Calling all fiction 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
The Visionary Movement
With Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
Using fundamental techniques such as writing like a camera and tracking the sensory experience of a POV character, we will learn how to write successful visionary movements such as hallucinations, delusions, distorted realities, daydreams, and interior fantasy lives. We will study literary examples and film sequences as models for how to convince our reader they too are seeing and experiencing what the characters on the page think they are seeing and experiencing, when in fact it’s all in their head.
Plotting Your Course: The Major Turning Points Every Story Needs
With Jenny Elder Moke
Plotting your novel doesn’t have to feel like pulling teeth. Writers will learn about the plot points roadmap—the five major plot points in every story that you need to know before starting your first draft. We'll talk about the three-act structure, theme as the touchpoint for every story, and how plot and character rely on each other and propel each other forward. We’ll identify the five major turning points in every plot that keep your story on track to the finish line (even if the story wanders a little in between).
The Undeniable Voice: Craft Lessons from Vigil by George Saunders
With Alexander Lumans
The latest novel from Booker Prize-winning George Saunders, Vigil, takes place in a single evening—the last one, in fact, for dying oil baron K.J. Boone. During his twilight hours, Boone finds himself transported to otherworldly realms populated by the living and the dead. And everyone he meets has an urgent story to tell. In this class, we’ll dissect Saunders’s meaningful storytelling choices. We’ll discuss his emotionally affecting style that takes bigger and bigger risks by the page. And we’ll experiment in our own writing with his craft techniques. Come ready to learn from one of our modern masters!
Strange And Mundane: Pulling The Odd From The Everyday
With Nini Berndt
The minutia of our lives is a rich and wild and wonderful place. In this course we'll look at a variety of writers—Joy Williams, Grace Paley, Lynne Tillman, Stephen Dixon, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders— to see how they mine the strangenesses of the everyday. In looking at these writers, you'll identify places in your own work where the fascinating inner life of the work we do, the food we eat, the tasks we have to complete, the rules we have to follow, can become the thrilling, perplexing, nuanced, and propulsive heart that keeps us invested in a story.
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.
Monday, June 15 - Tuesday, June 16
Emotional Truth — Using Fiction To Tell The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth
With Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
This workshop will focus on how to write what you know, taking both small and large elements of your particular human experience to create fiction. We will study other fiction writers and their techniques and do exercises based on them. This class will focus on generating new text but should be inspiring for those writers deep into a work-in-progress too. Ideally, writers will experience a catharsis as they alchemize their hard times into art.
Wednesday, June 17 - Thursday, June 18
Bridges To Elsewhere: Defamiliarizing 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
Getting Unstuck
With Ramoa Ausubel
Does it sometimes seem like your novel is trying to kill you? Have you considered divorcing a story? Me too. Being a writer means coming up against self-doubt. But what if it doesn't have to be so defeating? What if the blank page felt more like an invitation than a cliff? In this gathering, we will work through a few exercises designed to bring joy and a sense of possibility and invention so that you and your writing will once again be besties (or at least unlikely to murder each other).
Hike & 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.
How To Work With Narrative Time
With Andrea Bobotis
In our novels, we control how quickly or slowly time passes for our readers. We can compress several decades of events into a couple of paragraphs, or we can let an entire chapter linger on a single scene. Managing narrative time is an essential (and often overlooked) storytelling skill. In this seminar, we’ll hone that skill by deepening our understanding of sequence, pacing, and flashback, among other temporal devices, while also learning how we might orchestrate different “time signatures” to enhance both meaning and beauty in our writing.
Writing About Work To Create Resonance
With Wendy J. Fox
Many authors have day jobs, but possibly more importantly, most characters in contemporary fiction have a relationship to a job, even if it’s just a quotidian fact about their day. So, how do we write about employment without it verging on the banal? After all, this is where we and our characters likely spend one-third of our lives. In this workshop, we will look at examples in fiction where workplace context adds richness to narrative, and discuss how details from jobs can offer a unique specificity to character development in order to create resonance in our stories.
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.
Beginnings, Middles & Ends: The 9 Parts Of Your Story
With Carleen Brice
Stumped by all the novel structures out there? So was I, until I heard someone say "end of the middle" and it made me start thinking of the novel I'm revising in 9 parts: the beginning, middle, and end of the beginning; the beginning, middle, and end of the middle; and the beginning, middle, and end of the end. This class will explore using these 9 parts as a simple (okay, simpler, way) to build the spine of your story. The goal will be to KISS (keep it simple, scribe!), but we'll also discuss ways to incorporate elements of other common western story structures (such as Hero's Journey, Save the Cat!, Storygrid, and 3-act, 4-act, and 5-act structures).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
In The Trenches With Historical Fiction
With Terri Lewis
In historical fiction, you want to stay true to the period but resonate with modern readers. To feel like life, not a history book. So, how do our characters’ words capture the era? How does society decree they will relate to each other? Can you create an accurate world without overwhelming description? We'll explore shaping dialogue, choosing vocabulary, and making the best use of our research. Whether you have an idea or a first draft, bring your characters to the workshop and be prepared to write.
Saturday, June 13
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.
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.
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!
Desire And 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?
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.
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.
Sentence Surgery: Another Live Editing Seminar
With David Wroblewski
Sentences in fiction are subject to different demands than sentences in nonfiction, and thus (perhaps) must be constructed and revised differently. In this multi-hour live-edit session, we'll collectively play with various sentences and paragraphs as a means of exploring this idea, beginning with a sentence that every typist knows by heart, then mauling passages from some famous/infamous works, and concluding with examples submitted by participants (from their own work or from well-known writers, preferably dead). Where, exactly, we go will be driven by the examples selected and the questions that arise. Emphasis will be on exploring the phenomenal plasticity of language, design tradeoffs in sentence structure, and the cognitive processes involved in reading, rather than issues of correctness, style, or rhetorical strategy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 define 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
Becoming A Channel
With Melissa Broder
In drafting and editing, there are often two different drives at play: our conception of what the text is “about” vs. the story that wants to be told. How, as writers, do we dismantle our egos, transcend the clutter of the conscious mind, and surrender control—even in a rigorous editing process—to tap into the fundamental heart of a story?
In this seminar, writers will be given a toolkit for doing just that. We’ll explore meditation, archetype, myth, ekphrasis, writing in motion, somatic exercises, stichomancy, and alchemy. We’ll also discuss the outlining process from a perspective of fluidity, and how, like the ship of Theseus, an outline can evolve as we write and edit.
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.
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.
Plot: A Conjuror's Guide
With Megha Majumdar
An often daunting aspect of writing fiction can be conjuring a plot that snags and keeps a reader's attention. In this craft seminar, we’ll break down different ways to think about plot, and we’ll examine how plot can be an essential element of the stories we are trying to tell. With a mix of lecture, writing exercises, and some time for Q&A at the end, we’ll engage with how to make plot less intimidating and see it as an organic, intrinsic, and hugely satisfying part of storytelling.
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.
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.
Monday, June 15
Bait The Hook: Your First Few Pages
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.
Novel Whispering
With Mat Johnson
Have a novel that you just can’t finish, or finish well? Considering writing a novel and want an insight into how to actually complete one? In this seminar, we'll identify hurdles in completing the process of novel creation, and we’ll learn how to get over them. The seminar will provide participants with practical techniques to kickstart their manuscripts, such as applied story structuring, thematic tuning, character mirroring, and more.
Every Sentence An Ocean: Concision And Compression In Flash-Fiction
With Chris Vanjonack
As anyone who’s ever sat down to write a flash story or essay knows, it can be incredibly difficult to fit an entire narrative into 1,000 words or less. Even more difficult: lacing that narrative with enough tension and emotional complexity to make your readers feel like they’ve devoured a much longer work. In this two-hour craft seminar, we’ll break down George Saunders’ 1995 flash fiction masterpiece “Sticks” on a sentence-by-sentence level to examine and emulate how he packs an entire ocean of complexity—and decades of narrative time—into just 392 words.
From Morally Gray To Black—Creating Flawed And Unscrupulous Protagonists
With Jon Bassoff
Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, claims: “The best way to create a memorable character is to make them both repellent and fascinating at the same time.” Indeed, more crucial than the likability of a protagonist is his/her charisma—even if that charisma only serves to hide complicated or even depraved psyches. In this class, we’ll explore some morally questionable protagonists from authors such as Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, and Flannery O’Connor. We’ll then try our hand at creating some of these fascinating, and sometimes terrifying, characters in our own work. The class will combine readings, writings, and discussions, and when we're finished you should be comfortable writing from the POV of not-so-sympathetic characters.
How To Stop Worldbuilding And Start Worldconjuring
With Alexander Lumans
Writers wanting to build worlds are met with difficult questions: Should I describe the city’s sewer system for ten or twenty pages? How much to explain Frontier Utah’s rural bartering system of spiderwebs? These are also the wrong questions. As writer Lincoln Michel says, “Worldbuilding imposes. Worldconjuring collaborates.” In this seminar, we’ll challenge current paradigms for worldbuilding; instead, we’ll craft settings and circumstances through the power of detail selections, rule systems, and essential mysteries. Together, we’ll ask much better questions: in your new world, what do readers need to know and what do readers want to know?
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
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.
How To Write Sex Scenes Without Shame
With Steve Almond
Even though people think about sex all the time, and even have it occasionally, writers tend to shy away from the subject. Which is crazy. Because sex is the one experience that makes us all hopeful and horny and embarrassed and vulnerable. In this freewheeling afternoon, we’ll look at the work of Mary Gordon, James Salter, and other literary horndogs in an effort to figure out how to infuse our own sex scenes with genuine emotion and ecstatic sensation, not evasions and porn clichés. Arrive ready to lay your characters bare.
Tuesday, June 16
Literary Lightning: Finding The Poetry In Your Prose
With Ellen Blum Barish
Are there lines in your stories or essays that, when you reread them, contain multitudes? Ideas in which your thinking has deepened or changed? How do you pull threads from previously written prose and turn it into prose poetry or hybrid prose? What was once an essay may carry the seeds of a flash essay, prose poem or song. We’ll explore work that began in one form and transformed into another and talk about how to do that for a piece of our own.
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.
Where The Deer And The Antelope (And The Poets) Play: On The Page
With Juan J. Morales
With our usual poetic practice, we might focus on clarity and meaning while letting our instincts determine the lines, stanzas, and punctuation. Some poems entice us to try something new. In this workshop, we’ll play on the page in hopes of discovering new layers and poetic intentions. We’ll talk punctuation and how it honors rhythm, including Dickinson’s emdash, when to “and” or “&,” and the mystery of / and // used by writers like Dana Levin. We will also consider methods of end stopping, enjambing, and even omitting punctuation altogether.
Survey of Interiority
With Brandon Taylor
Using readings and examples from a variety of modes—short fiction, novels, cinema, and drama—this seminar provides a survey of interiority in narrative writing. We’ll examine and explore the technical challenges of writing interiority as well as the narrative and aesthetic motivations that accompany the concept. At the end of the seminar, we’ll engage in short writing exercises to synthesize and practice these techniques.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hook, Line, And Sinker: Exploring Form Via Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness
With Claire Jia
I recommend that every participant in this workshop watch Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness (available on Hulu and elsewhere) before coming to class, and then we will discuss his unique triangular form. We’ll imitate the form in a writing exercise, coming up with a simple premise involving two characters, expanding the premise, and then flipping the premise entirely on its head. Come ready to write!
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.
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.
Setting And 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.
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.
Critiquing The End
With Mary Robinette Kowal
Most workshops focus on the first part of a novel, but the ending is just as important. In this mini-critique session, we will specifically critique the last chapter of your work without requiring people to read an entire manuscript. To participate, each writer will submit a synopsis, the first page, the middle page (yes, the page in the exact middle of the manuscript), and the last chapter. Before the workshop, participants will be required to read two other participants’ materials. You'll be taught how to evaluate an ending and guide the reader to opportunities to deepen the ending. (This works best limited to six people)
That's Cinema: Applying Screenwriting Techniques To Novel Writing
With Claire Jia
In this beginner-intermediate course, we will look to film and television to help us outline and visualize our novels. My debut, Wanting, was published this summer by Tin House, and I wrote it utilizing techniques I use every day as a screenwriter. I come from the world of half-hour comedy, which means tight three-act structure, snappy act blows, and characters that change from start to finish. How can this be useful when structuring a novel? How can visualizing a scene cinematically help to bring our story to life? We will look at screenwriting forms, such as Dan Harmon’s Story Circles, while also discussing ways to subvert those forms.
How To Make Plot Your Friend
With Steve Almond
Plot can feel like the enemy. You’ve got a compelling voice, a rich premise, real momentum—and then the story stalls. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. In this seminar, you’ll learn how to make your plot your friend—instead of feeling trapped by it. Through close readings of classic and contemporary works, we’ll break down the mechanics of rising action, pacing, consequence, suspense, and character decision-making. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, this class will help you supercharge your plot.
On/Off The Record: Hybrid Writing With Documents (Virtual)
With Kanika Agrawal
Hybrid writing often emerges from and recontextualizes documentary material, such as personal archives, news reports, legal documents, and scientific papers. In this seminar, we’ll explore how such sources can be transformed—and become transformative—in cross-genre writing. Through short readings and discussion, we’ll consider when and how writers can use documents to question the authority, perspectives, and legacies of received narratives. Reflective exercises will help participants identify potential topics for research, outline source materials, and imagine hybrid projects that blur the boundaries between fact, history, memory, and speculation.
Scaffolds And Skeletons: Crafting Strong Foundations In Poetry And Fiction
With Seth Brady Tucker
Structure should never be an afterthought for poets and writers—in poetry it often is the whole point, and in story it is the spine that lets a story stand upright—in this generative seminar we will work to create the frame and foundation for your own great poems and stories (and essays). We will begin with some core architectural strategies and choices that help shape compelling work across genres: tension arcs, complications and crisis turns, scene and image sequencing, and the purposeful use of propulsive detail. Seth is an award-winning poet and fiction writer and has taught both genres for decades. This seminar will help participants build pieces that move with intention and hold their weight. Through (very) short readings, craft discussions, and hands‑on exercises, writers will experiment with scaffolds that invite discovery and revision strategies that bring clarity to the page. Suitable for all levels.
Just 2 Poems
With Lynn Wagner
In this class, we’ll experience the power of deep reading. Before class, you’ll be given two poems that serve as jumping off points to explore and be inspired by master poets of exceptional craft. Previous years have featured long poems by BH Fairchild, Larry Levis and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. We’ll explore both the measured unfolding of a longer poem and the lyric compression of another. Exercises, experiments, and your own poems will follow.
Writing Thrillers
With Carter Wilson
Learn to craft thrillers that grip readers from the first page, and develop the mindset to keep writing when you don’t feel like it. In this two-hour class, we’ll survey the psychology behind suspense: how to build pressure, raise stakes, and deliver unforgettable endings. You’ll explore emotional tension, consistent writing habits, and editing strategies that sharpen every scene. Whether you’re a debut writer or a seasoned pro, you’ll leave with practical tools to make your stories darker, tighter, and more intense.
Ticking Clocks: Managing Time In Fiction
With Danielle Evans
In this craft seminar, we’ll consider how writers use time, with particular emphasis on the ways writers deliberately call attention to time: interruptions, flashbacks, glimpses of the future, montages carrying the reader through a stretch of many years. In the first hour of the class, we’ll hold a seminar style discussion of examples from published work. In the second hour, we’ll try some generative exercises modeled after some of the work discussed.
Thursday, June 18
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
Fantastic Thresholds: Short Fiction Techniques Of Kelly Link And Susanna Clarke
With Kanika Agrawal
Kelly Link and Susanna Clarke write stories in which the extraordinary emerges from the ordinary in an elegant, intimate, and unsettling manner. We’ll explore key techniques that shape their short fiction, such as finely calibrated voice, well-placed rupture, and invitation into mystery. Discussion of excerpts will lead into generative exercises, encouraging writers to experiment with modulating voice and narrative distance, layering the uncanny into the everyday, and crafting tension through implication. Participants will have opportunities to share their inspired yet distinct approaches to estrangement and enchantment.
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 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.
Satisfy Me!
With Christopher Castellani
Even when you think you know where the draft of your story or poem is headed, its "real" ending is often lurking somewhere beneath the surface. In this discussion class, we will close-read the endings of two works of fiction and poetry on the spot (no advance reading required). The goal is to figure out not only how/if these endings "satisfy" but what "satisfaction" actually means for them and for our own projects.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Absolute Fiction
With Rebecca Makkai
In an age of both metafiction and high fantasy, writers have grown shy of writing realistic experiences wildly different than their own. Why have we lost the confidence to utterly make shit up and say it with authority? And how can we get it back? We’ll talk about writing away from the self and the lived experience, the research that makes such stories believable, and the narrative possibilities that give us control over completely fictional worlds. We’ll touch on the ethics, difficulties, and occasional necessity of writing genders, races, sexual orientations, abilities, ages, religions, etc. different from our own—but that’s not the core of this talk. Rather, we’ll focus on how to make stories up out of whole cloth and fully inhabit characters who aren’t you.
Unlock Ideas With Maps
With Malinda Miller
Drawing inspiration from maps – real and imaginative – in this generative workshop we’ll explore how to unlock memories, create worlds and discover details we may not have thought of otherwise. We’ll consider recent and ancient cartographic maps but also search for what’s revealed in the often unmapped, such as radio waves permeating the air, light cast by street lights, or Little Free Libraries in a neighborhood. We’ll discuss how authors create narratives for prose and poems on the concept of maps and write from prompts based on maps we study and those we create (no artistry needed).
