Loon Writers Festival Workshops
Writing In the Wild
Led by Randi Kay Olsen-Heinold
Date and Time: Saturday 10/10 9:30-11AM
Location: Ortenstone Garden (*approx. 2 miles from downtown)
It’s time to step away from the writer’s chair and take a walk in the woods. Through movement, mindfulness, and connecting with the natural world, this experiential workshop explores how caring for yourself and aligning with the rhythms of nature can support your creativity and help you navigate the high’s and low’s of the writing process. Using simple practices and writing prompts, we’ll discover new ways to find inspiration, get unstuck, tap into your intuition, and create the conditions for your words to emerge.
Writing the Moment: Transforming Strange Memories into Powerful Stories
Led by Anthony Albright
Date and Time: Saturday 10/10 3:00-4:30pm
Location: IOOF (Main venue)
In this generative workshop, we’ll take one vivid moment from your life, whether that’s funny, unsettling, joyful, or downright strange, and turn it into a compelling piece of writing. In this cross-genre workshop, we’ll explore how memory, place, and emotional pressure shape storytelling. No experience required. We’ll play with dialogue, sensory detail, and narrative turns as tools for building tension and meaning. The goal is for you to leave with ideas and prompts for future pieces, and a fresh way of seeing your own memories, as well as a sense of how to let the weirdness of real life drive your creative work.
Biographical Poetry: Turning Lived Moments into Resonant Poems
Led by Anthony Albright
Date and Time: Saturday 10/10 1:00-2:30pm
Location: IOOF (Main venue)
In this workshop, we’ll take a lived moment from your life and let it unfold into a poem that carries emotional weight. No poetry experience required! This isn’t about confession or drama, we’re looking to focus on the way memory, place, and sensation shape the stories we tell about ourselves. We’ll go over how to distill experience into imagery, how to let pressure and landscape guide the line, and how to write from the body as much as the mind. Whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or have never written at all, the goal is that you’ll leave with imagery tools to bring emotion into your writing.
The Ghosts in Our Lives
In this generative writing workshop, we will explore what, or who, is no longer present in our lives. We’ll consider the ways absence can become a presence of its own, shaping our memories, relationships, places, and stories. Through a series of prompts and writing exercises, participants will have the opportunity to explore these ideas in whatever form speaks to them, including fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, or personal essay. No previous writing experience is necessary; come ready to write, reflect, and discover where the ghosts in your own life might lead you.
Led by Jamie Parsley
Date and Time: Saturday 10/10 9:30-11:00am
Location: TBD, downtown
Scandal, Crime and True Stories in Poems
Led by Jamie Parsley
Date and Time: Saturday 10/10 1:00-2:30pm
Location: TBD, downtown
What stories linger in a place? In this generative writing workshop, we’ll explore how local characters, scandals, crimes, gossip, history, weather, cemeteries, and familiar landscapes can become the raw material for poetry. We’ll consider how writers can transform real events and remembered stories into something more layered, imaginative, and even elegiac—moving beyond the facts to explore memory, place, loss, mystery, and meaning. Through prompts and writing exercises, participants will create new work inspired by the stories and landscapes around them. No poetry experience is necessary, and writers of all genres and experience levels are welcome.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Dialogue
Led by Lori O'Dea
Date and Time: Saturday 10/10 3:00-4:30pm
Location: TBD, downtown
In this workshop we’ll develop our ability as writers to use dialogue to reveal character, propel plot, build tension, and ground readers in our story. After getting words flowing with a light, generative writing prompt (with verbal and visual options), we’ll sharpen our knowledge of dialogue craft by closely reading and discussing several very short mentor texts. We’ll then plan and draft a two-character dialogue during individual writing time. Following a refresher mini-lesson, including a Dialogue Toolkit, we’ll revise and improve the dialogue we’ve written. Writers will have the option to read aloud their dialogue, solo or in performance with a partner, and receive supportive feedback. We’ll wrap with a take-home exercise for ongoing study of dialogue.
(Un)intentional Legacies
Led by Whitney (Walters) Jacobson
Date and Time: Saturday 10/10 9:30-11:00am
Location: TBD, downtown
What objects, skills, and traits are inherited? What ripple effects do those accumulations forge? This cross-genre writing workshop will ask participants to explore chance and intent as we consider our knowledge (or lack thereof) about what is lost and gained between generations. Through prompts and writing exercises, attendees will generate ideas for prospective pieces that examine what shapes us and our world, as well as how our values, and the choices based on them, influence what we will leave for the future. No experience required.
Writing While Processing WTF Is Happening Right Now
Led by Jenny Sheets
Date and Time: Sunday 10/11 9:30-11:00am
Location: IOOF (Main venue)
For better or worse, media gives us plenty of writing material. Between current events, to Tiktok trends, to what's happening on our own streets, how do we process what's happening around us, let alone write about it? In this full group, cross-genre workshop, we'll close out the festival by working on techniques to write through difficult situations, and how to write while we're still processing without "trauma dumping." We'll go deep, but we'll also explore utilizing humor in writing (for our own sanity).