8-Week Classes
8-Week: Craft Lessons From The Poetry of C.D. Wright
March 17, 2025 to May 5, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Elizabeth Robinson
C.D. Wright was one of the seminal poets of our generation. Her work spans narrative and lyric, meditation, and activism. This class will draw from her work to help poets generate new ways of approaching their poetry, with an emphasis on the long poem.
8-Week: Exploration in Poetic Forms
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Suzi Q. Smith
In this generative course, we’ll explore poetic forms and traditions, both ancient and contemporary. We’ll examine the relationship between content, voice, and form by discussing the structural elements of poetry, such as rhythm, meter, metaphor, rhyme, and repetition.
8-Week: Intermediate Poetry Workshop
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
André Hoilette
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
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: A Certain Slant of Light—Elements of Poetic Craft
March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | In-Person
Andrea Rexilius
In this generative and discussion based poetic craft course, we'll tend to our poems as ecosystems (or gardens) of language as we explore the poetic elements of image, sound, idea, line, gap, revision, and more. There will be flowers.
8-Week: Introduction to Poetry Workshop
March 19, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Lynn Wagner
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.
8-Week: Advanced Poetry Workshop
March 19, 2025 to May 7, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Radha Marcum
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: 20th Century Poetry Schools Survey
March 20, 2025 to May 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM MDT | Virtual
Andrea Rexilius
20th Century Poetry Schools Survey is an eight week "craft lessons from" class that examines, in-depth, a variety of schools of poetry, giving historical context to poets and their work. In this class, we'll survey various schools within 20th century poetry. Our aim is to help poets learn about the schools of writing that shaped contemporary poetry and to identify their own poetic lineages.
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.
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: The Poetry of Spirituality
March 17, 2025 to April 7, 2025 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM MDT | Virtual
Joy Roulier Sawyer
No matter how we might define “spiritual,” reading and writing poems that explore this dimension can make us more alive and compassionate as people. In this class, we’ll read poets who write deeply authentic poetry as an expression of spirituality: Rumi, Pesha Gertler, R.S. Thomas, Jane Kenyon, Antonio Machado, Mary Oliver, David Wagoner, and others.
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 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: 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.
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.
