Loon Writers Festival Workshops
Writing In the Wild
Led by Randi Kay Olsen-Heinold
Date and Time: Announced Soon
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: Announced Soon
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: Announced Soon
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
Led by Jamie Parsley
Date and Time: Announced Soon
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.
Scandal, Crime and True Stories in Poems
Led by Jamie Parsley
Date and Time: Announced Soon
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.
Lori's Workshops Announced Soon!
Led by Lori O'Dea
Date and Time: Announced Soon
Coming soon!