Earlier this summer, Denver got a brand new lighthouse, which might seem the ultimate incongruity in a city about as far from a seacoast as one can get.
But the lighthouse in question is much more metaphor than maritime, and the metaphor is clearly focused on the light that emanates from the written word, whether in literature, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism or personal diary.
After more than a quarter century of restless but patient roaming through several Denver locations, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop finally moved into a permanent home, a spacious, attractive and custom-designed facility in Denver’s rapidly redeveloping Clayton neighborhood.
The just-dedicated 11,000-square foot structure, along with Lighthouse’s 15 employees and some 1,800 members, puts an exclamation point on the ultimate value of its founders’ original vision: To create a social and educational space created and operated by, about and for writers of all kinds and from all backgrounds.
And yes, the new home — with a cylindrical tower incorporated into its sleek design, the interior of which contains a sweeping winding staircase — does indeed evoke the classic lighthouse motif of maritime lore.
The building’s architectural aesthetics and declared dedication to writing might at first call to mind a monument to writing, more than a workshop, but a quick tour provided by Lighthouse’s knowledgeable marketing director Alexa Culshaw soon puts such quaint notions to rest.
This is clearly a place for working and learning in the present tense, with spacious meeting spaces and practical classrooms, (including a whimsical and colorful one especially for children who write), a lunch room and artfully designed nooks and crannies where groups of writers, or solitary scribes, can find a quiet and secluded spot for the meditation and contemplation that all writers crave.
A $2.4 million grant last year from Colorado Creative Industries — drawing upon American Rescue Plan funds to help facilitate pandemic-related virtual learning programs — made the new Lighthouse possible.
Its first big function took place in June, when Lighthouse’s traditional flagship event, Lit Fest, was held at the new facility.
Eight days of workshops, seminars, panel discussions and writing celebrations, both actual and virtual, unfolded.
Thousands of writers and aspiring writers participated.
Not bad for an idea that started in a Denver living room.
That living room, in 1997, was in the domicile of a Denver couple, Andrea Dupree and Michael J. Henry, both lit majors who had recently finished graduate school and did not want to walk away from the community of writers with whom they had grown close and whose support they considered crucial to their own aspirations as writers.
That initial goal led them to found Lighthouse Writers Workshop, of which Dupree and Henry are today program director and executive director, respectively.
A nonprofit 501(c)3 entity since 2004, offering individual payment plans to students, it was decidedly informal at first, Dupree, a published poet and short story writer, told the Intermountain Jewish News in a recent interview.
“We met in graduate school, which is just by definition this community of writers,” she says, “and it’s a temporary community. You have these really intense, wonderful, nurturing relationships for two-and-a-half or three years and then everybody scatters and goes back to their old jobs and their old lives.
“We wanted to find a way to continue the community, find a way to bring people together around writing because I feel like that is kind of necessary to most of us.
“I was highly skeptical of academia as the only place for such a place to live.”
The couple began hosting gatherings at their home, then as the number of participants grew, in places like the old Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek and Denver Public Library.
“We saw that there was an eager community out there,” Dupree says.
“I mean, it grew slower than it might appear, but it was consistent. Even though we were both doing other things — Mike was teaching at CU, I was teaching at DU and we were doing a lot of other things too — that remained consistent.”
As both Dupree and Henrry came to the conclusion that most writers eventually reach — “not to think of writing as something that would ever pay the bills” — and as they saw the demand increase for a welcoming community of writers, Lighthouse gradually evolved into an ongoing institution, eventually leasing various locations as headquarters and gathering places. One of them was the Curtis Park home of the late Thomas Hornsby Ferril, a celebrated Colorado poet.
There were plenty of writers who wanted to teach, including some of Colorado’s most noted authors and poets. There were many aspiring writers who wanted to learn from established writers, and vice-versa. There were writers from all sorts of backgrounds who simply wanted to rub elbows with other writers, compare notes, share worries and concerns.
Among those concerns, Dupree says, was a growing sense of unease that the written word was coming under threat from other forms of communication, even at the twilight of the 20th century, well before the internet and social media were as ubiquitous as they are today.
“I would say that developed over time,” she says. “We were all reading the tea leaves. Back then, the threat was television and movies; everybody was more interested in those things. Looking back historically, there’s always been a threat to the novel and to literature as the main storytelling mediums.
“So yes, that was definitely something that we felt helped build the community a little bit because it is a beleaguered art form. Even back then, National Education Assn. studies were coming out that, you know, 80% of adults had read one book over the last year. So there were already alarm bells going off and there had been before that, too.
“Now it’s just gotten more dramatic.”
That Lighthouse has grown steadily, and that it has arrived at the satisfying juncture it enjoys today, is a validation of the idea that there is a pressing need for a writers collective and of the sustained resilience of writing itself, both as an art and as a trade.
“Writing is something that connects people across almost every category,” Dupree says. “It’s something that by definition is deep; it seems to foster thoughtfulness and compassion and empathy. All those things help sustain it.”
Although many professional writers participate in Lighthouse activities, the inherent value of writing for its own sake remains a cornerstone of its philosophy.
“That has nothing to do with publications or money or agents or anything else. It just has to do with, ‘This is a worthwhile way to spend my time.”
That appeal has been fundamental to Lighthouse’s sustained success, and seems almost universal, Dupree says.
“There are fewer and fewer patterns,” she replies when asked about the demographics of Lighthouse participants.
“Right now we’re overrun with middle schoolers and throughout the summer we run summer camps for young writers. I think our youngest is eight and we’ve had people in their eighties and nineties.
“The average is somewhere between those two but it always surprises me. I’ve taught a lot of the workshops and the demographics of any given workshop can change drastically.”
The wide inclusivity at Lighthouse transcends age and extends to gender, race, ethnicity, creed, sexuality and virtually every other imaginable category.
“We’ve been putting a lot of effort into creating comfortable, accepting and inclusive places for people,” Dupree emphasizes. “We have affinity groups, color groups, which are for writers and creatives of color, we have a LBGTQIA+ group. We have specific places for people who have traditionally maybe not felt so comfortable in a group like this, and our goal is that they not only feel comfortable in those specific groups, but outside of the groups as well.”
The sort of writers these people want to become are just as diverse as the people themselves.
“There’s such a range. We have a two-year competitive program for people trying to be traditionally published. They are predominantly literary but not always.
“Sometimes there are genre fiction and non-fiction writers in there.
“In the last two months, three of those people had books come out — one was straight non-fiction, one was short stories of the literary, speculative sort and one was a middle grade novelist, all very different genres.”
While such success stories are certainly part of the Lighthouse experience, other students ultimately do not sell their work commercially; some aren’t even interested in that.
“People come to writing for different reasons,” Dupree says. “Some have a delusion that they’re going to be able to quit their day job, write all day in their sweats, spend time on the beach and develop this lifestyle that I think has been glamorized and is not even close to reality.
“More people than that do have something they can work with and I don’t think any of us on the faculty at Lighthouse has that crystal ball that says, ‘This person will never learn,’ or ‘This person is for sure going to sell their book.’ Maybe someday they’ll have a breakthrough. Who am I to say?”
In any case, all of the people who participate in Lighthouse, Dupree says, love to write and want to learn how to write better.
The institution’s approach is both practical and basic.
That includes such brass tacks as syntax, outlining, story organization, plot development, voice and characterization — everything from factual research to sheer imagination.
“The focus is usually on how can I tell the best story,” Dupree says. “How can I communicate what I see in my mind and in my heart on the page so that other people can experience it? Beyond that, there’s quite a bit of variation.”
The collective approach at Lighthouse stresses the importance of writers being able to critique their own writing by critiquing that of other writers.
“You’re looking at other people’s work critically, which is usually telling you more about your own work than about theirs. That’s impossible to do with your own work because you have your own mind and you have all the context and the ego is associated with the desire.
“So as you’re going through the process of learning how to be helpful to other storytellers, you’re actually giving yourself a crash course on what matters to you as a writer and what challenges you as a writer.”
Also important is learning how to be disciplined as a writer, how to maintain motivation and accountability. “In other words, if you don’t put it on your calendar, you don’t commit to it and sometimes it doesn’t get done.”
A crucial objective at Lighthouse is to ensure that the writer’s nascent idea does indeed become the writer’s finished story.
Meeting such ambitious goals, Dupree says, is made vastly easier by the comforts and convenience of Lighthouse’s new home. It has replaced earlier venues where such things as reliable heat and air conditioning were not guaranteed, where access for people with disabilities was not ensured and where such necessities as classrooms and meeting spaces were far from adequate.
One thing the new building can’t help Lighthouse deal with, however, are the many new challenges that writers and writing are facing in the highly divisive social and political climate of the 21st century.
Dupree is asked about such issues as cultural appropriation, conservative efforts to censor or ban certain books in various places and progressive attempts to silence writers over who they are or what they’re writing about.
Does Lighthouse discuss such topics with its students, she is asked, and do those students even care about them?
“They do care,” she replies, “but I don’t know that a consensus will ever be reached on those issues. At Lit Fest we often have community conversations. There was one on cultural appropriation that I would rather forget, just because it got pretty heated and was not good. Good faith was not being assumed on all sides.
“I think these issues, like a lot of political issues, are flashpoints that don’t have much to do with the art. They can have a lot to do with whether something is published or whether it’s successful or whether social media takes it to task, but I don’t think it’s time well-spent on a writer’s part to think too much about it. When they’re trying to tell the truest story, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or poetry, that stuff doesn’t belong in their head.
“What I tell my students is that the debate will go on forever. As many people as think they’re right about it, other people think they’re wrong. So if you’re trying to find a way not to offend anyone or to appease everyone, you’re probably not going to write the best that you can write.”
In the end, Dupree has profound faith in the long-term viability and survivability of the written word in the face of such divisive issues, even in a digital age in which social media and artificial intelligence are posing challenges that writers have never faced before.
“Writing is under siege,” she says, “but I think it will survive.
“As much as you can train a computer or a robot to spout out what it has learned from what has already been said, you can’t really teach a robot to see the present and beyond.
“It relies completely on the past and what has already been thought but is devoid of that extra layer of magic that comes when a person is struggling with getting the words out on the page.”
While AI might replace some writing and some writers, including in the field of journalism, Dupree says, she is convinced that human writers are not an endangered species.
“There have always been threats to the written word,” she says, “but I feel like that innovative spirit lives in most writers. We’re going to figure it out. Writing as a tool for understanding is here to stay.
“I don’t know anything else that can replicate that.”
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