Over a decade ago, leaving the cozy, inspiring, crazy-making, inbred culture of our graduate MFA program, Mike Henry and I ventured west to see what we could see. Were there eight writers to every ten strangers you met, as there were in Boston? Would they be interested in finding each other? Really, we all know that writing, per se, cannot be taught—though learning the craft can be accelerated, the learning curve shortened—so why start a nonprofit, independent writing center? As our brilliant volunteer copywriter J. Chris Rock so eloquently put it: “Sometimes, what a writer needs most is other writers.”
We’re a strange and diverse enough crowd, everyone from apprentices to full-timers working on their fourth novels, ages 10 to 85, all walks of life, probably all political persuasions. So what do we have in common? A tendency to see things in terms of the story, the poetic line, the image, the scene. We try to be, as someone famous said, people upon whom nothing is lost. That might not go over so well with some of our family and friends. In that way, Lit Fest becomes a time to let it all hang out there—every writerly impulse, every bad draft, every I-love-it-but-I-hate-it attitude toward our strange, shared compulsion. People here will understand… even without your “treatise on why I do this” that you send out every year to your e-mail list.
So begins the count up to the Third Annual Lighthouse Lit Fest. Over the last two years, we’ve seen writers immerse themselves in weekend-intensive writing courses like Writing Through Character, Navigating Your Book, Environmental Writing, and Emotion On & Off the Page (not to mention the already waitlisted Novel Bootcamp). Some have gone on to their own wonderful writing careers outside of Colorado, like our friend Sarah Ockler, whose Twenty Boy Summer catapulted her to a 2-book deal with Little, Brown, freedom from a day job, and a return to the city she loves, New York. Others, like Gary Schanbacher (author of Migration Patterns, winner of an honorable mention for the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction) and J. Diego Frey (author of the forthcoming Umbrellas or Else, from Ghost Road), continue to take part in Lighthouse events and will make a featured appearance at the Lit Fest participant reading on Tuesday, June 17. Both Schanbacher and Frey received book deals after meetings at our first- and second-annual Lit Fests. Hear them read (for free, of course) on June 17, 8PM, Forest Room 5, [OOPS! Edited: it's at the Mercury Cafe] along with other scribblers who sign up for the Participant Reading. If you’re participating in Lit Fest and you’d like a 3-to-5 minute slot to read, contact moi: [email protected].
See ya’ll there!
