. Reading scenes by Gabriela Cabazón Cámara, Lucia Berlin, Grace Paley, Dennis Johnson, Deborah Levy, Catherine Lacey and Percival Everett, we will analyze the distinctive turns that create, channel, and change energy in a work. We will then turn to the components of our own scenes, and revise using (among other techniques) power shifts, subtext, revelations, image, misdirection, and surrealism.
Thursday, June 18 - Friday, June 19
The 48-Hour Story Or Essay
With Erika Krouse
Ready, set, write! In this generative class, we’ll write a short story or essay over two days. Using targeted exercises and a few insider tricks, we’ll work on particular elements of short stories/essays (both traditional or nontraditional) to form new characters, settings, story arcs, dialogue, action, interiority, and more! Come with a basic story idea and leave with a complete(ish) story to continue perfecting on your own. Open to all short prose genres.
Craft Seminars
Friday, June 12
Where's The Conflict?
With Ana Qu
A deep dive into how to shape characters and their conflicts on the page. In this two-hour seminar, we’ll look at relationships between the self and other characters, as well as the types of conflicts to consider in your nonfiction work or memoir.
Memoir: What's Research Got To Do With It?
With Angie Chuang
Memoir and personal essay may seem far removed from the world of Google Scholar, articles with citations, surveys, news databases, historical archives, theoretical texts, and other resources frequently used by academic researchers. As a memoirist and essayist who also just published a scholarly book, I’ll lead you through a diverse toolbox of research resources, as well as discuss ways that epistemology can add depth, surprise, and gravitas to your personal writing. Research often illuminates the "So What?" of a memoir. You'll also get some practical, judgement-free advice on generative AI and chatbots, and how they can help, hurt, expand, and /or limit your research process. We'll embark on a research journey to add a new dimension to your work-in-progress by the end of this workshop.
The Art Of Constraints: Setting Limits To Set Ourselves Free
With Alexander Lumans
As Oulipo Writer Georges Perec says, “I set myself rules in order to be totally free.” In this seminar, we’ll follow Perec’s logic: working with writing constraints so our prose can emerge more forceful and more honed from the first draft on. We’ll read examples of contemporary writers who use (or appear to use) different constraints in their fiction and nonfiction. We’ll dissect how and why constraints are of great use to any writer. And we’ll get a chance to try our own constraints via fun prompts. Even if you’ve never worked with constraints before, this class is still for you.
Hike And Write: Urban Style
With Michael Henry
The tradition of nature writing goes back to the Romantics and before, most likely because we are creatures of place. In this hands-on and feet-walking session, we'll explore some of the 'natural' settings just outside of Lighthouse, using the landscape as inspiration, and see what we find, and what the world around us has to say. We won't be walking miles on end, but please wear comfortable shoes, a good hat, and sunscreen. We'll walk around the 39th Avenue Greenway for a time, and then settle back into the air conditioned comfort of 3844 York Street to share and perhaps dig a little deeper.
Dance. Write. Repeat.
With Jennifer Wortman
We write not just with our minds but with our bodies. In this class, taught by a certified dance fitness instructor, we’ll explore what moving our bodies does for our writing. Using the principles of LaBlast dance fitness, which incorporates ballroom dance moves into accessible, partner-free patterns, we’ll alternate a variety of dance styles with writing sessions and see what comes loose. Open to all genres and all writing, dance, and fitness levels: the dances will be offered in lower intensity forms to suit the non-gym environment, though comfortable clothes and shoes are recommended.
Your Dark Materials
With William Haywood Henderson
It’s easy to write a story—you just have your characters do things, think, and engage in witty dialogue. But it’s difficult to write an excellent story—you have to expose something vital (maybe even dark, certainly elemental) that lurks in your subconscious, that speaks to your true self. If you’re unwilling to dig around and go deep, you’ll be forever writing perfectly fine stories that skim the surface. In this class, we’ll look at famous works that definitely took a risk, and, with these excerpts as inspiration, we’ll take an expedition to find our own dark materials.
Orbweaving A Book Of Essays
With Christina Rivera
Do you dream of a book of essays, but need help finding a shape to cradle your vision? In this workshop, we’ll break out of linear thinking and into the many dimensions that can hold a book—from conception to publication. We’ll discuss themes, portals, organizational tools, and story-holding shapes (many from nature, such as the orbweaver’s spider web, which lent structure to my book). Come to class with two or more essays, and together we’ll investigate how your themes are talking to each other and could further arc outward. The emphasis of this workshop will be on individual vision building and generative feedback. Prose writers of any genre are welcome, as the shape-finding techniques can be applied to many projects. Come to class with fragments and leave with a book vision that has touchable dimensions!
POV Jumpstart
With Amanda Rea
If you’ve ever found yourself lost in a workshop, listening to someone talk about the “first person plural” or the limitations of “close third,” you’re not alone. Perspective and point-of-view can be daunting, even to experienced writers. In this generative, no-pressure session, we’ll look at the various kinds of POV a writer can use, and why. We’ll experiment with different perspectives, and take note of how they change the stories we tell. Other topics will include head-hopping, psychic distance, and narrative voice.
Writing Through Chronic Illness And/Or Disability: A Reclamation
With Rachel Weaver
In this generative workshop for people who have experienced chronic illness and or disability, we'll work to recover the voice that illness and treatment often take away. We'll read short texts, look at art installations, watch performance poetry and write in the shadow of each unearthing the depth of our own experience and most importantly, celebrating the specific life wisdom gained by each of us as we’ve navigated our own paths. We'll work to create a safe space and sharing of work will be completely optional.
Speculative Nonfiction
With Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Essayists, memoirists, and writers of hybrid nonfiction have long navigated the line between emotional truth and factual truth in search of meaning. In this hands-on, discussion-driven craft seminar, we’ll clarify the distinction between invention, lying, and the use of imagination and speculation as instruments of discovery. We’ll explore practical strategies for making our work deeper and more complex through “perhapsing” and other techniques.
True Crimes: The Challenges Of Writing Homicide Stories (Virtual)
With Javier Sinay
In this seminar, we'll explore the challenges of telling true crime stories: from capturing the essence of the cases to managing ethical sensitivity. To understand how masters do it, we will read David Carr, Marcela Turati, Truman Capote, Emmanuel Carrère, Óscar Martínez and others. We'll learn from their techniques on research, structure, and writing. A seminar for writers, journalists, and true crime enthusiasts. A combination of theory, practice, and discussion under one goal: storytelling with impact, respect for the victims, and writing with precision.
Dynamic Dialogue
With Amanda Rea
Strong dialogue brings characters to life in a way no amount of exposition can. It crystallizes relationships, advances the plot, provides texture and humor and heartbreak. In the words of Elizabeth Bowen: “Speech is what the characters do to each other.” It’s also when the reader is allowed to participate most fully in the world you’ve created. So let’s not shy away from it. In this generative session, we’ll look at strategies for making our dialogue as dynamic as it can be, including subtext, characterization, embedded action, using voice, as well as the nuts and bolts of dialogue tags and formatting.
Telling Stories In A Time Of Fire: How To Write Within The Climate Crisis
With Alexander Lumans
“The future is not yet written,” says Rebecca Solnit, “[because] we are writing it now.” Even when hope feels harder than ever to maintain, the most effective single act of environmental conservation and protest is to tell stories. In this class, we’ll read and discuss writers across different genres, like Barry Lopez, Paisley Rekdal, Richard Powers, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Their work artfully weaves the ecological with the individual. We’ll then experiment with enhancing our own writing through new techniques of engagement with the natural world. For any writer wanting more reason to hold onto hope for the future!
Time And Time And Time Again
With Kyle Beachy
In this lecture and discussion, we'll consider time as a formal component of narrative, essayistic, and lyrical writing. Moving beyond the distinction between scene and summary, we'll introduce techniques for mapping a story's time, and consider what happens when we stop or step outside of time's passage. We'll also experiment with time as a generative tool. By the session's end, we'll depart with new curiosities and the confidence to work and play with time as we might voice, POV, and every other element of creative writing.
Writing From Weakness
With Jennifer Wortman
Zadie Smith advises writers to “avoid your weaknesses.” With all due respect to Smith, sometimes our so-called weaknesses produce the best writing. In this generative class, we’ll embrace our weaknesses—personal, artistic, and physical—to see what power we can find. For writers of all levels and genres who don’t mind getting a little uncomfortable.
The Character Interview: Your Protagonist Is Lying To You
With Lior Torenberg
Every character has secrets. It's your job as a writer to uncover them. In this craft workshop, we'll put your main characters in the hot seat and ask the tough questions that reveal who they really are, what they want, and what they're hiding from you. Through guided exercises and group discussion, you'll learn how to interrogate your characters to uncover hidden motivations, fears, contradictions, and desires that can crack open your writing.
Saturday, June 13
Desire & Power
With Dino Enrique Piacentini
Desire is a fundamental element of character-building, yet in too many drafts, character desires lack urgency or are too easily thwarted or fulfilled. In this seminar, we’ll discuss different ways to pump up the stakes and, even better, consider the sparks that can fly when multiple characters have multiple, competing desires. How can tension be built through power dynamics? What are the ways in which power might manifest? How might it be applied? And how and when might it shift, so that your characters—and your reader—are kept on their toes?
Say Less, Mean More: Writing With Subtext
With Rachel Weaver
Learn how to layer meaning beneath dialogue and description so your characters reveal as much in silence as they do in speech. We’ll analyze short examples, then practice writing scenes where the real tension simmers beneath the words.
Haunted Landscapes: Writing Place As Presence
With Hillary Leftwich
In this generative workshop, we’ll go about the project of animating setting as character. Through prompts and discussion, we’ll explore how landscape can embody memory, loss, and the uncanny—whether rural, urban, or imagined. Come ready to write!
The Creative Act: Finding Flow in Flaw (Virtual)
With Ladane Nasseri
Inspired by Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, this generative workshop will loosen your sense of perfectionism and open the door to creative possibility. Through the practices of stillness, attention, and mindful observation, we’ll quiet the inner critic, welcome flaws on the page, and make them part of the creative process. Guided exercises will turn mistakes into unexpected openings and reveal new textures in your writing. Leave with pages that surprise you and a renewed sense of creative freedom.
Literary Ephemera
With Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
In this generative, multi-genre course, we’ll explore alternative approaches to storytelling, such as erasure, literary collage, photo captions and image-text hybrids. We’ll create narratives relying less on plot and more on association, juxtaposition and negative space. This seminar will be run like an art studio – with live prompts and plenty of cutting, pasting, erasing and replacing. Through examples, discussion and exercises, we’ll learn how everyday ephemera can jumpstart your writing, help you approach a project from another angle, or simply see your world differently. Bring your inner child, an open mind, and be prepared to play.
Sell Essays That Boost Your Book's Potential
With Amanda McCracken
Trying to build your platform to sell your memoir book proposal? I was in that situation last year. This seminar will help writers brainstorm a variety of reported essay angles for their main personal story, and craft pitches for reported stories that include the right balance of research and connection to readers. We’ll talk about finding contacts for editors and then grabbing their attention. We'll examine sample pitches that helped me land research-backed essays in The New York Times, Guardian, Vogue and CNBC, all of which boosted my credibility as an expert, which in turn promoted my book.
Is My Character An Asshole?
With Pardeep Toor
WWE Hall-of-Famer Scott Hall famously said, "Bad times don't last, but bad guys do." Is it true that bad characters last longer in our imaginations than the good ones? How does this compete with conventional wisdom that encourages likeable characters? We’ll examine common character tropes in fiction and nonfiction, as well as the mandate that characters can (or should?) change over the course of the story. Collectively, we’ll explore character arcs and how to create lasting relationships between readers and characters. Each writer will leave this seminar having developed an archetype for one of their characters.
Structure Through Motif
With Dino Enrique Piacentini
A motif is a recurring element in a piece of art—an object, action, idea, sensation, or just a word or line. Saris. Doors opening and closing. Variations of the word “small.” And, like characters, motifs can develop over the course of a narrative, adding layers of suggestion and meaning. They can even serve as a narrative’s primary structural element. In this seminar, we’ll consider motifs that call to us; locate potential motifs in our own drafts; identify ways to tease out arcs for our motifs; and maybe even figure out how to use those motifs to build an entire story or essay around. Bring something short you’d like to play around with.
The Laundry Line (Virtual)
With Natalie Hodges
In his writing workshops, the journalist Michael Pollan says that every piece of writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, needs a "laundry line": a main conceptual through-line that is strong yet flexible enough to hold the various vignettes, reflections, and analyses that make up the piece. This craft seminar will provide an opportunity for writers to begin developing a sturdy laundry line for their current projects, focusing on the difference between narrative and chronology, how voice evolves across structure, how to braid personal reflection with reportage and analysis, and much more.
Out Of Character
With Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
Contrary to everything writers are told about crafting credible characters, this workshop will explore when and why your characters should do something “out of character.” Practicing techniques we’ll discuss in class, we’ll further develop characters, build tension, create conflict, and/or work toward revelation and resolution. We will use low-stakes fiction-focused writing exercises to explore the idea but creative nonfiction writers and memoirists will learn how to use the same concept in their work. All participants will learn who the people populating their pages really are.
I Shot The Sheriff: Writing True/Untrue Confessions
With Erika Krouse
Literary confessions generate sympathy, create immediacy, and solidify the confessor’s relationship with an empathetic reader. But how do you navigate the trickier aspects of confession: drama vs. self-indulgence, getting the reader to care, and scariest of all, what your mother might think? In this class, we’ll examine how the experts navigate their real and imaginary confessions, and plunder their secrets for our personal use. And then confess to it. Privacy will be respected; open to all genres.
Literary Swagger: Writing Prose That Makes Readers Take Notice
With Jenny Shank
Have you ever read a passage in a book that made you want to applaud, howl, laugh, and most of all, underline? Some writers have literary swagger, and don’t think that people don’t notice! Swagger can arrive through confidence, humor, decisiveness, or intensity of feeling. Swagger happens when the voice of the prose rises to meet the pitch of the story in an important moment. In this class we’ll read examples from writers including Miranda July, Deborah Jackson Taffa, Olga Tokarczuk, Damon Young, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Kevin Wilson, and Hanif Abdurraquib and try writing knockout prose of our own.
Lyric Essay: Gathering Fragments
With Suzi Q Smith
In this workshop, we will read examples and begin drafting our own lyric essays. The lyric essay is a form that brings together elements of poetry, memoir, and creative nonfiction to invite a reader to an experience. Sometimes fragmented, the lyric essay allows us to draw from our own memories, impressions, ideations, questions and research to weave a narrative about our individual and collective experiences. We will write fragments in response to prompts and find strategies to weave them together into lyric essays.
Unspooling Local Lore: Bringing Your Setting To Life
With Chris Vanjonack
Even as many of us can quickly identify the eccentricities and mythology of places we’ve called home, it can be enormously challenging to fully capture a place on the page. In this two-hour, generative craft seminar, writers will have the opportunity to name, map, and explicate the urban legends, suburban gossip, and local lore that defines the towns and cities we call home, and, in doing so, bring the settings of our fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to life in more vivid detail.
Sunday, June 14
Listen to the Work
With Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Writers of all genres are invited to take part in an experiment designed to help you listen. In the midst of creating a work, it’s necessary to invest time in dreaming what it could be. Throughout our process, we may make statements, diagram plot, lay down tidy plans for where a work will go, what it will mean, and what it will sound like. But your best-laid plans might be concealing a more exciting path you haven’t imagined yet.. Perhaps you have begun to perceive it, but you have not wholly become conscious of it. In the days leading up to this seminar, you will have an assignment: listen to your work in progress. During the seminar, we’ll abstain from editing and instead listen to what our novel, memoir, essay, or poem has to teach us.
Inhabiting The Narrator
With Evelyn Hampton
The premise of this class is that prose writers should spend as much time (or more!) on narrator development as we spend on character development. The best way to understand your narrator is to learn to embody them. How do they sit? Move? Gesture? Move through the world? Inflect their sentences? Cry? Laugh? Drawing from improvisation and method acting, this class will help writers inhabit their narrators, telling their stories with full voices.
Creative Research: Turning Curiosity Into Story (Virtual)
With Ladane Nasseri
At the start of every great story is a question and the need to explore or understand better. In this class, we’ll explore how intentional research can enrich your creative work and give it depth, texture, and authority. Drawing from my background in journalism, I’ll show you practical ways to design a research plan, find reliable sources, and conduct meaningful interviews with relatives and strangers. Whether you’re writing an essay, memoir, profile, or novel, you’ll leave with tools to approach research as a creative, ethical and enjoyable practice.
Going Out In Style
With Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
We will explore the “baroque” and “plain song” writing styles. When we talk baroque, consider Angela Carter's adjective-heavy prose, filled with language demanding a reader have a dictionary nearby. In the case of plain song, Ernest Hemingway, a journalist, employs prose so simple it almost reads like Dick & Jane. While every writer cultivates their own style and individual voice, this class examines the impact style has on content. We’ll explore how (and when) to write a complex-compound sentence absolutely littered with modifiers and punctuation versus when to be economic, sparse, even fragmented.
Are Words Alive?
With Heather Christle
This craft talk will focus on strategies for collaborating with words as living beings. How do we make ourselves available to their arrival? How do we treat them when we meet? What do they desire? What do they hate? We'll look to possible clues from poets, writers, and critics who knew language before us, as well as theories nabbed from neuroscience and predictive coding. We may not answer all our questions, but we’ll marvel at the sensations (and writings) they can produce.
Beyond The Laugh: How And Why To Use Humor
With Kathleen Boland
There are serious reasons to crack a few jokes in your manuscript. In this class, we'll discuss how to use humor as a narrative tool. From deepening plot to establishing tone, we'll explore how and why comedy is an essential function in storytelling. The class will include close readings of examples from Twain to Tulathimutte, discussions of the various definitions of humor, and prompts using different joke forms. To note, the class will be focused on fiction, though all writers of all levels are welcome.
Structure And Alchemy: Writing Climactic Transformations (Virtual)
With Natalie Hodges
Fiction writers are conditioned to assume the climax of our novel/short story is simply the point of highest action. But this is a narrow, purely situational definition of climax. And for nonfiction writers, the necessity of a climax in our structure is mentioned as an afterthought if at all. This seminar will reconceptualize narrative climax as an alchemical transformation deeply connected to a work's motivating questions and utterly necessary to all prose works, regardless of genre. Writers will leave equipped with tools for plotting the climaxes of their own works and integrating these into their narrative structures.
Turn Your Essay Into A TEDx Talk (Virtual)
With Amanda McCracken
This course will demystify the TEDx process by helping writers find a TEDx organization taking applications, understand what organizers are looking for in your application, apply for a TEDx talk to be selected, and learn the difference between writing a TED talk script and an essay. I'll provide handouts with templates and links to helpful resources. My content will include personal anecdotes and interviews I've had with three TEDx show producers and two essayists who have given TEDx talks.
Monday, June 15
Bait The Hook: Your First Few Pages (Livestream Option Available)
With Erika Krouse
The first few pages of a story are the tryout; after that, the reader makes a decision to keep reading or move on. How can you “hook” your readers and immerse them in your narrative world? What techniques do you need to create a firm writer-reader contract? In this content-heavy class, we’ll explore hooks and expositions (a.k.a. beginnings): how to introduce your characters, ground your readers in your novel/memoir/short story/essay, and begin the art of narrative intrigue. Bring your ideas to class, and leave with new beginnings you can use immediately. Open to all prose writers.
From Patient To Protagonist: Claiming Agency In Your Own Story
With Rachel Weaver
Illness can make us feel passive, but memoir requires an active center. In this session, we’ll practice techniques for crafting a narrator who drives the story—even when circumstances are beyond their control. In this class, we’ll read brief examples and then draft scenes that externalize symptoms through action, imagery, and interaction. We’ll practice crafting vivid, fresh metaphors and sensory details that convey what it feels like to inhabit a changed or challenged body.
To Flash Back Or Not To Flash Back
With Jenny Shank
Good characters come with a past, but is a flashback the only way to let readers know about essential details from before the story’s start? Not necessarily. We’ll look at examples from writers who eschew flashbacks but still give readers a rich sense of a character’s past life, including excerpts from Kent Haruf, Jane Austen, and more. If you choose to use flashbacks, how do you do it well? We’ll look at the way experts including Willy Vlautin, Susan Straight, and Percival Everett slide gracefully in and out of flashback.
Letting The I Ching Help You Write Your Story (Virtual)
With Henry Lien
Philip K. Dick claimed that he did not write one of his greatest novels, The Man in the High Castle, by himself. Dick discovered the I Ching when he began the novel and he claimed the I Ching co-wrote the novel with him. The I Ching is a 3,000 year-old collection of 64 poems. It can be read as philosophy but is most famous as an oracle, using a method of casting coins or yarrow stalks. This workshop guides students through the process of consulting the I Ching to guide the course of their story.
Tuesday, June 16
They Can’t Be All Bad, Right?
With Gloria J. Browne-Marshall
Your antagonist is totally despicable. But despite horrible behavior, they must be interesting, fully capable of sustaining your reader, and a substantial foil to your protagonist. They must be more than a receptacle for revenge. Avoid the one-dimensional villain and make your antagonist develop beyond their worst act. This craft class will help fiction as well as nonfiction writers give depth to despots, frauds, and mean actors. Writers will use generative exercises, selected excerpts, and discussion to explore possible positive traits in even the most deplorable characters.
I Hate You, Too: Writing Antagonistic Relationships
With Erika Krouse
Our friends are close, but our enemies are uncomfortably closer, and the protagonist-antagonist relationship is often the most intimate one in any story. For this reason, it’s important to throw your protagonist and antagonist together in all sorts of interesting ways, so the torture can begin. In this hands-on, exercise-driven class, we’ll craft that antagonistic relationship to hit as many trigger points as possible, creating story-propelling conflict and change. Open to all prose writers.
Reader In The Room
With Angelique Stevens
Writers are often told to “write from the heart,” but if the goal is to move or connect with others, audience matters. This two-hour class explores how powerful nonfiction honors both the writer’s truth and the reader’s experience. We’ll look at what audiences really want—to be invited into another’s world, to feel tension and release, to understand what’s at stake. Through short readings, discussion, and exercises, you'll learn to balance authenticity with craft—using the tools that make nonfiction not just true, but felt.
Information Underload: What Each Precious Paragraph Communicates To A Reader
With Bix Gabriel
We’re writers. We want to beguile our readers so we write and re-write, polish and agonize over every word and comma. But what information is the reader taking away? And does it match our intentions? In this two-hour session, we’ll examine paragraphs—published examples and our own—and identify what types of information readers glean, how it advances or deepens the plot, story, and characters. When it doesn’t achieve our designs, we’ll diagnose why, what we want to change, and most importantly, how to do so. This is an interactive session in which writers examine their own work, so please bring (or have available) some pages of manuscript.
The Cutting Room Floor: Late-Stage Revision
With Evanthia Bromiley
“I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free,” Michelangelo said. What are both esoteric and practical techniques for cutting, in late-stage revision? We’ll dig into how different writers approach this question. Bring a draft or two to this revision-based class, in which we’ll practice techniques for excising, removing weight, and clarifying shapely prose.
Jungian Dream Analysis For Creative Writing: An Introduction (Virtual)
With Henry Lien
Joseph Campbell once described psychologist Carl Jung’s writings about dreams as examining x-rays of the spiritual state. This workshop introduces writers to techniques to replicate the ability of dreams to turn complex or unconscious ideas into powerful images. It uses meditation, a Choose-Your-Own-Narrative format, and writing prompts to identify Jungian archetypes in the writer’s dreams or nascent ideas. Participants will then learn how to harness those archetypes to sink deeper into their own writing.
Finding The Heart And Body Of Your Memoir (Virtual)
With Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
One of the biggest challenges in writing memoir or essays is finding the focus and structure. So many directions tempt us before we find our best way forward. In this invigorating seminar, we’ll explore tools and approaches for sussing out the heart of the memoir, and from there, consider possibilities for organizing it (chronologically, thematically, as an essay collection, or even as a collage of vignettes). We’ll do some short exercises to clarify what our memoir or essay wants to be and how we can realize that potential. Ample handouts will be provided.
A Wrinkle In Time: How To Manage Chronology And Structure
With Steve Almond
One of the central struggles in storytelling is that human beings are, in essence, time travelers. We live in the past of our memories and the future of our hopes. Thus, when we tell stories, we often shuttle around in time. This can be exciting, but more often it winds up confusing the reader, and (in my case) the writer. In this fast-paced seminar, we’ll look at fiction and non-fiction examples of authors who manage chronology, and structure, masterfully. And we'll help all participants learn how to do the same.
Write Stronger Scenes: A Checklist
With Rachel Weaver
Scene work is the backbone of any story. When your scene work is strong, your reader is pulled into the story and forget everything else. In this class, you’ll bring in one of your scenes and will reshape it according to a check list of what makes great scene work, including but not limited to controlling narrative distance, writing effective dialogue, capturing setting without being boring, maintaining tension, and integrating or eliminating backstory.
Symbolism and Metaphor: They Aren’t Just for Fiction
With Angelique Stevens
So you think symbolism and metaphor are devices only fiction writers use? Everything humans do is symbolic. We create symbols, we use them, we misuse them. In this class, we’ll first take a deep dive into the symbolic and the metaphorical in our everyday lives. We’ll analyze several examples of literary nonfiction that use the same devices fiction writers employ. We’ll talk about ways nonfiction writers can both deepen and complicate their own narratives and, in the process, understand why and how they can be beneficial.
Setting & Embodiment
With Dino Enrique Piacentini
How can setting suggest a character’s emotional life? How can setting itself be embodied so that it becomes its own living, breathing character? In this seminar, we’ll explore ways to show what is going on beneath the surface of your character and/or narrative by learning how to physically embody internal realities in the external details of setting. We’ll consider examples of embodied setting; run through prompts that hone our awareness of the sensory and emotional details of physical spaces; and then, figure out ways to apply that awareness to the imagined worlds of our narratives. Bring a passage or scene that you’d like to work on.
Black Doubt, Revision, and Faith (Livestream Option Available)
With Andre Dubus III
Albert Camus reminds us that we cannot be successful writers without “black doubt.” What do we do, then, when this doubt feels overwhelming? What do we do when we’ve lost faith, not only in what we’re working on, but in our ability to ever write anything worth reading ever again? Often, what is needed in these disheartening moments is deep revision, a stage of artistic effort and creation that is absolutely essential and which too many writers give short shrift.
ChatGPT Is My Secretary (Virtual)
With Erika Krouse
ChatGPT is awful. It’s a plagiarist, it lies and fabricates, it will run us out of our jobs…but it’s also free, exploitable, non-human labor! AI can be the answer to our harried dreams: a sometimes-reliable entity to perform research, consolidation, organization, and administrative tasks that would otherwise take us hours or months to do. What are the many ways a writer can use recent technologies to save ourselves valuable time and labor? How much can we trust it, and what are the ways we really shouldn’t? No technical knowledge needed; your instructor doesn’t have any, either.
Wednesday, June 17
Real People, Real Problems
With Erika Krouse
If you write about real people, sometimes they get mad at you. Your memoir, novel, short story, essay, or poem may cause problems ranging from family tiffs to actual lawsuits. All of us wonder if it’s okay to write certain stories, and further, what to consider when publishing them. What’s off limits, and who gets to decide? What types of things should you worry about? If you write fiction, are you immune? (Short answer: no.) How can you tweak your text to safeguard your work? You’ll leave this class with practical, concrete tools to protect your writing without compromising your vision.
Memoir Structure: Scene by Scene
With Jenny Shank
Contemporary memoirs are organized in many ways, from experimental to traditional three-act. But when it comes to structure on a page-by-page and sentence-by-sentence basis, there are some tenets most published memoirs follow. Come learn to discern the difference between sharing memories and creating a story, how to structure your memoir using scenes and transitions, how to work with causality, how and when to skip big chunks of time in a memoir, and more. We’ll look at examples from memoirs by Carmen Maria Machado, Anthony Bourdain, Daisy Hernández and more.
Memoir for the Anxious, Uncertain, or Scared Writer
With Beth Nguyen
This craft seminar aims to demystify the process of writing a memoir. We'll talk about structure, perspective, ethical concerns, and more, including how to begin and how to continue. Let's deal with the anxiety together, and we’ll leave with the confidence and tools we need to write personal essays and memoirs!
Perhapsing: What To Do When We Don’t Know
With Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
In the craft book Tell It Slant, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola ponder the question memoirists face again and again: Does nonfiction mean “no fiction”? What do we do when we don’t remember or know all the details? How do we handle the fact we are all inherently unreliable narrators? “Perhapsing” is a term coined by Lisa Knopp to describe one technique a memoirist can employ to signal to the reader that they are now speculating. We will experiment with this strategy (and others) while focusing on how to simultaneously establish and maintain intimacy and trust with the audience.
Perseverance Training: Surviving The Long Haul Of Writing
With Rachel Weaver
The novel that takes twenty years, the memoir that won’t cohere, the one hundredth agent who says no thanks, or worse, just ignores you — disappointment, doubt and fear are part of the process. Of course, so is gloriousness. In this two-hour workshop, we’ll air it all out: the anxieties, the self-sabotage, the night terrors. Together we’ll examine how other writers have pushed through fear and flagging confidence, and we’ll discuss practical strategies for surviving. Bring your doubts and worries; you’ll leave with a sturdier sense of what it takes to keep going until the work is done.
Thursday, June 18
Making the Personal Matter (Livestream Option Available)
With Emily Rapp Black
In this seminar, we’ll explore strategies for integrating research into our own first-person writing with the goal of answering some burning questions about creative nonfiction: How do essayists use “real” experiences to make stories that move? How do they create context that matters, turn personal anecdotes into universally applicable meanings, and write fresh perspectives into experiences and topics that are age-old: culture, travel, death, or love? What is the best way to build context and to shape essays so that they have momentum and meaning? In other words, how do we make meaning?
From Idea To Outline
With Mary Robinette Kowal
Often we have a nugget that we want to play with, but can't find the larger story. This generative workshop walks writers through a toolbox to go from idea to outline. This will work for people who are pantsers as well as plotters, because they can apply the tools at any point in the process. The takeaway from this class isn't "this is how it's done" but rather "here are tools for when you are struggling."
Secrets: Strategies For Story
With Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
In this workshop, we’ll explore secrets as a major component for all storytelling. Secrets both separate us from one another and bind us together. Writers will learn how to make powerful allusions in their writing to build plot and develop character. In addition to learning the art of confession, we’ll also explore subtext as strategy and when and how to prioritize the reader’s experience.
The Rich Layers Of Personal Style
With William Haywood Henderson
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.” This quote is famously attributed to the artist Pablo Picasso, but it applies equally to writers. We all bring to the page our influences over the years—the books we’ve admired (or even hated), the imagery and music and themes we’ve been drawn to again and again, and the styles we’ve envied. In this class, we’ll look at your influences, how they’ve helped shape your style and ideas, and work to consciously incorporate your influences in your writing. No one will accuse you of stealing—we’ll just admire the rich layers of your style.
Seance Of The Bees: Writing And Ritual Practices
With Andrea Rexilius
What parts of your body do you write with? Your brain, your heart, your lungs, your womb? This interactive, movement-based seminar will guide participants through a series of somatic and ritual practices, stemming from the wisdom of bees and the artist/writers Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others.
Crash Course In Character
With Jenny Shank
Characters are the most basic part of writing fiction, but just how do you create fictional people that will win readers over with their authenticity and verve? We'll study how masters such as Kent Haruf, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Ann Patchett introduce major and minor characters, talk about "spark plug characters" and how to create them, learn how to collect character details in a writer's notebook, and discuss the importance of giving your characters skills.
The Picture Within: Art As Inspiration And Critique
With Megan O’Grady
Throughout literary history, writers and poets have often turned to artists for inspiration and contemplation. Visual art can be a powerful catalyst for both sensory and formal exploration, deepening our awareness of color, composition, tension, and scale. It can also elicit words within us, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf on Cézanne, from places we had not known language to exist. Through close-looking exercises, short ekphrastic readings (contemporary and classic), and writing prompts drawn from our own encounters with art, we’ll hone our skills as noticers and interpreters of life.
Make a Scene!: How to Bring Your Memoir to Life (Virtual)
With Minda Honey
If your memoir is reading like the hair in the "Before" photo in a shampoo commercial — flat, lifeless and dull — adding a scene might be what's missing! In this seminar we'll chat about what it looks like to "show not tell" by bringing your reader into the real-time of your narrative. The writing prompts for this seminar can be applied to your work-in-progress or generate writing for a new piece.
Suffering Builds Character
With Tiffany Quay Tyson
A story in which characters don’t suffer (or don’t suffer enough) is a story that’s easy to put down. In the most compelling stories, characters struggle mightily. They grapple with impossible dilemmas. They face their greatest fears. And just when you imagine they can take no more, things get undeniably worse. We’ll look at examples from literary fiction and commercial fiction. We’ll discuss ways to put characters in peril and keep them there for the sake of crafting a compelling story.
Writing The Best American Essay: Contemporary Techniques And Ideas
With Jenny Shank
In this class, we’ll read excerpts from essays that appeared in the Best American Essays 2025 with an eye to their technique, structure, story, voice, and emotion. We’ll study recent trends in essays as well as classic templates, glean everything we can learn from some of the best essayists working today, and leave with some fresh starts and ideas for our own writing.
Just Keep Going: Being a Writer for Life
With Buzzy Jackson
What sets "real writers" apart from dilettantes? The practice of writing. As creative people, too often we blame ourselves for a lack of motivation and consistent creative work, when the truth is that we live in a society designed to distract us from original creation, encouraging us to put off creative work in favor of something more "productive" (e.g., money-making). This seminar proposes the radical idea that part of your job as an artist is self-motivation: you need to keep yourself inspired and creating, despite everything. Together we'll explore ideas, strategies, and daily practices to ensure you Just Keep Going.
Writing In An AI Powered World
With Cynthia Swanson
For many writers, artificial intelligence is changing not only the creative landscape, but also how we talk about our writing, connect with readers and other writers, and build community. One of the biggest challenges brought on by AI is anxiety. Writers worry about being falsely accused of using AI to produce work, their published works being used to train AI tools, and ensuring their words remain relevant in a world that’s rapidly become accustomed to AI-generated content. In this seminar, we’ll talk about these challenges and discuss approaches for building (or rebuilding) our creative confidence in the AI age.
Friday, June 19
Lens
With William Haywood Henderson
What the heck is lens? It’s merely a vital element of craft utilized on every line of every page of your writing. It helps you find meaning in detail, action, vision, and it allows space for subtext. Why is the sofa in your scene gold? If you don’t know, then it’s time to learn how lens works. In this class we’ll read great examples of lens (actually, any page of good writing can show us), and we’ll work through exercises to sharpen your own.
The Propulsive Narrative: Creating And Maintaining Momentum
With Tiffany Quay Tyson
You have a great premise. Maybe a gripping first chapter. But now your characters are wandering around contemplating the scenery, and you can't seem to make them do anything else. Sound familiar? If you want to write the sort of story that a reader cannot put down, you need to create urgency on every page. We’ll look at tools employed by writers of thrillers and suspense novels and explore strategies for creating a propulsive read no matter what sort of book you are writing.
Strange Beasts: Wild Structures And Architectures
With Evanthia Bromiley
Sometimes, the world can be heavy beyond measure. "At certain moments," says Italo Calvino, "I felt the entire world was turning to stone." Fortunately, writers like Mohsin Hamid, Italo Calvino, Ovid, Tea Obreht, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and Cabezón Camára have an answer: the surreal. In this class we will analyze their technique from the above writers and craft a series of vignettes that build and cross bridges to elsewhere, and employ the techniques of surrealism to turn "language into a weightless element that hovers above like a cloud or better perhaps, the finest dust."
Behind the Frame: To See, To Feel, to Know
With Rachel Louise Snyder
Sometimes even the most familiar or memorable photographs mask the emotional truth of a moment. In this seminar, we’ll look at both new and well-known images from historical moments that capture or fail to capture the stories that exist behind them. Students will explore the relationship between visual representation and emotional gradation through discussion and experimental written exercises.
How To Be An Asshole
With Nick Arvin
Stories need villains and brutes, scoundrels and jerks, creeps and lowlifes. Collectively, let’s call them assholes. They create conflict, suspense, and intrigue. They’re often the most interesting characters in a story. But writers are, generally, nice people. How do we put ourselves into the mind of the asshole? How do we give them their humanity without denying their depravity? Let’s explore how to be an asshole (on the page) by exploring their mindset and ways to write it without becoming one ourselves. This will be a discussion-based class with examples by the masters and directed exercises.
