8-Week Classes
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: Intermediate Memoir and Personal Essay
March 17, 2025 to May 5, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Angelique Stevens
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. Readings each week will expand writers’ exposure to the broad field of personal narrative with an emphasis on structure, voice, research, and other aspects of artful nonfiction storytelling.
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: Intro to Writing the Personal Narrative and Memoir
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Vanessa Mártir
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. We’ll cover such concepts as the nature of truth and memory, how to develop the first-person narrator, showing v. telling, and how to mine your experience for deeper meaning.
8-Week: Immersive Nonfiction
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Abe Streep
How fully can we understand the experiences of other people? As writers, how can and should we convey our view of those experiences? In this workshop, we’ll study techniques used in literary and immersive journalism and discuss how they can be applied to all forms of creative nonfiction.
8-Week: Outward-Facing Memoir 2.0
March 19, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM MDT | Hybrid (In person or virtual)
Helen Thorpe
This course will focus on the use of personal narrative to tell a bigger story—whether that’s the story of a community, a profession, a tribe, an extended family, a team sport, a shared hobby, or a particular issue dear to your heart that will also speak to others. In class, we’ll focus on optimum narrative structure, key aspects of strong writing, and how to transition back and forth from the personal to the bigger picture.
8-Week: Advanced Nonfiction Workshop
March 19, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Brittany Ackerman
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. This course will begin by focusing on what we can learn from great writing by published authors, and then segue to include written and verbal critique of writing by participants in workshop format from your instructor and peers.
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: Hybrid Essay Forms—The Critic and the Lyricist
March 20, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Natalie Hodges
This course will be a deep dive into two very different niches within nonfiction: the long-form critical or reported essay and the lyric essay. Writers will engage with these seemingly opposite ends of the essayistic spectrum in order to probe the core craft elements that unite all nonfiction writing and to expand their vocal ranges on the page.
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: 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: Writing Braided Essays—The Surprise Element of Research in Narrative Essays
March 18, 2025 to April 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Kase Johnstun
Braided essays are multiple essays braided into one, hence the name. In this class, we'll follow a strict essay format, weaving together a present-tense journey, a past-tense narrative, and a research element. Braiding these three elements together creates a strong, layered essay that will surprise the writer as much as the reader. We'll also read multiple layered essays, break them down, and write our own—all while sharing the cool things we found in our research and within ourselves.
4-Week: The Personal is Political—An Introduction to Writing About Politics
March 20, 2025 to April 10, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Becca Andrews
This class is for writers who read the news and feel helpless or disconnected from the world represented therein. Writers 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. Here, we'll combine sharp, clear-eyed prose with meaningful reportage to write the personal into the political.
4-Week: From Spark to Flame—Turning an Idea Into a Pitch
March 20, 2025 to April 10, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Genevieve Walker
You know there’s something there, but what’s the story––what’s the pitch? To turn an idea into an actualized essay (or feature or exposé), particularly if your aim is to have it published, you’ve got to spend enough time with your idea to understand how it will live in a publication. This also means understanding how to sell your idea to a publication.
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: Filling the Gaps—Speculation, Truth, and the Art of Nonfiction
April 1, 2025 to April 22, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Angelique Stevens
Speculation is so much a part of the truth of our lives that it seems natural we would use it in nonfiction—an art form that claims to be cemented in the truth. But, what, exactly, does it mean to tell the truth? And is speculation at odds with the truth? In this class, we’ll read and discuss works of speculative nonfiction, cultural criticism, and ethics.
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: 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 Art & Craft Of The Reported First-Person Essay
April 17, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Geoff Van Dyke
First-person essays have the unique and powerful ability to connect the individual experiences of the writer with their reader through artful prose. But reported personal essays have the capacity to attract an even larger audience by connecting the personal experience of the writer with larger social trends. In this four-week course, writers will study the craft of elegantly written personal essays that broaden the scope of the respective pieces through reporting and research.
4-Week: Family Trouble
April 17, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Vanessa Mártir
How does a writer handle writing about family with honesty and respect? In this generative class, we’ll examine how writers have tackled writing about family in their essays and memoirs and explore and practice craft techniques that can help us in writing about the people who love us the most, know us the best, and hurt us the worst.
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: 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: 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.
Word Choice and the Logic of a Sentence
April 5, 2025 | 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Genevieve Walker
Writing creatively is tough. We know this. But why, exactly? For one, it requires both artistry and logic: You’re telling a story but telling it in your own way. If you’re a lyrically inclined writer, it can be helpful to recognize what it is about your writing that serves your style, and what could or should serve your structure. So let’s look closely at some strong nonfiction work and talk about how word choices, sequencing, and sentence and paragraph placement change the mood and impact of the work as a whole.
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.
The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but Speculation
April 12, 2025 | 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM MDT | Hybrid (In person or virtual)
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Essayists, memoirists, and writers of hybrid nonfiction have long navigated the line between emotional truth and factual truth in search of meaning. In this hands-on, discussion-driven craft seminar, we’ll clarify the distinction between invention, lying, and the use of imagination and speculation as instruments of discovery and insight.
Nonfiction Narrative Blueprints: Structuring True Stories with Fiction Techniques
April 19, 2025 | 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM MDT | In-Person
Ari Schneider
Narrative structure is one of the most important elements of nonfiction. With true stories, we have to be especially thoughtful with where we start, where we end, what we include, and what we leave out so our writing is both honest and irresistible. In this workshop, we'll see how story structures commonly used in fiction can be adapted to the limits of reality.
The "New" Travel Writing
April 19, 2025 | 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Raksha Vasudevan
Travel itself continues to occupy an important space in our lives: with the lifting of pandemic restrictions, travel is booming, both domestically and abroad. In this class, we'll explore how a new generation of writers, including those from historically marginalized backgrounds, are creating a different canon of travel writing.
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.
