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lighthouse - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing

Lighthouse of yonder rock that harkens into the oceanic arena, there is tell that you were born of starlight rather than built by hands of men. Yet I say to the storytellers of the deep that it is through the hands of men that the stars make heaven's way.

In the turret of that lighthouse bright, I placed my writers desk. I called the scene of those waves, the stormy and the calm, my home. Yet in truth it was only half a truth, for without you I am half a soul, at least I feel that way. So until you can fly over those bonny waves, here I sit, imagining that I am whole.

The lighthouse stood as a great guardian of land and a friend to those navigating sea waves.

The weathered paint of the lighthouse was evidence of its humble valour, how it stood resolute upon the rock to tell of dangers others couldn't see.

The lighthouse was bathed in rainwater and brine, the pure and the salty, season in and season out. Around it were the rocks both proud of the waves and submerged. It had been a long time since there were real steps to the door, ones that could be traversed with ease, and so they waited for the tide to pull the sea out a little further, to wait until all the rocks could breathe fresh coastal air.

Day or night, the lighthouse lit up my heart, for it was a thing of beauty, a poetry, a part of this coastal soul.

Starlight calls from the heavens, lighthouse glow replies from Earth, together lighting up the night.

There is a heartbeat in that lighthouse that gets converted to a steady beam upon the nightly reign of the moon.

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Storms and solitude: the literature of lighthouses

They have exerted a hypnotic pull on writers for generations, from Robert Louis Stevenson, who came from a dynasty of lighthouse builders, to Virginia Woolf, whose family returned every year to a house overlooking a Cornish beacon

Gallery: the stark loneliness of lighthouses – in pictures

E arly in the 1870s, a lighthouse was under construction on the Torran Rocks, deadly hazards to shipping off the west coast of Scotland. Masons carved ragged granite into smooth, interlocking blocks and built them upwards with the help of a steam-crane. Even 14 miles offshore, the building site was as methodical as any on land. To the young Robert Louis Stevenson , who was watching the operations while the sea roared at the rocks beneath, the deed was profoundly impressive.

We know Stevenson today for writing Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Yet, somewhat unexpectedly, this celebrated literary figure started out as a trainee lighthouse engineer.

Early in the 19th century, his grandfather Robert had established Scotland’s network of lighthouses almost from scratch. He made his name with the Bell Rock lighthouse , a beautiful tower built, miraculously, 11 miles off the coast on a half-submerged reef. His sons Alan, David and Thomas (respectively, Robert Louis’ two uncles and his father) were trained to continue this work. They built some fine lighthouses themselves, chief among them Alan’s Skerryvore , a colossal granite tower on a reef even more remote and inhospitable than the Bell Rock. Quite the shoes to fill.

In a pivotal scene in Stevenson’s Kidnapped, set in 1751 in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion, David Balfour is freed from his ordeal when the ship Covenant is wrecked on the Torran Rocks. In this parable of dangerous navigation around the Scottish coast, the unmarked reef’s menace is evoked with the recoiling precision of one who had seen it first-hand.

I had begun to wonder what it was that sat so heavily upon the captain, when the brig rising suddenly on the top of a high swell, he pointed and cried to us to look. Away on the lee bow, a thing like a fountain rose out of the moonlit sea, and immediately after we heard a low sound of roaring …

Or there is the unforgettable figure of Ben Gunn in Treasure Island, marooned for years on a remote and isolated island. He could almost be Stevenson’s humorous caricature of his younger self, stuck toiling dutifully for the family firm. In passages such as these, Stevenson’s lighthouse-building experiences lie half-submerged beneath his fiction.

Perhaps fittingly, he died in Samoa, far off Scotland’s shores. Towards the end of his life he began Records of a Family of Engineers , an account of his ancestors that reveals the awe in which he held them, driven possibly by a sense of writerly guilt at absconding from the family business. Of his grandfather he wrote: “He was above all things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier of nature itself. A road to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its channel – these were the problems with which his mind was continually occupied; and for these and similar ends he travelled the world for more than half a century, like an artist, notebook in hand.”

Our surviving lighthouses were built by Victorians like the Stevensons. The story of lighthouse-building resembles a classic Victorian novel, heroic and all-consuming, with grand themes and firmly delineated structure. So it seems paradoxical that Virginia Woolf should choose a lighthouse as the symbol for her modernist masterpiece. To the Lighthouse (1927), written and published after all the major lighthouses had been built, was Woolf’s attempt to tear down Victorian literary structures. The story of the Ramsay family’s endlessly postponed trip was a new kind of narrative with a swollen beginning, fractured middle and inconclusive end.

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening. Now … it was a stark tower on a bare rock.

Lighthouses are paradoxical things – beautifully designed, but never really seen. As architecture, they are defined by this distance from us and by a unique duality: in daylight a building, at night only a light. It was Woolf who first captured the buildings’ layering of identities in the moment when, after a decade, James Ramsay finally reaches the lighthouse. Was it the faraway presence of his childhood? Or the stonily real edifice that now reared before him? Both, in fact.

Like Stevenson, Woolf was moved to write by family experience. The lighthouse of her imagination was not in Scotland, as in the novel, but off the Cornish coast. Godrevy lighthouse perches on an islet a little way offshore, prominent in views from Talland House, which her father rented for family holidays between 1881 and 1895.

The endless postponements of Woolf’s novel mirror the real delays suffered by lighthouse keepers in being relieved of their duties. Unruly seas frequently prevented relief boats from reaching them, extending their postings long beyond the customary two months. WJ Lewis, a keeper on the isolated Bishop Rock lighthouse during the period Woolf was writing, later described these experiences in Ceaseless Vigil (1970), an astute and lyrical memoir of his time in the lighthouse service. Long out of print, it deserves to be more widely read.

The solitary existence of a lighthouse keeper has long captured the imagination, from Edgar Allan Poe (in his fragmentary and haunting last work The Light-House, unfinished on his death in 1849) to ML Stedman’s 2012 novel The Light Between Oceans, whose beleaguered central character was portrayed on screen by Michael Fassbender in 2016. But Lewis offers the purest testimony of what it means to have made the journey to the lighthouse.

After two years on the Bishop Rock, where he endured Atlantic storms violent enough to shake the 6,000-tonne granite tower, he was posted to Godrevy, his (and Woolf’s) “Island of Dreams”, where he relished observing the flora and fauna and nearly succumbed to madness after his colleague’s ill-health left him isolated in the tower during a Christmas storm. Other postings included the Channel Island of Alderney, Longstone, off the Northumbrian coast and, most strikingly, Cape Pembroke in the Falklands, where he describes exploring the rusting hulk of Brunel’s SS Great Britain, scuttled in Sparrow Cove, before it was shipped back to Bristol and restored to great fanfare.

Few people realise what real hardship is endured by lighthouse keepers. They cannot imagine the solitude of a granite tower where the mournful moaning of the winds is often deafening, or the cramped living quarters, the uneventfulness, the isolation or the monotony of the work, of place and of scenery.

Lewis was a rare personality: the stoicism necessary to be a keeper combined with the sensibility of a poet. While lacking the accomplishment and fame of Stevenson and Woolf, he matches them with the sheer quality of testimony. He wrote as dextrously about relishing the first smoke after midnight watch as he did about his helplessness in the face of the sea’s fury. Nothing else is known of this remarkable character beyond his 45 years in the lighthouse service.

Lighthouses are today unwatched, automated, keeperless. Silently kindling and dousing their lights, their severance from the land and our own preference for flight now makes them hard to know. In Seashaken Houses, my own fathoming of these buildings, I drew upon these three writers because they offer glimpses of lighthouses in their prime, when they were newly built, heroic enterprises that meant many things to many people. From his lighthouses, Stevenson came with visceral portrayals of what these hazards could mean to shipping. To her lighthouse, Woolf offered interpretations of what they meant to people on land. And, inside his lighthouses, Lewis hauntingly parsed their impact on those who kept a ceaseless vigil.

Seashaken Houses: A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet by Tom Nancollas is published by Particular Books

• Virginia Woolf
• Robert Louis Stevenson

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Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

01 May 2021

Posted by Tabby Hayward

LIGHTHOUSE POETRY

11-14 group - 15 attending 15-18 group - 12 attending

This week, we were continuing with our theme of lighthouses, but looking at poetry about lighthouses...

To begin, we thought about personifying a lighthouse - personification is when you describe something which isn't human as if it  were  human, giving it qualities/characteristics/features which only a human would have. Looking again at our lighthouse pictures, the young writers picked one and asked themselves...

If this lighthouse were a person, what sort of a person would they be? How old would they be? What gender? What would they look like? What would they wear? What sort of personality would they have? Introverted or extroverted? Calm and peaceful or bad tempered?  How would they feel? Lonely? Bored? Contented? Frustrated? Joyful? What could they see? What could they hear?

Putting all this together, the young writers wrote a short poem/poetic description introducing their lighthouse character!

Here’s Annie’s ‘lighthouse person’ poem:

Glowing smile and bright eyes, Her hair as bright and yellow as that of a light, A small bucket hat sits upon her head, Hair swaying in the wind as she passes, A cotton dress comes down to her ankles, Whiter than snow itself, She wears a red belt across her waist, Red and white bracelet upon her wrist, Alone and desperate, Unable to move, She guides those on adventures but longs for an adventure herself, Soon enough her eyes begin to dull, The white dress stains, Her smile is no more.

And here’s Aurora’s description:

The giant sighed, feeling the holes in his old fleece splash like the waves of the never-ending sea. His knees dug deep into the soft rock beneath him, keeping his great body solid in the gales that often froze him near to death. His breaths were drawn heavily, as if they were being pulled by some great rope in a violent tug of war, groaning under the massive lantern that laid upon his cold back. Cold despite the huge flame that hissed and spat where he held it, warding off doomed ships and unfortunate sailors.                                                                                                       What happened to the days gone by? What happened to the children who would run up, red-faced from their play at school, carrying garlands of valley flowers and warm-knitted blankets to keep him on his age-old mission? Alas, they had long since grown up, and they now knew of the ancient crime that chains him to this blasted cliff. And so none would go near him, leaving his white-and-red jumper to rot on his heaving chest, only withered black stalks hung from his aching neck, no-one to comfort him.

The giant sighed, feeling the holes in his old fleece splash like the waves of the never-ending sea. His knees dug deep into the soft rock beneath him, keeping his great body solid in the gales that often froze him near to death. His breaths were drawn heavily, as if they were being pulled by some great rope in a violent tug of war, groaning under the massive lantern that laid upon his cold back. Cold despite the huge flame that hissed and spat where he held it, warding off doomed ships and unfortunate sailors.      

What happened to the days gone by? What happened to the children who would run up, red-faced from their play at school, carrying garlands of valley flowers and warm-knitted blankets to keep him on his age-old mission? Alas, they had long since grown up, and they now knew of the ancient crime that chains him to this blasted cliff. And so none would go near him, leaving his white-and-red jumper to rot on his heaving chest, only withered black stalks hung from his aching neck, no-one to comfort him. The giant wept when he though of this, creating cascading waterfalls that ate at the soft chalk rocks beneath his stained knees. The wind was his only companion, a sneering comrade indeed, that only whispered snidely before rushing off to annoy someone else.

Next, we looked at kennings – metaphorical compounds, dating back to Old English and Viking poetry, which are used as tiny riddles to describe things in unexpected ways! Some of our young writers were already familiar with kennings (especially those in the Afterschool Club, where we looked at them last week!) but we went through the page on kennings on the Young Poets Network together and the writers all came up with some really imaginative kennings for their lighthouses – including the ‘sun’s substitute’ and the ‘waves’ boxing bag’!

Next, we looked at some other examples of poems about lighthouses, from Lighthouse Keeping by Kay Ryan to Land’s End by Weldon Kees, The Inland Lighthouse by James McMichael, I Was Never Able to Pray by Edward Hirsch, and Letters from an Institution by Michael Ryan. Some of these were using lighthouses more as a symbol/metaphor, while others looked at the imagery surrounding lighthouses and seascapes, exploring ideas of memory, childhood, nature, the environment and loss. We also looked at the different ways in which the poems were set out on the page and their use of rhyme, rhythm and structure – some almost resembling lighthouses in their shape!

Finally, putting all this together, the young writers wrote their best lighthouse poems, which could use kennings, personification, metaphors, imagery, shape, and anything else we had looked at today – or any other techniques they wanted to explore!

Here is Annie's poem, using kennings, rhyme and personification!

A guide to thee who are lost in the dark, A bright light as if a spark, Standing tall and firm, A hero to all in a different term, Watching over the pool of the world, A white base with a red twirl, The candle tower is a sight for sure.

And check out Evie’s brilliant lighthouse shape-poem below!

Evie's brilliant lighthouse poem!

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A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO TIME TRAVEL

A Suspenseful New Year

Competition Results

the toad & i by H L Truslove

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS AND EMPATHY POEMS

December 2020

Strictly Come Writing

ONE THOUSAND AND A FEW MORE NIGHTS!

WINTRY WRITING

THE GREAT ARTFULSCRIBE CHRISTMAS BAKE OFF!

The Great Christmas Bake Off!

Through Their Eyes

UNLIKELY SCENES AND SHAPING THE STORY

Covid Letters

November 2020

COLLABORATIVE POEMS

KEEPING THE STORY MOVING

Sleeping Beauty

ALADDIN AND THE RETURN OF THE LAMP

Pantos and Nature Writing

SELF PORTRAIT POETRY

Poetry Weekend

GUNPOWDER TREASON AND PLOT!

Pantomime Time

SINDBAD THE SAILOR

NEVER SUCH INNOCENCE

October 2020

Writing the 'other' - Looking through the lens of the ghost.

The Shark, the Rind, the Slug Ooze and the Stag's Leap

AUTUMN BAKE OFF!

PERFORMANCE POETRY

Writing to the Sound of Music

Lifelines: Farewell but not Goodbye

Writing Like a Metroidvania

HUMANS IN NATURE / EMPATHY

Paper Boats and List Poems

WORLD-BUILDING

Carving a Week Out of the Alphabet

ON A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT...

Where do we belong?

SCHEHERAZADE

A new term begins...

Creative Inspiration from Poole Museums

September 2020

It Is What It Is

POLITICAL POETRY

ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS - CLIFFHANGERS

FRIENDS AND STRANGERS

STORY GYM - Character

Fruits for the picking

August 2020

Lighthouse Under Lockdown 2: Tim Colegate

END OF YEAR BAKE OFF!

End of year showcase!

Lighthouse Under Lockdown 1: Perdie Bargh

FIVE MINUTE DRAMAS

Food writing and memoirs

FLASH FICTION

Avoiding Clichés

Looking to the Stars / Watching the Clouds Part

UGLY NATURE POETRY

Go and open the door...

Perspectives

Refugee Week 2020

Collective Nouns for Young Writers

Birds with Jack Thacker

Flash fiction

Alice In Wonderland and Colours

Film Reviews!

Community Writing Workshop

100 Powerful Words

THE FUTURE WE WANT

Characterisation

Message in a bottle

Theatre Above the Pines

Ideas for a Sign

I didn’t know I’d miss

Sad Shower in New York and the Cheeky Little Astronomer

DEAR FUTURE ME

Objects with voices

From Letters to Lockdown

Head, Heart

Bake Off - Short Stories Edition

The Mayflower Young Writers are back!

Boxes On A Screen

CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS

EASTER EGGS

FAIRYTALE SCRIPTS AND LOCKDOWN DIALOGUES (ONLINE)

A Writer in ... Isolation?

ODES AND PRAISE SONGS (ONLINE WORKSHOP)

The Ghost Light

Online Workshop

Arts Awards Skill Share

ENEMIES AND OPENING SCENES

God’s House Tower

A blustery and rainy day in Poole...

February 2020

Walking on Sunshine...

The Great British Write Off

Safety, Sand dunes and Senses

Whole Lotta Love

The Heart at Twenty-Four Days / A Tongue Hanging Out

Thirteen ways to eat a chocolate bar

Jane Eyre Reflection - Arts Awards Part B

Frozen Lakes and 300,000 Years of Oral Tradition

From Homer to Hip Hop

Jane Eyre and the gothic

January 2020

What Colour was Your Day?

Truth or Dare...

Characters In Love

Write Yourself Well?

A New World...

Lost Characters!

New Year, New Characters!

Poetry at Atlantic Academy

December 2019

The 'Get-In'

Christmas fun!

Re-making Panto and Calling The Shots!

Christmas festivities and an exciting new project!

Marshmallow-Ice and Under Milk Wood

November 2019

The Imaginary Box

Jack and the beanstalk - retold!

Mirror, mirror- Reflection on self image

The Cinderella Story Around the World

A, B, and C - Bonfire Night Edition

Fractured Fairy Tales

October 2019

'In Residence'

Murder in the classroom!

Review Writing with Jo Fisher

Roundabout Reviews and The Funny Award!

Procrastination-Motivation-Inspiration

Mayflower Journeys in Warli

Freedom in Becoming Old?

A Blank White Space

Journeying into the Unknown

Introducing Jack Thacker

September 2019

Make Your Wishes Come True!

Roundabout!

All the women I have been

Start Of The Year - Autumn!

End-of-year Showcase

Are you paying attention?

Masterclass with March

Display Work and A Message In A Bottle!

Short Stories

Lights, Camera, My Story!

A Brief Introduction to Spoken Word

'Love' Letters

Let's Make A Protest!

Archives Alive

A Date with Johnny Angelsnake?

The Lion, The Witch, and... the moon?

Our Take on 'The Great Gatsby' Ballet

From Beginning to End…

Party like it's 1923!

My Work Experience with the Mayflower Young Writers

Curses, Spells, and Charms - Fantasy Poetry

A Bee's Knees* of a Session

Fantasy Worlds

Young Writers on Tour – Behind the Scenes at the Mayflower

Re-Reading and Re-Writing

It ain't what you do....

Self-Portrait Poetry

Genre Tropes and Cliches

A Writing Space for All Women: How We Can Help You

One Million Tiny Plays...

Keep on keeping on...

Awful Egyptians

Creative Insulting

Scriptwriting

Mystery Box

Eco Sound Poetry

New beginnings

Eco-Poetry with Susan Richardson

February 2019

A Recipe for Success… Or Disaster?

Lighthouse Young Writers

It's All Good

A Reason to Write

Tudor House Submitted

Typing up Tudor Tours

January 2019

Tudor House Continued

Anonymous Confessions and Superheroes

Tudor House Drafts

Aardvarks to Zebras and more besides

Tudor House Tours

Term 1 Summary

December 2018

The Naming of Parts

Winter Poems

Southampton’s Oceans, Journeys and Identities

Poem Sculpture

December Notes

Bowling Balls, Dentists, and Baby Donkeys

Dick Whittington and His Cat

November 2018

Writing from Objects

First Lines

Flash Fiction Fairytales

Writing for Stage

Theatre Trip

Fairytale Writing

Beautiful Words

Rapunzstiltskin

So: To Speak Festival

October 2018

Introduction to writing

So, Write A List...

Family - Vona Groarke

Wicked Workshop (Reprise)

I Spent Most of the Summer

Introduction

Defying Prejudice

A New Chapter

Women's Writing Archives

September 2018

JHG Writer In Residence - Iain Morrison

Summer Writing for the Soul

Wicked Young Writers

August 2018

Writing the Great Outdoors

Mayflower Writer in Residence 2017-18 Archive

Our projects

Headlight Press

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08 April 2024

New Forest Writer in Residence role at Countryside Education Trust

ArtfulScribe (AS) is pleased to announce its first Writer in Residence role aimed at connecting the landscape and forest inhabitants with wider audiences through...

Stories From Our Streets - Activity Pack

NEWRITE Media Release

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© Horowitz Research

What you need to know about Denver in 5 min.

Look inside the new Lighthouse Writers Workshop building in Clayton, where students’ words are going directly onto the insulation

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"It's the small things that count. The small beauties of the world that keep you going, keep you thriving. Look for the small things and you, too, will be beautiful."

Alice Pearson wrote these words on foam board, a piece of insulation on display in the Lighthouse Writers Workshop's temporary headquarters. It would eventually be carried across a parking lot, embedded in a construction project and, possibly, never seen again.

Lighthouse turned 25 years old in 2022, and the nonprofit is close to completing a major upgrade for their writing workshops and youth programs. Their new permanent headquarters, a brand new $8 million building on the edge of Denver's Clayton neighborhood, is set to open next year.

And as the work began, Donneve Rae, a member, floated an idea in the community. Wouldn't it be fun if they penned some of their own words onto the building's bones?

"I just thought that was absolutely delightful," Jefferson told us. "We are all just really thrilled by the idea of physically building a building out of words, even if it's just in that small way. The words are literally part of the building materials."

Pearson, a member of Lighthouse's Young Author's Collective, said it didn't matter the short sentiment would be sealed away behind drywall. To her, it was an opportunity to bless a space she's come to rely on, a small gesture for something that's become a big part of her life.

"It's like setting intentions," she said, "you know what I mean?"

"Even the little witch girl needs friends."

This was the passage Abby, who asked we don't use her last name, chose to write. For her, it was a reflection of what she's gotten from the Young Author's Collective, a musing on acceptance and friends found by chance.

"I didn't seek out these people, and then we all found each other through writing" she said as she sat with Pearson, Bruna Patton and Zoe Roberts during their weekly workshop. "We all get to enjoy these parts of ourselves and find people who will accept your, like, little witchiness."

The kids described themselves like the "Breakfast Club," not necessarily compatible in the real world but absolutely cohesive in this context. They're each between 13 and 15 and figuring themselves out, mostly on the page, in this "judgement-free zone."

The words Patton chose - "sometimes you need comfort, even if you get it from the worst places" - was an example of this self exploration. The passage wasn't so much about projecting an intention as it was an exercise in homing in on the kind of ominous prose she's been exploring in workshops.

This kind of safe place was a big goal in Lighthouse's expansion. Jefferson said the new building will offer, for the first time, a dedicated room for young people to come and write. Their goal is an open invitation to any kid in the neighborhood, not the few selected each year for the intensive Young Author's Collective program.

"We wanted to be in a place where kids can walk in after school and get tutoring help and, you know, 'I need somewhere to write my creative writing homework,'" she said. "We wanted to be somewhere that was really accessible to local schools, an area that really doesn't have a ton of arts access that we can help build up. That was really important to us."

"I think the meaning of life is to make a difference in the world in a way no one else can."

Those were the words Zoe Roberts penned on the foam panel, a mantra she tries to keep in her mind when things outside herself seem hectic or depressing.

It also embodies Lighthouse's broader goals, beyond just their youth programs.

During the pandemic, the nonprofit's footprint grew far beyond the metro. As they opened classes over zoom, they accumulated participants from all 50 states and a handful of other continents. They offered seminars for medical workers who needed a venue to blow off steam as their hospitals filled with COVID cases, an offshoot of older programs that used writing as therapy for people dealing with hardship.

Alexa Culshaw, the nonprofit's spokesperson, said this kind of community work is what sets Lighthouse apart from other organizations like them. Writing and words, she added, are perfect vehicles to create spaces where individual people and communities can grow stronger.

"We're guided by the belief that writing is a transformative act, and words are our most meaningful way of connecting with one another," she told us. "We see a real power and potential in creative writing, expressing your story, reading someone else's story, understanding new perspectives. It's just a powerful tool."

Three stories tall, packed full of books and adorned by the words of their students, Culshaw said their new home will finally match their ambition, reach and ethos.

"The new building means everything," Jefferson said. "It means growth. It means new access to community. It really means everything to the future of Lighthouse."

Correction: The genesis of the interior poetry idea was originally misstated by our sources, and has since been changed to reflect Donneve Rae's contribution.

Kevin is a multimedia artist who flung himself into the world of journalism. He likes using a camera and microphone to tell stories about workers, the environment, social justice and fascinating humans.

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Writing KS2 The Lighthouse 5 complete lessons

Subject: English

Age range: 7-11

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

30 June 2022

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A set of 5 writing lessons based on the short film ‘The Lighthouse’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HfBbSUORvo&ab_channel=7even3hreeTv

Suitable for KS2 and can be edited according to your students and year group.

Printable resources are included on the PPT slides.

These lessons could be extended to look at the functions of lighthouses, lighthouses around the world or into PSHE topics such as helping and empathising with others.

If you like this resource, please have a look at my others, which include standalone writing lessons, Kensuke’s Kingdom, Holes and Maths projects.

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The Story of a Writers Workshop: Lighthouse Shines in Denver

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Art connects community. Story brings us together. Arts organizations like the Denver Art Museum, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Museum for Contemporary Art, and Lighthouse all bring the power and potential of art into our community in tangibly impactful ways. Lighthouse alone focuses on the ways the art of writing can teach, heal, connect, challenge, and inspire.

We aim to keep leading the way—and to invite even more people in our community to experience the transformative power of writing and reading. Founded in 1997, Lighthouse has grown from a small cadre of literary types to a diverse community engaged in an active creative culture. Over 22,000 people of all ages and walks of life participate in Lighthouse programs each year, a number that’s growing by the day. It’s no wonder we’ve outgrown our current location at 1515 Race Street. Now is the time to write the story of a new home—an innovative space that looks a lot like Denver’s literary future, one that embraces a new vision built upon the foundation we’ve already made. We have purchased the land on which we'll build our new home, along the newly developed 39th Avenue Greenway in north-central Denver, on York Street. To date, over 100 supporters have joined in the effort to fund the project, including generous grants from the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and the Gates Family Foundation. Hear more from our Executive Director about the vision in this  February 2021 Westword article . 

Here’s how the new space will write the next chapter:

Writing Workshops : Throughout the year, hundreds of weekly workshops nurture writers of all ages and experience levels through the drafting, revising, and refining of poems, plays, screenplays, novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, and everything in between.

A More Equitable Literary World : Through focused projects, including our Writing in Color and Queer Creatives programs, we seek to amplify the voices of traditionally underrepresented writers, build community, and foster a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive writing community in Colorado.

Community Engagement Programs : From weekly Hard Times workshops, designed for people experiencing homelessness and poverty, to programs at libraries and museums and women’s shelters, we take our programming directly to people who need it.

Young Writers Program : We serve thousands of young people through school partnerships, community programs, in-house workshops and summer camps, and our Young Authors Collective for advanced teen writers. With several schools in walking distance, our after-school and summer writing programs will serve neighborhood youth in new and creative ways.