Rebecca Makkai began her career as an elementary Montessori teacher for twelve years before the publication of her first book. She went on the write The Great Believers, one of The New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, and her recent novel, I Have Some Questions For You, was called “[An] irresistible literary page-turner” by The Boston Globe. She holds an MA in Literature from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.
Rebecca Makkai is teaching an advanced workshop at Lit Fest in 2026, Starting or Starting Over, where you will either begin brand new pieces or begin a brand new version of an old piece.
Learn a little about her in this Q&A before applying for her workshop.
What’s your teaching style? What can people expect in workshops?
I tend to focus pretty rigorously on the technical elements of craft. This year I'll be teaching a generative workshop, meaning we'll be writing brand new stories in there and sharing work only on the last day... But we're hardly going to sit around writing silently the whole time. We'll be talking about all the construction work that needs to happen, and thinking productively about plot, momentum, and narrative change.
What's the best advice you ever got about writing?
The author David Huddle, who passed away just recently, told me that my characters could be as smart as me, or smarter. I'd been writing really limited characters, ones who didn't know what was going on. I took this not only to mean that they could be literally intelligent, but that they could stop and examine or articulate specific moments in a way that we might not always have time to in real life.
If you could only bring three books with you on a deserted island, which ones would you choose, and why?
Something about raft building, something about foraging for food, and the Riverside Shakespeare.
Your books always connect so deeply to a moment in time, but they feel so universal in their emotional depth. How do you find what's happening in contemporary culture while making your pathos timeless?
I find it really strange when people try to avoid time markers in their fiction. I definitely don't want to be writing about some meme that everyone will have forgotten about by next week, but I do want to write about real people living real lives—and it's that sense of reality that makes people feel three-dimensional. If those people live now, as they did in I Have Some Questions For You, then that's absolutely going to include things like social media and podcasts. Right now, though, I'm finishing a book set in the 1930s, so I have to keep reminding myself to give people cigarettes and handkerchiefs and hats.
LitFest is an annual celebration of readers and writers that turns Denver into a literary hub every June for a Colorado summer full of workshops, readings, events, and more!
