8-Week Workshops
8-Week: Intermediate Memoir and Personal Essay with Steve Knopper
January 6, 2025 - February 24, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | In-Person
This class is well-suited for writers who have completed Intro to Personal Narrative and Memoir, and who are looking to hone their writing with deeper and more specific discussions of craft and revision.
8-Week: Eight Weeks, Eight Starts—Fiction and Nonfiction (Asynchronous) with Christopher Merkner
January 6, 2025 - February 28, 2025 | 24hr | Virtual via Wet Ink
This generative course is an ideal fit for intermediate and advanced writers of prose at any point of their projects looking to get themselves rolling at the start of a new year.
8-Week: Writing Persuasive Book Proposals with Natalie Lampert
January 6, 2025 - March 3, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
What does it take to represent your work to the outside world? And in a competitive, overcrowded market, how do book proposals find literary agents that “get it” and book editors that want to buy in? As publishing becomes increasingly competitive and publishers less willing to take risks, a good, persuasive proposal is more important than ever before.
8-Week: Getting it Done—96 Hours Towards a Finished Draft with Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
January 6, 2025 - February 28, 2025 | 9:00am - 1:00pm MDT | Virtual
Every writer has the same goal: I’m going to finish my draft … soon. Then we get distracted. Before we know it, “soon” becomes “later” and our draft still isn’t done. This eight-week, 96-hour intensive writing experience is your chance to flip the script.
8-Week: Environmental and Place-Based Writing with Abe Streep
January 7, 2025 - February 25, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
Good stories don't happen just anywhere. In this critique-based workshop, we’ll focus on writing that brings specific environments to life in all their nuance and complexity, and we’ll think about how certain settings can dictate outcomes for their inhabitants.
8-Week: Productivity Club—Weekday Edition with Jenny Taylor-Whitehorn and Amanda Rea
January 7, 2025 - February 27, 2025 | 9:30am - 1:30pm MDT | In-Person
Who says writing has to be a solitary occupation? This facilitated writing program aims to combine two things every writer needs: focused time and a sense of community. Join us twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday, in person at Lighthouse, for concentrated writing time to finish that draft or start a new project using the Pomodoro technique.
8-Week: Five Pages Feedback with Paula Younger
January 7, 2025 - February 25, 2025 | 10:00am - 12:00pm MDT | Hybrid
This class is designed for writers who want feedback on their projects, but don't have the time for workshop. Each week, the instructor will assign an optional reading to inspire participants, and each writer will bring in five pages to read aloud to the group and get feedback.
8-Week: Memoir—Crafting Your Story with Karen Auvinen
January 8, 2025 - February 26, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
Working on a memoir and need some support, encouragement, and feedback? This workshop is open to students who have begun a memoir and have anywhere from two to twenty chapters written. Class includes weekly craft talks on the nuts and bolts of memoir writing such as character and scene, writing in moving pictures, following energy, but also tackles questions of truth, memory, authenticity, and writing about people you know.
8-Week: Works in Progress—Prose with Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
January 9, 2025 - February 27, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
This class is a workshop and writer's group for prose writers designed to give you that precious window to work and to simultaneously bring to life your works-in-progress via a process aimed at establishing and maintaining a steady momentum.
8-Week: Intro to Writing the Personal Narrative and Memoir with Vanessa Mártir
January 9, 2025 - February 27, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
This workshop will help you understand how to turn your own experiences into riveting stories with universal themes. Through craft talks, class discussion, homework assignments, and close readings of published work, the class will introduce you to the possibilities and pitfalls of personal narrative.
8-Week: Advanced Essay Workshop with Natalie Hodges
January 9, 2025 - February 27, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
This workshop is for practicing writers working on reported narratives, first-person essays, and memoir who are in need of feedback and a supportive writing community to dive deeper into their texts. Through weekly close reading discussions of other texts by acclaimed writers, optional writing/revision exercises, and feedback workshopping, this class will support writers to develop a firm grasp of their project's structure, pacing, character development, essential questions, and the balance of scene and exposition.
8-Week: Forms of Essay with Karlié Rodríguez
January 24, 2025 - March 14, 2025 | 10:00am - 12:00pm MDT | Virtual
As a genre of writing, the essay is generally a short, prose composition that relates—or attempts to relate—a message or story. How you order language in an essay gives it a form, which determines how the message or story is experienced by the reader.
4-Week Workshops
4-Week: Spark and Re-Spark—Re-Ignite Your Craft and Creativity with Joy Roulier Sawyer
January 6, 2025 - January 27, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
Revive your most powerful and productive writing core and recover your momentum and morale in this four-week intervention designed to reignite your creativity.
4-Week: Watery World—A Generative Workshop with Jessica Roeder
January 6, 2025 - February 2, 2025 | 24hrs | Virtual via Wet Ink
Let water—its nature, its movement, its states of being, the creatures it contains—inspire four weeks of creative exploration. Each Monday, you’ll find new poetry and prose, visual art, videos, sounds, and creative prompts proximate to water.
4-Week: Finding Your Unique Voice with Raeann Giles
January 6, 2025 - January 27, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
This course is a deep dive of self discovery that will bring our own personal life experiences and events to our characters and stories. We’ll first become in tune with our true inner self through writing exercises to determine our purpose and blocks.
4-Week: Experimental Essays with Brittany Ackerman
January 7, 2025 - January 28, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
The umbrella term of Personal Essay commonly refers to essays, op-eds, profiles, personal growth narratives, etc. All of these forms share the focus of perspective through the lens of a writer’s own life, often using first-person point of view to convey experience. But there are so many more ways that we as writers can bend genre and shatter form in order to share our most transformative moments.
4-Week: Shaping Our Stories Through Tarot with Hillary Leftwich
January 7, 2025 - January 28, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
In this four-week transformative workshop, we’ll practice weaving the esoteric art of Tarot with the creative craft of writing. Each week will feature tarot card pulls, writing exercises, and insightful discussions designed to evoke your storytelling, along with workshopping sessions to refine your divine aspirations.
4-Week: Writing 101—Gotta Start Somewhere with Joy Roulier Sawyer
January 7, 2025 - January 28, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | In-Person
In this experiential, non-critiquing writing workshop, you'll immerse yourself in a wide variety of writing exercises, learn to use your journal as a creative catalyst, assess your writing strengths, set do-able writing goals, reflect on and learn from your own writing process, and discuss future Lighthouse workshop options. No previous experience necessary. Just bring a pen, paper, and your burning desire to write.
4-Week: Draft a Short Story or Essay with Alexander Lumans
January 7, 2025 - January 28, 2025 | 10:00am - 12:00pm MDT | Virtual
This generative, writing-intensive course will focus on the most important elements of writing short prose (fiction or personal essays) while keeping you on deadline. We’ll start at the beginning (how to write a great opening), then discuss evocative landscapes, narrative arcs, convincing characters, and make sure our drafts come equipped with a sturdy backbone of ideas.
4-Week: Tuning In—How to Invite Inspiration and Keep Ideas Flowing with Sasha Geffen
January 8, 2025 - January 29, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | In-Person
Inspiration is one of the slipperiest, most elusive pieces of writing practice. What's the difference between a day when a big idea just comes to you and a day when all you seem to be getting is radio static? In this class, we'll reframe inspiration as something that can be honed with practice and attention: not a big cosmic gamble, but a skill in its own right.
4-Week: Submit Now—Short Story/Essay Edition with Erika Krouse
January 8, 2025 - January 29, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
The first step in publishing short stories and essays is…you guessed it, submitting your work to literary magazines! But how? And how, and when, and what, and to whom, and at which litmags? In this weekly class, we’ll help you build a solid submission strategy and process that you can use immediately and well into the foreseeable future, based on time-proven techniques to maximize your success.
4-Week: Write Like a Visual Artist with Steven Dunn
January 9, 2025 - January 27, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Hybrid
Writer Steven Dunn and visual artist Jada Dunn will discuss examples and elements of visual art and experiment with possible ways to translate those elements to writing, from shading and highlighting to composition and character design. Surprise yourself through the act of pulling from one artistic practice into another.
4-Week: Body Horror—Our Bodies, Ourselves with Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
January 14, 2025 - February 4, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
This four-week class will serve as a crash course on this subgenre of horror writing, with a keen focus on the intersection of abjection and the female/femme body as used to express historically marginalized experiences based also on race, disability, age, sexual orientation, etc. as well as gender.
4-Week: From Micro to Macro—Revising the Details with Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
January 27, 2025 - February 17, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
This intensive prose-focused workshop zeroes in on the fine art of the line edit, considering punctuation, word choice, sentence structure, and repetition to explore how such microscopic work can result in big picture revisions. Each week, we’ll zoom in on key techniques, using an instructor provided manual to guide us.
4-Week: Writing 101—Gotta Start Somewhere with Joy Roulier Sawyer
February 3, 2025 - February 24, 2024 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
In this experiential, non-critiquing writing workshop, you'll immerse yourself in a wide variety of writing exercises, learn to use your journal as a creative catalyst, assess your writing strengths, set do-able writing goals, reflect on and learn from your own writing process, and discuss future Lighthouse workshop options. No previous experience necessary. Just bring a pen, paper, and your burning desire to write.
4-Week: Family Portraits with Lisa Kennedy
February 3, 2025 - February 24, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | In-Person
In this four-week course, we'll read pieces and excerpts—nonfiction, fiction, poetry—that take on family, then dive into our own work with in-class exercises. Whether embarking on a new project, working on an existing one or craving craft work in community, writers of all levels are welcome.
4-Week: Personal Essays—From the Particular to the Universal with Jenny Shank
February 3, 2025 - February 24, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
In this four-week class, we'll explore how to write appealing and meaningful personal essays. We'll discuss how to create characters in nonfiction and examine different styles of creative nonfiction, including the braided essay, hermit crab, narrative, and lyric essays.
4-Week: Writing 101—Gotta Start Somewhere with Joy Roulier Sawyer
January 7, 2025 - January 28, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | In-Person
In this experiential, non-critiquing writing workshop, you'll immerse yourself in a wide variety of writing exercises, learn to use your journal as a creative catalyst, assess your writing strengths, set do-able writing goals, reflect on and learn from your own writing process, and discuss future Lighthouse workshop options. No previous experience necessary. Just bring a pen, paper, and your burning desire to write.
4-Week: Writing the Nonhuman with Brittany Ackerman
February 4, 2025 - February 25, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
In Writing the Nonhuman, writers will explore featuring non-human beings in our stories in ways that subvert common cliches and stereotypes and tackle the hurdles of how to make unreal characters real, relatable, and resonant.
4-Week: The Art of Memory in Prose with Alexander Lumans
February 4, 2025 - February 25, 2025 | 10:00am - 12:00pm MDT | Virtual
As a source of inspiration as well as verisimilitude, memory’s deployment in prose writing typically offers a kind of grounding for the writer and reader. But as Alexander Chee says, “Memory is the thing you forget with.” In this class, we’ll examine how different writers have unexpectedly turned memory into a galvanizing force in their work.
One-Day Workshops
The "New" Travel Writing with Raksha Vasudevan
January 18, 2025 | 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT | Virtual
Travel writing has recently (and rightfully) fallen out of favor for prioritizing the perspectives of privileged, white visitors, or those who flatten their destinations into exotic sites for "finding themselves." But travel itself continues to occupy an important space in our lives: with the lifting of pandemic restrictions, travel is booming, both domestically and abroad.
The Personal Is Political: An Introduction to Writing About Politics with Becca Andrews
January 19, 2025 | 10:00am - 1:00pm MDT | Virtual
This class is for writers who read the news and feel helpless or disconnected from the world represented therein. Participants will learn the basic ins and outs of political journalism and discuss how to braid in their own experiences and perspectives in a way that is enlightening and never indulgent or disjointed.
Glimmers: A Generative Technique with Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
January 19, 2025 | 10:00am - 12:00pm MDT | Virtual
Using a concept Pam Houston calls “glimmers,” we'll draw from our past, from our everyday, and from our dreams to write what haunts us. Sometimes the right "glimmer" serves as the revision strategy you didn't know you needed.
Beyond Personal Experience: Investigation and Reporting in Narrative Writing with Natalie Lampert
January 25, 2025 | 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT | In-Person
How do you expand and enrich the narrative in first-person writing when your personal experience doesn’t illustrate all you need it to? You don’t have to be a capital R reporter or capital J journalist to get people to talk to you! Reportorial skills are not innate, or “trade secrets” — anyone can ask questions and gather material to broaden their narrative and the story they’re trying to tell.
Finding Your Way Through Faulty Memories with Kyle Harris
February 2, 2025 | 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT | In-Person
Nonfiction often relies on memories to get at the truth. But memories are often flawed. This class offers tools for fact-checking what happened in the past—especially when recollections clash. We'll explore how to use interviews, documents and a critical eye to create work that gets as close to uncertain truths as possible.
I and Love and You: Writing About Significant Others in Narrative Nonfiction with Natalie Lampert
February 15, 2025 | 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT | In-Person
In this craft seminar we’ll discuss these ideas and more as we explore best practices for ethical and emotionally honest approaches to writing about significant others (spouses, ex-partners, family members, and more) in narrative nonfiction, including (though not limited to) when the writing involves difficult topics such as substance abuse and mental illness.
Adding Energy to Your Writing with Alyse Knorr
February 16, 2025 | 12:00pm - 2:00pm MDT | Virtual
Do you have a piece of writing that feels flat and you can’t tell why? Why does some writing seem charged with electric energy and others not so much? This workshop will offer you some quick practical tips for how to add energy into your writing in any genre. Bring a piece in-progress or take tips away for your next piece.
Out of Character with Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
February 22, 2025 | 10:00am - 12:00pm MDT | Virtual
Focusing on all the ways people are walking contradictions, we'll learn to create complex, believable characters and realistic portraits of the human psyche. We'll start with low-stakes writing exercises, then work on applying these lessons to our own characters.
