8-Week Workshops
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: Advanced Poetry Workshop with Elizabeth Robinson
January 7, 2025 - February 25, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
This course gives experienced poets a community of inquiry in which to workshop poems and consider issues in contemporary poetry. We'll consider each author’s poems individually while also taking a broader view: How do the poet’s writings fit together toward a possible manuscript? What attitudes and beliefs about poetry inform this poetry? Each meeting will include some in-class writing as well as discussion about the nature and value of poetry.
8-Week: Intermediate Poetry Workshop with André Hoilette
January 7, 2025 - February 25, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
This workshop will create a community of poets who will become adept at reading each other's work. Workshop time will concentrate on studying and supporting the poetry of participants and becoming attuned to how their poems come together, both in sequences or manuscripts and in terms of how they resound within trends in contemporary poetry.
8-Week: Productivity Club—Weekday Edition and 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: The Poetry Chapbook with Marisa Tirado
January 8, 2025 - February 26, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | In-Person
This eight-week workshop will provide poets with an opportunity to create and edit a chapbook (short-length, 15-40 page book) manuscript. We'll vigorously order, thematize, and edit a short collection, learning to assemble pieces based upon threads and cohesion. We'll also read and discuss successful chapbooks by writers such as Jenny Xie, Daniel Borzutzky, Danez Smith, and Kaveh Akbar.
8-Week: Introduction to Poetry Workshop with Suzi Q Smith
January 22, 2025 - March 12, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
In this introductory workshop, we'll explore ways in which sound, image, and idea conspire to create the poem. We'll support each other’s experiments and learn from the approach of other poets, with the aim of identifying what makes poems do what they do and acquiring tools for crafting our own imaginative works. There’ll be inventive exercises and plenty of feedback to get you inspired and thinking about language in new ways.
4-Week Workshops
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Submit Now—Poetry Edition with Lynn Wagner
January 9, 2025 - February 20, 2025 | 6:30pm - 8:30pm MDT | Virtual
For most of us, submitting isn’t our favorite part of writing, but we do want to see our work published. This class will focus on submitting poems for publication by strategizing the best ways to send out work, get it published, and create a system to move forward.
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: 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: Writing 101—Gotta Start Somewhere with Joy Roulier Sawyer
February 4, 2025 - February 25, 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: Poetry of Grief and Healing with Jodie Hollander
February 5, 2025 - February 26, 2025 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm MDT | Virtual
For centuries, creating art, and writing poetry in particular, has served as a form of healing for hurt, pain, and grief. In this workshop, we’ll discuss examples of celebrated poems that tackle these difficult topics and study effective techniques for channeling our pain into poetry. Then, through a series of writing prompts, we'll delve into our own experiences and turn them into powerful, effective poems. This workshop is for anyone who is interested in the incredible transformative power of poetry to heal our wounds.
One-Day Workshops
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.
Contemporary Eco-Poetries with Elizabeth Robinson
February 8, 2025 | 10:00am - 4:00pm MDT | In-Person
This class will read from contemporary eco-poetries by Radha Marcum, Jack Collom, C.S. Giscombe, and Evelyn Reilly and use their poems as a means to shape our own distinct ecologically alive writing. We'll attempt a range of styles and tonalities—playful, satirical, elegaic, exploratory, and even documentary.
Making Conversation: Inviting New Voices Into a Poem with Emily Pérez
February 9, 2025 | 1:00pm - 4:00pm MDT | In-Person
How might we invite other voices into our poems as a way to open new opportunities? In this generative workshop, we'll read and discuss poems that make use of quotations and dialogue as counterpoints to the voice of the speaker, exploring what extra voices make possible. We'll also use these models as springboards for our own multi-voiced poems.
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.
