Serious Fun with Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore speaks to a group of writers downtown

I’ve only been to three of the six Lighthouse Writer’s Studio events, but I think I can safely say that last weekend’s guest, Lorrie Moore, had the shiniest hair of any of them, and the most melodic voice.  I know: I sound like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, but something about Moore’s thoughtfulness and good humor has me a little enamored.  Not enamored enough to pet her to death in a barn, but enamored enough that I started drinking coffee again after a three-year hiatus just because she said, “What kind of writer drinks herbal tea?”  Well, me.  But not anymore.  Now I wake up and hear Moore’s voice saying, “I like to get my first cup of coffee on the page.”  And she doesn’t mean by spilling it.  She means by writing.  Which I’m doing nowadays, coffee in hand, optimism almost outweighing heartburn.  But you didn’t come to this blog to hear about my heartburn.  You came to this blog because you googled Corgis.  (True story: a bootlegged photo of a Corgi once caused a major spike in our blog traffic.) Luckily, writers and dog fanciers alike can find solace in what Lorrie Moore had to say. 

First, her visit illuminated one of those truths that can get lost in a writer’s eagerness to improve: there is no one way.  There is no secret to being a great writer, no magic feather, no rusted key hidden under a rock somewhere.  Every writer must find her own path.  I first encountered Moore about a year ago at the University of Wisconsin, where a group of students and faculty members had gathered for a talk with the writer Ann Beattie.  Beattie described her writing process as quite fast.  For many years, she’d used a manual typewriter, and before making a keystroke, she formed each sentence in her head.  In this manner she wrote stories for the New Yorker in about three hours.  She also testified to never returning to anything—if a story didn’t work quickly and on the first attempt, she threw it aside.  I sat in the second row, feeling awe and an acute mental oafishness.  I can’t write a grocery list in three hours.  I was distracted a little bit, too, by this woman in front of me who had really great hair.

The woman was Lorrie Moore, of course, and I know now that her process is rather different from her friend’s.  Like Beattie, Moore writes stories for the New Yorker.  But, perhaps unlike Beattie, Moore revises her writing “a million times,” and “tinkers endlessly.”  She has never mastered that strict writing schedule prescribed by so many authors and teachers. In fact, when asked by a member of the audience for tips on developing such a schedule, Moore asked with sincerity if the audience had any tips.  As a single mother, Moore writes when time allows, and tries to make it to the desk when inspiration strikes. At her Non-Crafty Craft Talk at the Tattered Cover, she described a palpable difference between pages written in moments of inspiration, and those written from obligation, and explained that even great books have a few of the latter.  The key is to bring as much energy and enjoyment to your desk as you can, and hope that the number of inspired pages outweigh those necessary others.

“There are a lot of times you get stuck,” she said.  “Sometimes you have to go for a walk.  Sometimes for years.  Other times, you have to force yourself to write something you know is wrong.”

Evident here is some of Moore’s distinctive humor.  She finds humor in everything—sometimes so much that she has to cut jokes and digressions from her final drafts.  Writing, she says, should be fun.  But serious fun.  And developing the craft of writing should come after finding the right subject.  “If you’re writing about the wrong thing,” she said, “it doesn’t matter if you use adverbs in your dialogue tags.”      

To illustrate this, she asked the 80-person audience at the Tattered Cover to write down a description of their latest fiction project, and pass it to the podium.  Then, on a second sheet of paper, participants were asked to write down: 1) Something people always say you should write about; 2) the worst thing you can imagine happening in your life; 3) the best thing you can imagine happening in your life; 4) the most important relationship in your life; and 5) the biggest problem facing the world.

In many cases, there wasn’t much apparent overlap between the participant’s current project and his/her fears, desires, loves, and concerns.  Several lists hinted at a riveting story that remained unwritten.  While the demonstration wasn’t perfect (writers are notoriously bad at “pitching” their own stories, and perhaps many had written about the topics on their list at another time) it was a dramatic reminder of how often writers put the cart before the horse.  Or perhaps beside the horse.  I suspect that many participants found, as I did, that there were connections between their innermost concerns and the stories they were working on, but that they hadn’t been fully exploited, or that the story had begun to veer away from a potential power source.  Moore went on to urge writers to use the illusion of fiction to be more honest than they might otherwise be, and to forget trying to please people.  By reading from a snide deconstruction of John Updike’s prose (by Martin Amis, from The Guardian) she’d already illustrated the impossibility of pleasing people anyway, especially with anything as subjective as “craft.”

So write about what means the most to you, even if someone might disapprove, even if that someone is your Corgi (high-fives to the Corgi peeps who are still with us!) and don’t worry about how other writers schedule their time, or what they drink in the mornings.  Unless it’s herbal tea.  That stuff is for suckers.

 

With a name like this, she had to be a writer

Kendal Muse, winner of the Lighthouse-Stories on Stage contest

News Alert! 

Kendal Muse, a dazzling member of Jessica Roeder’s dazzling Online Fiction Workshop, recently learned that her story, “A Message from the Sarge,” was selected by Stories on Stage to win our collaborative contest.  Kendal lives and muses, we assume, in Colorado with her husband and son.  Along with the rest of us, she will get to see actress Elgin Kelley (photo below) read her work on stage at Nobody Likes a Smartass, performed at the Jones Theater  (Denver Center for the Performing Arts) on Saturday, Sept. 26.

Writers—and, well, people in general—may not agree with the premise “Nobody Likes a Smartass,” but Kendal and 38 other members of the August Lighthouse short story workshops were invited to submit a story that touched in some way on that theme. At the deadline for submission, September 5, I had in my e-mail inbox 25 great short stories written by our members.  Our partners for this experiment, the nationally recognized Stories on Stage, were given the unenviable task of deciding which story would be performed along with a lineup of virtuosic pieces from Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and Flannery O’Connor. SOS Artistic Director Norma Moore ultimately fell for Kendal’s “vibrant personal voice.”

You’ll see what she means with this little preview of “A Message from the Sarge”:

We shouldn’t have been there that night. Henry was only ten, still too young for a role in the Christmas pageant, and I had sworn to never be in it again. I had been cast every year since we’d moved to town, once as a bearded wise man and last year as Mary. Mary was the worst. The church leaders didn’t leave you alone when you were Mary, everybody going on about how a Mary was chosen for her beauty and grace, and wasn’t I just thrilled with myself? As if I were the kind of girl who gave a crap about beauty and grace. For such an important role you barely had any lines; you attended rehearsals so you could practice gazing lovingly from your baby to your husband. There is nothing like trying to portray godly love for a plastic baby doll and a kid with pimples and wandering hands that really puts your life into perspective.

Kendal wouldn’t have written the story were it not for the contest. “When asked to consider writing a story based around the idea ‘nobody likes a smartass,’ this story slowly started to piece itself together,” she says. “Having an opportunity to workshop it with other writers and then having a place for it to be heard has been a great experience. “

Her instructor, Jessica Roeder, engaged with Kendal’s original take on the topic:

“A Message from Sarge” was the first story submitted for workshop this session, alongside the week’s reading of O’Connor and Wolff. Kendal’s story looks at the smartass the other way around, leaving him where we’d often like to leave him in life, on the periphery. The narrator’s voice combines her father’s toughness with a teenager’s understatement, and she proves herself much smarter than her smartass rival.    

Elgin Kelley will read Lighthouser Kendal Muse's winning story.

Come hear the rest of Kendal’s story, along with Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too,” Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” on the September 26, either the 5 or 8 PM shows. For a limited time, $15 discount-rate tickets are available to Lighthouse members by clicking here and entering “lighthouse” as the discount code, or by calling 303.494.0523.

 

That recurring dream of being back in high school? Doesn’t have to be a nightmare

Don't blame the books for your traumatic memories of 10th grade!

Over the past year or so, I’ve reread four or five books that I at one point read grudgingly and with heightened suspicion back in high school. I know, I know. It almost seems like a waste. We’re all trying to machete through the Modern Library-type “100 Best Books” jungle, and those members of the high school canon, despite having suffered the diminishing returns of our aging and overstuffed minds, are reliable hackaways. Freebies, if you will. Yes, I’ve read that one. Check! But returning to The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, The Bell Jar, and, most recently To Kill a Mockingbird (this year’s One Book, One Denver selection) has taught me a few things:

• I have an absolutely terrible memory. Sieve-like! I didn’t even remember the murder at the end of Gatsby, let alone Scout’s pitch-perfect voice: “Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.” (Imagine: when you first read To Kill a Mockingbird, you didn’t likely know that the character of Dill was based on Truman Capote, and you didn’t picture a miniature Philip Seymour Hoffman as you read.)

Tell me that's not Dill twenty years after To Kill a Mockingbird!

• Reading as a writer is not the same sport as reading as a put-upon teenager. Despite his plot’s semi-degeneration into what might be termed (today) a series of melodramatic conniptions, Flaubert captured a thing of perfect narrative beauty in Emma Bovary’s journey from bored doctor’s wife to vampy suicidal vixen. Okay, that’s not a very literary interpretation (send hate mail directly here), but it puts you on notice: stuff should happen in fiction. Especially crazy stuff! Take note you moderates (she said to herself).
• It takes hardly any time to re-read most books. The effort should not derail your attempt to get through the aforementioned “100 best*” list.  It will take mere moments for you to plummet back into the bell jar, for example, and wonder how you ever deluded yourself into thinking you were sane. Those second reads are quick and centering, somehow. Am I wrong?

Be sure to join William Haywood Henderson this Saturday for our Writer’s Buzz: Write Your First Novel workshop, Saturday, September 12, 10 AM to noon, Highlands Rec Center (2880 Osceola St.)   

*But please try to replace and rescramble the official list with your own completely random list, like this one that keeps cropping up everywhere.

 

Raves accumulate for Lorrie Moore’s new book

If you’re an author and Amazon reviews get you down, the best revenge is winning over Michiko Kakutani, who has the following to say about A Gate at the Stairs, Moore’s soon-to-be released novel:

Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, “Self-Help,” which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her — and her characters’ — emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences.

The rest is here.

And did we mention (I’m sure we didn’t) that she’s our next weekend residency guest at Lighthouse? More details here.

 

Blood on our hands: Literary Death Match Denver

First let me explain something about what we do at Lighthouse. You would think, with the name and all, that we spent long days and nights showing the light to writers who are lost in a sea of confusion and solitude and other metaphorical stuff like that.  No.  We actually spend most of our time ducking into the refracted light that already shines on our members.  More accurately, we should call ourselves “house of refracted light.”

Literary Death Match's Todd Zuniga and Jody Reale "work the crowd" (picture compliments of Stephanie Hight)

Like so many in the Thursday night short story workshop, Nick Franciose is one of the members who’s graced with a natural talent for the short story. His verbal acuity is ferocious.  So this is what we did: we sent Nick Franciose out to represent Lighthouse at Denver’s second Literary Death Match.

For those of you unfamiliar with the LDM, it’s an international sensation, led by the tireless and satellitically haired Todd Zuniga, who manages both air travel and witty repartee on a daily basis. A regular diet of either would exhaust yours truly, but not this guy. He does it, he tweets it, he moves on.  So, after he promised us laughs and ribaldry, many Lighthousers and other literary types packed into Forest Room 5 on Wednesday night, hungry for a showdown.

The evening did not disappoint. Battling it out were two fiction writers—Nick for Lighthouse and Sharon McGill for Opium Magazine, and two poets—Jessy Randall (A Day in Boyland) for Ghost Road and Nicky Beer for Copper Nickel magazine. All, it should be noted, were cute as buttons.  That they also oozed talent was a bonus.

The short summary is that Sharon McGill wowed the crowd with mention of mediocre sex in the kitchen, an image that haunted the judges  (poet Chris Ransick, nf writer Curtis Pesman, and the dynamite Tara Anderson) for the entire night ; Franciose floored them with his tale of a law school dropout who wakes up in drag in the back of a police cruiser; Randall had us all in fits of giggles with various poems about the haplessly lovestruck and men-as-dawgs and whatnot, finishing with the swashbuckling “Unt Not Invent System.”  Nicky Beer had us at “perineum” but continued to bewitch us with her rollicking, smart poetry.

The two finalists were Randall and our own Franciose.  Because there’s no video of Nick’s performance, let me just give you this taste, from his opening:

Coming out of blackout is like emerging from a fugue state; one second you’re hunched over staring unperceivingly at your crotch, your head lolling with the movements of the police cruiser, and the next, consciousness returns to you and an ocean of worldly particulars rushes at your senses.  On TV you once saw a team of marine researchers attach weights to a life-sized Styrofoam head and lower it on a cable into an ocean trench.  When they pulled the head back up the tremendous pressures had squeezed it, preserving the proportions perfectly, to the size of a plum.  That’s what your head feels like, like ocean tonnage and compacted Styrofoam—and like a plum, the flesh gray and sweet with bruise. 

–From Nick Franciose’s “Foreclosure”

Franciose Wins! Accompanied by Lighthouse Scream Team MVP Stephanie Hight

‘Nuff said about our guy.  He killed the crowd. (Thanks also to the Lighthouse Scream Team—we are not above it, though such premeditated hollering is annoying/offensive/cruel at graduations, it’s required at duels-to-the-death.)  We had already guessed this wouldn’t be a typical reading when the young woman with the hula hoop showed up, and you can hear a great summary of the Franciose siblings’ virtuosity in the writing and hula hooping world here (scroll down the comments to see Papa Franciose’s wry, off-the-wall and allusion-studded note—it explains a lot about the Francoise talent pool).

As they often say, it’s not who wins or loses, but how strong the drinks are during the performance. What a fun night, all, and looking forward to the November Literary Death Match. More to come on that.

 

Intern’s Report: Young Writers’ Camp

Ed. note: Our trusty intern Laurel Smith is back, reporting on the events of last week’s camp, run by the supersonic Amanda Rea. Here’s what Laurel had to say.

One of our young writers on the town

For five days young writers sailed the seas of creativity. They wrote their way through brainstorms of poetry and survived the resulting flash fiction. On Friday the Lighthouse guided them to the shores of the Platte River where they disembarked their crazy adventure at the Tattered Cover, reunited with their parents and stood up to tell a packed room of curious onlookers about their voyage. But before they could tell us about the fruits of the Sea of Creativity they had a bit more writing to do.

            Around forty kids went out into the heart of Downtown Denver looking for what inspires them. I was lucky enough to be taken aboard by the fifth and six graders. They watched people walking their dogs, noted the alarming amount of black spots on the sidewalk from chewing gum, and investigated the simmering smell of hotdogs. They turned these observations into poetry and stories, most of which I swear are better than the stuff I’ve read in intro to creative writing classes that I took in college. 

The inspiration for Laurel's nautical metaphors?

            They wrote and read their stories to each other. They even begged for more when a writer stopped short of the end. They would huddle around as she scribbled a few more words on a page, taking note of every waft of the hand and scrunch of the nose, like they were watching a sporting event.

            When their time to speak came, they took the microphone and the room came to a hush as everyone tried to grasp onto every word of their thrilling stories. Parents looked at their children proudly and instructors beamed with satisfaction and I realized the tables had turned. They were the ones teaching us. They showed us the endless possibility of young minds and what it means to be inspired. Shari Caudron, who worked with the high school students, even sent along a message that her students restored her faith in teenagers.

At the end of the event, they beamed with pride holding onto their writing framed and behind glass and left with their parents.

Young writers read at Tattered Cover in front of an audience of over 100

 Do all good things have to come to an end? I asked myself. I saw students clutching onto notebooks packed with blank pages waiting to be filled. Students lined up to hug their instructors and say goodbye. I saw a fifth-grader give cheeky wink followed by a wave. “See you next year,” she said.

End? No, this is only the beginning. I bet in a few years we will even see some of our high students back to sail the seas of creativity and teach young writers just like them what it means to love writing.

 

Cheers,
Laurel Janeen Smith

 

Biz Weekend Report: The Serpentine Path

I can’t say I was ever very good at deadlines; I once wrote a paper on James Joyce’s Ulysses, and turned it in, oh, let’s say, two months late. My professor was not very happy, but he let it slide.

So, six weeks after the fact, here are some tidbits on the Serpentine Path talk at the Tattered Cover, back on June 20. Each panelist discussed the very different routes they followed in order to get their work in print:

The Take No Prisoners (While Risking Burning Some Bridges) Route:
Janis Hallowell, author of She Was and The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn related her story of calling a major editor in the middle of the night to ask: Why? Why didn’t you want my book?

(She got through; he actually picked up the phone and patiently answered her questions. He also gave her the name of an agent-friend. She called that person–during business hours–the next day. He ended up signing her. And selling her book.)

The Pay Your Money and Take Your Chance Method (But Please Be Sure to Not Include Your Name and Contact Info on the Manuscript):
Fiction wordsmith Steven Wingate approached the pub thing with a practical and reasoned eye: he entered contests. Eventually, this investment paid off when his short story collection, Wifeshopping, won the 2007 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize for Fiction from the Bread Load Writers’ Conference.

The way he described it, the contest thing was kind of like making a diverse set of modest investments in the stock market, hedging that one would eventually hit it big (that’s before the recent stock market shenanigans, of course).

And big it was: Kirkus Reviews wrote that Wifeshopping was: “Strongly imagined, often deeply moving fiction from a gifted writer who seems to know us better than we know ourselves.”

Go It Alone, and Find a Rapt Audience Route:
Lois Hjelmsted survived breast cancer–and then wrote a touching memoir of her experience as a way of helping others through such trials. But she never bothered to find a publisher.

No matter–she published Fine Black Lines herself, and has taken her message on the road, speaking more than 530 times to a diverse population in all 50 states, England, and Canada, including patients, professionals, cancer support groups, women’s groups, and book clubs.

The Who Says Memoirs Don’t Sell? Route:
Kim Field signed with Denver agent Kristin Nelson after listening to Kristin at one of the Lighthouse Writers Buzz events several years ago, and hasn’t looked back since.

Her memoir, No Place Safe, received the Colorado Book Award for nonfiction in 2008. Currently, Kim is working on a novel–at 4:30 AM each and every morning. And then she goes to work at a full-time job. Now that sounds like dedication.

(And boy does that makes me feel like a lazybones….)

So, if there’s one thing to take away from these stories, it’s this: No matter how you find your way into print, you must do it with a tremendous amount of passion, focus, and energy.

And a deep belief in yourself.

–MJH

 

Your words, in the spotlight…

Enter the Lighthouse/Stories on Stage Contest

Thanks to a generous grant from the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, we’re happy to announce a contest run in conjunction with Stories on Stage (storiesonstage.org) that is open to all members of the August Lighthouse short story (or Online Fiction) workshops. Each entry should fit the general topic: “Nobody likes a smartass.” Stories on Stage will select the winning entry based on their program needs and various other subjective criteria.  The writer whose story they select receives a $200 cash prize and the honor of hearing his or her story read by a professional actor in a Stories on Stage (http://storiesonstage.org) performance. The performance will also feature actors reading short fiction by Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and Flannery O’Connor, and will take place at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Jones Theater on Saturday, September 26, 2009. Shows will run at 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM. Tickets are normally $25, but a limited number of $15 discounted tickets are available to Lighthouse members.

1. Applicants must be enrolled in the August session of the Intro, Intermediate, or Advanced Short Story or the Online Fiction workshop.
2. Stories must be no more than 4,000 words & should be double-spaced, 12-pt. font.
3. Stories must relate, in some way, to the topic: “Nobody likes a smartass.”
4. Stories must be submitted by Saturday, September 5, to andrea@lighthousewriters.org, who will forward them to Stories on Stage. Electronic submission by Word doc (or docx) is preferred.
5. Revisions and/or edits may be required by Stories on Stage, with or without author permission.

Deadline & Important Dates

      • Deadline for submissions for the contest ($200 prize plus performance): Saturday, September 5.
      • The performance with Stories on Stage will take place on Saturday, September 26, 5 PM & 8 PM shows. Tickets available here.

Questions

Contact Andrea Dupree, Program Director, at andrea@lighthousewriters.org

 

 

“Being beautiful is not enough…”

The business weekend came and went, and a few great things emerged from it.  For one, our first book deal of Lit Fest: Cara Lopez Lee signed a contract with Ghost Road Press to publish her memoir, They Only Eat Their Husbands.  Yay, Cara!  We may also have other connections to report, but they are in earlier stages, so we’ll have to practice our restraint.

The crew who packed the house at the Tattered Cover LoDo for our Business Weekend

So, the business weekend kicked off with the Agents/Editors reception on Friday, and then Saturday was all about expert panel talks and one-on-one meetings at the beloved Tattered Cover LoDo. We kicked things off with three agents (Nicole Steen from Elyse Cheney Inc., Kate Testerman from kt literary, and Jeff Kleinman from Folio Literary Management) and two editors from independent presses (Matt Davis from Ghost Road Press and Derek Lawrence from Fulcrum Books).  I’ll summarize their take on the state of publishing like this:

• Everyone’s confused, including the top of the top. Everyone’s watching to see what happens with e-books, Kindle, blogs, and Twitter. Publishing companies were mentioned disparagingly as not knowing their something from their something.
• It’s always been difficult to publish books, but now it’s even more difficult.
• You can set yourself apart by doing your homework (coming to events like these, taking your writing more seriously than you can imagine) and having a good deal of luck.
• Being beautiful is not enough: you can have super-literary, gorgeous sentences, but the narrative urgency is what gets noticed. At least with the most vocal of this crew.
• Think of literary agents as professional readers, and take their advice in that context. None of them has, just because of his or her station, supernatural abilities. They have opinions, proclivities, and very full lives.
•  On that note, here’s your tough task: A lot of agents and editors sideline the reading of queries and first chapters to the early, distracted part of their day (Kleinman’s watching The Today Show while thumbing through them, for example) or late into the night. If it doesn’t absolutely capture the imagination right off the bat, it’s not likely to get read beyond the first paragraph. Of the agents there, one cites 200 queries/manuscripts per week that he’s thumbing through that way.
• And yet. And yet!  There’s something to be learned from rejection. If you send your work out to ten agents and all ten send form rejections or don’t even respond (if you don’t hear in 8-12 weeks, your answer is ‘no’), it’s likely you have more work to do on your query letter. If you get, however, a few personal responses, it’s worth sending out to 10 more.  If you get multiple requests for the manuscript and then no responses, it means your query letter’s probably great, but the writing lacks urgency or that special something. Kleinman recommends treating it like a game.  It truly isn’t personal, and once you jump into this wholeheartedly, you’ll realize that.
• No one’s buying novels or no one’s buying memoirs or both.
• You can defy the odds.  This last one I’m adding just to end on an up note.

Please, feel free, reader (and I mean that literally), to add or subtract from the list. Up next, a report from the “Breaking and Entering” panel, where we discussed love, luck, and attending Seders as a means of networking.

 

Intern’s Report: Zee party

Ed. note: Once again, our trusty intern Laurel Janeen Smith is on the case, this time chatting up the final Lit Fest party. Next up is the report from the Business weekend, where no one was spotted crying this year. Thanks, Laurel!

What better way to mourn the ending of Lit Fest than a garden party with two open bars? Well I suppose we could have had a garden party with two open bars, a live circus and Mike in a clown suit… Andrea, are you getting this down for next year? Nevertheless, even without circus performers, Saturday night’s party rocked with good food, good conversation and some of the most aggressive mingling I have ever seen.

If there is one thing Lighthouse members have in common (besides being writers, of course) it is that they like to talk. I came to the party not knowing anyone besides a few people I had met in workshops, but I found myself chatting with dozens of people. Every time I found myself standing alone, even if it was just for a moment, someone would swoop in, grab me by the shoulder and ask me a thousand questions like: what am I doing at the Lighthouse, how do I like it, what kind of writing do I do, what do I study at school, what am I passionate about, where did I come from, where am I going and what is my life philosophy? Whew, I never imagined the Lighthouse crowd would be more exhausting than my college friends.

Mike Henry doing the poet's softshoe at Lit Fest farewell.

If there is one thing I learned at the soiree, it’s that as soon as you step inside the Ferril, the Lighthouse will grab you by the right hand (or left if you’re a lefty) and won’t let go until your passions are sparked, your writing is improved and you’ve learned a little bit about the biz. Even after all that you will be lucky to get away. The Lighthouse is a community that looks out for all its members. It supports us, and keeps us going when the writing is hard, and let’s face it, its always hard.  

One great symbol of the Lighthouse community was presented at the Litfest closing party. The Beacon Award represents the great partnership and mutual appreciation between students and faculty, and the skills, support and inspiration that a faculty member graciously shares with his/her students. A committee of board members and Lighthouse members decides the award recipient based on essays written by students. Selections of these essays were read, and they were powerful, showing not only what great writers we have, but also how much they have gained from the Lighthouse faculty. 

The 2008 award was announced first. It was supposed to be awarded in April but we had that freak spring snowstorm so not too many made it to the award ceremony. So in true Lighthouse fashion in front of students, faculty, board members and New York agents and editors, Bill Henderson was re-awarded the Beacon Award.

Following Bill, the Lighthouse board awarded Alexandre Philippe the 2009 Beacon award. As Alexandre took the microphone and accepted the award, his voice caught and Andrea was brought to tears, which spurred Alexandre’s tears. Soon everyone was sniffling. These people are family, and they are so happy to have each other, I thought.   

After the award ceremony it was back to the hanging around the bars, meeting new faces and sharing smiles and stories.

I snuck out just after the sun set and people were dispersing. I waved goodbye to the Lighthouse community happy to be apart of it. Bring it on out world. I’ve got Lighthouse by my side now.

Cheers,
Laurel