8-Week Classes
8-Week: Intermediate Speculative Fiction
March 17, 2025 to May 5, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Jeneé Skinner
Collapse, resurrection, and the absurd are complace, and perhaps this is why speculative fiction seems to have become even more important in our imaginative landscape. This class will explore the big and small moments written in speculative fiction from writers including Stephen Graham Jones, Pemi Aguda, and Maria Lioutaia. As we write stories for workshop and deliver feedback to our peers, we’ll also be asked to enter each narrative from a place of image and structure. Be prepared to create ecosystems, characters, and language of your own!
8-Week: Revision is the Whole Point
March 17, 2025 to May 12, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Nini Berndt
In this course we’ll work on a piece we’ve workshopped before, and bring in two new drafts, which we'll then workshop again. The goal of the course is to leave with a story that has been polished enough to feel, if not done, close. If you've ever left workshop and stuck something in a drawer and hoped maybe it would miraculously come out in better shape despite never touching it again, this course is for you.
8-Week: Intro to Writing the Short Story
March 17, 2025 to May 5, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Emily Flouton
This class will help writers tackle what might seem like the overwhelming task of writing a short story. Whether you're just beginning to write fiction or looking for guidance on a current draft, this introductory workshop will provide insight and direction to move you forward.
8-Week: Productivity Club—Weekday Edition
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 9:30 AM to 1:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Jenny Taylor-Whitehorn and Amanda Rea
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—25-minute writing sprints, followed by 5-minute breaks.
8-Week: Backstory—What’s Next
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
John Cotter
In this eight-week class we’ll put the story back in backstory: creating events in the past that feel as relevant and suspenseful as real-time action, and which fit seamlessly into the worlds we’re building. Through readings, discussion, and generative exercise we’ll make backstory the site of real transformation, an integrated whole.
8-Week: Intermediate Novel Workshop
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Jamie Figueroa
In this course, we'll shore up the basics but also dig past them: how do relationships drive a story? Why does setting matter? How does language build a mood, a whole atmosphere? We’ll dissect and consider scene, tension, character development, and pacing, exploring nontraditional ways of organizing and building plot alongside standard strategies.
8-Week: Advanced Novel Workshop
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
William Haywood Henderson
A novel is a huge undertaking, and this class is intended to help you break down the process into manageable units, gain perspective, and sharpen the aspects that set your novel apart and make it uniquely yours. This class is intended for advanced novelists who have completed a sizeable portion of their manuscripts. During the eight weeks, you'll submit two excerpts from your novel, for a total of 12,000 words. Each submission receives both written feedback and in-class critique. You'll also complete weekly craft exercises (written at home) which we'll discuss in class. There will be no in-class writing.
8-Week: Advanced Short Story Woodshop
March 19, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Alexander Lumans
As advanced writers, sometimes we need a break from workshop. In this “woodshop," we’ll reframe the guiding question of workshop: rather than critiquing stories we’ve already finished, we'll heavily focus on generative writing, which will then be submitted for group discussion. We'll also discuss contemporary stories as well as foster a supportive, engaged writing community. Rather than emphasizing what's “broken” in our stories, we’ll deeply explore each author’s original intentions.
8-Week: Intro to Writing the Novel
March 19, 2025 to May 14, 2025 | 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Andrea Bobotis
Calling all daytime writers who aspire to write a novel or have already started the ambitious task. This course will aim to provide direction and guidance, and we’ll also appreciate the camaraderie of writing with peers in an encouraging space. We’ll break down the process of writing a novel into manageable pieces, covering areas such as narrative structure, point of view, setting, character develo PMent, and use of language.
8-Week: The Other Shoe—Writing the Thriller
March 19, 2025 to May 14, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Daniel Levine
A thriller is not so much a genre as a quality of storytelling that crosses many genres: mystery, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, literary fiction. The quality is in the name—a thriller “thrills,” of course—but how do we thrill an audience in whichever genre we're working in? The key is the feeling of suspense, and in this workshop, we’ll examine the art of suspending, or hanging something heavy and ominous over the story’s terrain to create the sense that it could fall at any moment.
8-Week: Writing Violence
March 19, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Andrew Hernández
In this class, participants will explore the depths and perspectives of violence in their writing. Some questions we'll unpack include: (1) When should we include—and exclude—violence in our writing; what does violence do to our characters, to our readers? (2) How can we incorporate interiority and backstory to write violence more compellingly and to complicate victim-perpetrator dichotomies, tropes/stereotypes, etc.? We'll use various examples from fiction, nonfiction, and memoir to explore interpersonal, psychological, sexual, racial, political, structural, and generational violence.
8-Week: Experiments in Fiction
March 19, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Jenny Wortman
In this generative workshop, we’ll enter the literary laboratory to try our hand at a range of experiments in fiction, from constraint to visuality, hybridity to nonchronology, and more. We’ll read, chat, and touch on the thinking behind such experiments as the spirit moves us; mostly, though, we’ll write in playful, exploratory modes and see what bubbles up. All levels welcome!
8-Week: Intermediate Short Story Workshop
March 20, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Trent Hudley
Building on the foundations of Intro to Writing the Short Story, this class will consist primarily of workshopping short story and novel drafts. Each participant will have two opportunities to submit their work for peer review, one of which may (but does not have to) be a revision. In addition, we’ll use writing exercises and published short stories as launching points for generating new material and discussing all aspects of fictional craft.
8-Week: Getting it Done—96 Hours Towards a Finished Draft
March 31, 2025 to May 23, 2025 | 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
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. Using a method similar to the Pomodoro Technique, a proven time-management system that keeps you focused and driven, you'll commit yourself to distraction-free writing for four cycles per day, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for eight weeks.
8-Week: Works in Progress—Prose
April 6, 2025 to May 29, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
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. Regardless of what stage you're at in your current work-in-progress, the time to seriously work toward finishing that project is now. This writer’s group is designed to give you that foundation, community, accountability, support, guidance, encouragement, and motivation to get it done!
4-Week Classes
4-Week: Flower, Feather, Blanket, Chalk—A Generative Workshop
March 17, 2025 to April 11, 2025 | 24hrs | Virtual via Wet Ink
Jessica Roeder
Follow four simple objects into new places in your writing. Each week, we’ll focus on one object in its many possibilities, using poetry and prose, visual art, museum collections, memory, creative prompts, and the world at hand for inspiration. This is a generative and active class that honors surprise, play, curiosity, and genre crossing.
4-Week: Craft Lessons from Don DeLillo's Underworld
March 18, 2025 to April 29, 2025 | 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Alexander Lumans
In his 1992 Paris Review interview, Don DeLillo says, “What I try to do is create complex human beings, ordinary-extraordinary men and women who live in the particular skin of the late twentieth century.” Five years later, he published his magnum opus Underworld, which The New York Times ranked as the second-best work of American fiction since 1980 (behind only Beloved). Through four class sessions over eight weeks, we’ll read Underworld alongside external interviews and responses. Let’s dive deep into the deep world of post-war America and discover what DeLillo prophetically reveals about our past and our future.
4-Week: Writing 101—Gotta Start Somewhere
March 18, 2025 to April 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Joy Roulier Sawyer
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: Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Robots—Craft Lessons from Speculative Short Fiction
March 19, 2025 to April 9, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Ted McCombs
This four-week course will draw on short fiction by masters of science fiction, fantasy, horror, absurdism, and magical realism to explore craft techniques that can benefit all short story writers of any genre. We’ll look at stories by the likes of Octavia Butler, Aimee Bender, Ted Chiang, and Carmen Maria Machado that leverage their speculative conceits to undertake intriguing experiments in point of view, narrative time, and style.
4-Week: Novel Bootcamp III—World
March 19, 2025 to April 9, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
William Haywood Henderson
Our characters don’t live in a vacuum, with no jobs, no landscape beyond the confines of their homes, no sense of the time period or history or community or planet they inhabit. In this class, we’ll explore our books’ worlds, from the scent of the air to the grid of the streets, from the politics to the art.
4-Week: Making it Magical
March 19, 2025 to April 9, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Dino Enrique Piacentini
From Gabriel García-Marquez to Angela Carter, Louise Erdrich to Haruki Murakami, many of our greatest fiction writers incorporate the magical into their stories. What does this do for their work? From where do they draw inspiration? And most importantly, how do they do it so convincingly? In this four-week class, we’ll look closely at—and experiment with—some of the techniques and strategies writers use to make their work magical.
4-Week: Deception 101—Cons and Lies in Fiction
March 20, 2025 to April 10, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Marisa Tirado
In this workshop, we'll examine the uptick in contemporary fiction that fixates on cons, lies, and deception, including texts such as Emma Cline’s The Guest, Percival Everett’s Erasure, and R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface. How can we write characters that are delightfully deceptive? How can our plots and dialogue point to larger "cons" in society? Course curriculum includes required readings, introspective discussions and prescriptive writing exercises.
4-Week: Relational Worldbuilding
March 20, 2025 to April 10, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Sasha Geffen
When we think of "worldbuilding," we might think of a taxonomic accumulation of rules, technologies, and artifacts inside a fictional universe. But worlds are built every time characters speak to one another—in the assumptions they make, the questions they ask, the desires they harbor, and the way they work together to navigate shared reality. In this four week workshop, writers will practice growing vibrant universes out of the taut threads connecting their characters.
4-Week: Get A Little Closer—Psychological and Emotional Writing for Fiction and Nonfiction
March 31, 2025 to April 21, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Hybrid (In Person or Virtual)
Jenny Shank
Have you ever been hooked by a surprise twist in a story, felt immersed in the sensory world of a book, or cheered a protagonist's wins and mourned their losses? We'll examine insights from neuroscience and psychological studies that shed light on why certain aspects of stories hook us as readers. We'll learn how to evoke emotions in our readers while avoiding emotional clichés. We'll learn about filtering and how to avoid it, when to use internal dialogue, and how to effectively deploy sensory detail.
4-Week: Writing 101—Gotta Start Somewhere
April 14, 2025 to May 5, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Joy Roulier Sawyer
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 101—Gotta Start Somewhere
April 15, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Joy Roulier Sawyer
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: Craft Lessons from Gabriel García Márquez
April 16, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Dino Enrique Piacentini
If you're interested in how to write within a magic realist framework, or how to write a family saga, or how to play around with time, or how to write about place—or if you just love this book like so many others—this class is for you. We’ll consider the novel’s structure, its treatment of character, the way it handles narrative time. We’ll take a look at its use of voice, POV, and milieu, particularly how these elements contribute to the novel’s success in blending the “real” with the magical.
4-Week: Novel Bootcamp IV—Arc
April 16, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
William Haywood Henderson
Our stories need character change, a complex plot, intriguing dynamics, and so many other things. In this class, we’ll pull from our characters, situations, plot ideas, and books’ worlds to explore the possibilities for dynamic change over the arc of our stories. We’ll look at openings, endings, and how to fill that vast, messy middle.
4-Week: Writing the Truth—Identity on the Page
April 16, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Hybrid (In person or virtual)
Julissa Contreras
In this 4-week class, we’ll explore how to authentically represent identity—our own or our characters’—in inclusive ways. Through guided prompts, we’ll experiment with techniques for crafting authentic, multidimensional characters and narratives that reflect the complexities of identity. We’ll also discuss assigned readings from impactful works that serve as inspiration and frameworks for our storytelling.
4-Week: The Screen Junkie’s Guide to Better Writing—A Study of Modern Film and TV to Inspire Your Best Work
April 17, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Melissa Lucero McCarl
No matter your genre, this class will arm you with best practices in writing by putting the work of modern dramatic writers under a microscope. We'll learn from writers such as Phoebe Waller Bridge (Fleabag, Killing Eve), Aaron Sorkin (The Newsroom, The West Wing), Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), August Wilson (Fences), and many more. This class will be a mix of discussion and in-class writing prompts inspired by the screen excerpts of the day.
4-Week: Prose Poetry
April 17, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Marisa Tirado
Though the term "prose poem" might feel riddled with contradiction, it holds the potential to explore limitless topics and styles. In this 4-week class, we'll look at origins of the prose poem and explore the strengths of prose-centric poetry. From the work of Jose Hernandez Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, m.s. RedCherries, Claudia Rankine, and others, we will explore a range of writing approaches that straddle the extraordinary line between poetry and prose. Writers can expect in-class readings, introspective discussions, and prescriptive writing exercises.
4-Week: So What! Beat Perfectionism and Make a Huge Mess
April 17, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Sasha Geffen
So often, the ideas we build around our own writing prevent us from actually doing the writing itself. Worrying about quality, reception, and success—or failure—can stifle the spark needed to get in there and slash open the blank page. This intensively generative course will encourage writers to get in touch with their most spontaneous, unvarnished, and unselfconscious selves, reprogramming the impulse to strive for perfect, unassailable lines on the first try.
4-Week: Seeing the Big Picture—Techniques for Revising Fiction and Nonfiction Books
April 29, 2025 to May 20, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Hybrid (In person or virtual)
Jenny Shank
We'll discuss techniques to propel us through our latest draft, including tips for making a cause-and-effect outline, trimming or adding words, sharpening character arcs, and creating various props that will help us see the big picture of our story. The aim of this class is to guide you through as much revision as you can check on your own, so that when you share your manuscript with a reader, it's in the best possible shape.
Single-Session Classes
The Word and the Photo
March 29, 2025 | 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM | Virtual
Vanessa Mártir
In this class we’ll explore the generative relationship between photography and creative writing. We’ll examine how writers like Patricia Smith, James Baldwin, and Sorayya Khan worked with photography to reflect on and make statements about society, culture, and their lives, and we’ll explore how this practice can shift and perhaps even evolve our writing.
Garnishing Our Writing: Titles, Chapters, and Epigraphs
April 5, 2025 | 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM MDT | In-Person
Marisa Tirado
In this half-day prose and poetry seminar, we'll consider the implications of the “garnishes” (like titles, epigraphs, chapter titles) we place on our work, why they feel so difficult sometimes, and make time to intentionally engage with their purposes. Writers should bring finished works they are struggling to “garnish” and critically consider ways to strengthen their decision-making skills in these matters.
As We Come To An End: Poetic Closure in the Story
April 13, 2025 | 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Evanthia Bromiley
How might we write endings that feel both inevitable and surprising? How can we pursue satisfying closure in our stories and novels, yet leave a space for our readers to experience mystery? As Grace Paley says, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” In this hands-on, discussion-driven craft seminar, we’ll look at practical craft tools to polish our endings while still preserving mystery.
The Horror of Having a Body
May 4, 2025 | 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Daniel Levine
Living in a body can be sort of horrifying, on its own: the disgust of its natural processes, the terror of its unknown malfunctions, our lack of control over what is going to happen to it, often despite our best efforts, the fright of blood and viscera. In this seminar, we'll explore delicious examples of literary body horror, from the mundane to the outlandish, and learn how to incorporate this quintessentially human fear into our characters and our work.
