Get Lit! Festival 2021

Use this link to register for this event and others on Eventbrite. This class will be ticketed ($35) and will be limited to 25 attendees. You can also find this event on Facebook.

Please support Auntie's Bookstore by using this link to find books by festival authors. 

Building upon Rachel Carson’s famous maritime observation, we will investigate and interrogate the “strange and beautiful place” of genre-blurring work—work that melds elements of creative non-fiction and poetry. The primary focus of this hybrid class will be generative. We’ll have plenty of time for in-class craft analysis, discussion, and writing prompts galore that will send you home with several solid drafts of new work. Ideal for writers at any level of experience looking for a vibrant shake-up to their writing practices long after the class is over.

Use this link to register for this event and others on Eventbrite. This Zoom class will be ticketed ($35) and will be limited to 25 attendees. You can also find this event on Facebook.

Please support Auntie's Bookstore by using this link to find books by festival authors. 

At its inception, poetry was an aural art form. With the advent of the printing press around 1440, possibilities for literature expanded to include the page. What role does the performance of poetry have for modern poets? How can page poets succeed on the stage as well? This workshop will explore the importance of poetry as performance, how the effective performance of poetry can lead to opportunities for poets, performance of poetry as a useful tool in the editing process, and successful techniques for the performance of poetry.

This event is sponsored by and presented by North Idaho College. Sign-up for the workshop is available via this link. When the workshop seats fill, there will be opportunities to observe via the same link. Please contact Jonathan Frey via jafrey@nic.edu if you need more information.

Please support Auntie's Bookstore by using this link to find books by festival authors. 

Cindy Baldwin describes poetic writing like “sipping something delightful as you read.” But is sipping too much dangerous? Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are poetic heroes known for their rich yet prose-heavy storytelling; their sentences unravel like balls of yarn. But can lyrical writing extend like a tiny thread? Of course. This class will challenge students to maneuver between excess and scarcity by dissecting passages written by Ocean Vuong, Saeed Jones, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others, as well as practice severing sentences not serving a passage.

North Idaho College encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you anticipate needing any type of accommodation or have questions about the access provided, please email Jonathan Frey at jafrey@nic.edu in advance of your participation.

Use this link to register for this event and others on Eventbrite. This Zoom class will be ticketed ($35) and will be limited to 25 attendees. You can also find this event on Facebook.

Please support Auntie's Bookstore by using this link to find books by festival authors. 

Whether you’re writing an intergalactic space opera or a realist novel set in your home state, worldbuilding is essential to your project. Often thought of as the realm of speculative fiction writers, worldbuilding enables fiction writers of all genres to better define and explore the physical, emotional, and sociocultural layers of their world. In this class, we’ll read fiction that demonstrates mastery of worldbuilding to understand how to develop our own unique worlds on the page. In-class exercises will help students bring their worlds to life.

Ticket link coming soon. This class will be ticketed ($35) and will be limited to 25 attendees.

Use this link to register for this event and others on Eventbrite. This class will be ticketed ($35) and will be limited to 25 attendees. You can also find this event on Facebook.

Please support Auntie's Bookstore by using this link to find books by festival authors. 

The writing of humor trains one to communicate very specific ideas in very particular ways. In order for a premise, concept or joke to land, your audience has to be in on it. So, the writing must be concise. A poetry practitioner innately understands this because both humor writing and poems use many similar techniques to reach the payoff. Both are required to use as few of words as possible to reach the intended result. Both crafts rely on tension and tension-building and the release of tension. Both rely on a rhythmic structure, element of surprise, and feature impactful imagery that leaves an impression. In this workshop we will study various (humorous) poems that feature these elements and more. We will use prompts to jettison our own humorous writing and poems. We will gain clearer understanding of how word choice and word play, rhythm, tension, element of surprise, tone, voice, persona, premise and punchline/closing image can enliven our poems and deliver unforgettable wit and humor to our writing.