Aspen Summer Words Craft Talks and Panels 2026

I’m back in Snowmass this week, at an elevation of roughly 8500 feet, slick with sweat, moisturizer, and sunscreen, taking notes at the Aspen Summer Words Craft Panels. Just as in 2023, I plan on sharing the insights and soundbites that speak to me, in case they also speak to you. 

My plan is to post a summary shortly after each Aspen Summer Words craft talk and panels. If you’re reading this in relatively-real-time, please comment and let me know if these notes are helping your writing practice as well.

Speakers: Ashley Lopez (Massie McQuilkin & Altman Literary Agent), CeCe Lyra (Agent at Wendy Sherman Associates), Abby Walters (Agent at David Black Agency), Rebekah Jett (Assistant Editor at Scribner)

Moderator: Ryan Harbage (Founder of Fischer-Harbage Agency, Inc.)

I went into this panel somewhat disenfranchised about publishing, as lately I haven’t felt I have any work approaching the publishing phase. I left this panel with the same self-assessment, but now I have hope, and that is a pleasant shift. 

And now, the notes...

CeCe mentions she pulls clients right out of the slush pile, which gives me tremendous joy and reminds me how I find the best home goods sitting next to the commercial dumpsters in Snowmass. I bet Cece would unearth gems in Aspen Thrift.

Ashley says within a pitch email there is typically the pitch and then the first 10 pages of a piece, and she’s looking at the pitch to determine what the author thinks the work is about. Timing is everything in publishing.

Many on the panel talked about the team-nature of publishing. Even if you’re at a small agency, the agent often gets buy-in from other agents before making an offer, and if they are interested, they will bring your pitch to internal team meetings to see if there’s traction. 

Publishing is a bunch of book nerds, Ryan says.

The panel is asked to describe what makes them want to acquire a book, and the answer is various forms of “I feel an irresistible emotional connection to the characters.” Ashley adds that she must be able to sell the book, and wants a handy logline to emerge from the reading.

Self-publishing is no longer a dirty word in publishing and can work in tandem with the publishing agency. 

Advice for bettering your pitch: talk about your story with others and see what elements light them up—that’s your pitch material.

Speakers: Jamel Brinkley, Meghan O’Rourke
Moderator: Julie Comins

This was my most anticipated panel because I’ve taken an online class with Jamel Brinkley via MFA For All and loved it. He thoroughly and thoughtfully explained perspective in a voice with such musicality; I hope he reads his own audiobooks. As soon as my table-mates and I started chatting at the craft panel , I learned they were there for Meghan O’Rourke, and she too has an impressive career and teaching gig. Jamel teaches at Iowa Writer’s Workshop while Meghan’s at Yale. 

Is it bothering anyone else that I’m using the panelists’ first names instead of their last? I’m trying to loosen up and it's too far into the article to shift now...

This panel discussion was about structure. Jamel explained that humans are pattern seeking, and writers can use this inclination to reinforce meaning in a piece. Oftentimes, he writes to discover the structure in a short story, then he looks for the patterns in the piece.

Meghan reads her manuscript each day before she starts writing into it again, unless there is a significant break, but this helps her to recognize what is there. Like other Melissa Febos, Meghan is fond of using colored index cards to physically organize the material, with each color corresponding to different elements of her nonfiction: scenes, grief, characters. It helps her to map the problems as well.

It was very hot in the event tent, especially after hiking in, but I stayed.

The best structures are felt, Jamel says. The reader may not be able to articulate what it is but it must unleash some energy that sustains itself over the course of the piece. Structure can be both intuitive and intentional.

Meghan says she obsesses over structure because she understands its importance. Every few drafts, she does a read where she looks for the patterns. What is there that I did not know? Don’t get scared to start over, she says, once you determine a working structure. Don’t get conservative about revision when we should get imaginative.

They both spoke to the structure of a sentence and it’s importance in conveying so much more than what’s on the surface. When sentence structure establishes a pattern, and then that pattern is broken, the reader will feel it. That change communicates a feeling. Perhaps if a character is hiding something, the direct object of a sentence is hiding, or out of typical placement. “Are they loud or quiet sentences?” Jamel asks.

Speaker: Christopher Castellani

Both of Wednesday’s speakers, Christopher Castellani and Hannah Pittard stood alone on the stage, amid the heat and lingering wildfire smoke, and read to us for about 30 minutes. Now I love a curated podcast as much as the next person, but my table let out a polite groan at the conclusion of the talks, expressing a desire for more showmanship and spontaneity.

In hindsight, I can recognize it as a display of our privilege, to pay less than $6 per public event, and still demand MORE! How dare they not walk off stage, seize our pens, and re-write our rough drafts...

In all fairness, Christopher broke form to play movie footage and check his timer, and Hannah's delivery was engrossing. The audience was lapping pointers out of her hands. Did I mix metaphors there?  Christopher and Hannah bestowed many lessons on us, even some humor, and I scrambled to document it.

The book I’ve heard recommended throughout the festival more than any other is Jane Alison’s “Meander, Spiral, Explode.” Christopher brought it up Wednesday and Jamel on Tuesday. As speakers have been pressed to explain writing forms and containers throughout the discussions, they, in turn, challenge us to write away from Freytag’s Pyramid and wander instead into other structures that are perhaps less expected and satisfying, but more reflective of life. Christopher quoted from Alison’s book, “The form of a novel should seek to approximate our lived experience.”

Christopher played clips from the 1993 film adaptation of John Guare's “Six Degrees of Separation,” and was particularly focused on a scene where Louisa can’t let go of an experience she and her husband had with a young, endearing con artist. Louisa grappled with how to contain the experience rather than to turn it into a dinner party anecdote. And Christopher, through his talk was getting at a similar idea that art on the page or paint the canvas is an approximation of a lived experience, and the artist is forever trying to get closer to accurately capturing that experience.

“Good stories slow us down. Stories put the blur into focus and give it shape.” The forms in which we chose to tell our stories often leave out our mess, our contradictions; the chaos of life. But the important thing is that a story’s form resonates with the vibration of the human soul, which is a reference to both “Six Degrees of Separation” and Wassily Kandinsky’s soul vibration theory. Now you know everything I know about this topic. Direct all questions to Christopher.

There is no more important decision than who tells the story, Christopher says, and that someone is either the narrator or the narrative consciousness. We will know the characters only by the way she knows them, not by objectively how they are. “There is no such thing as a reliable narrator,” he says. Author and narrator collaborate in a story, but there is no way to parse them apart. Christopher says we write what we know and who we are—even when that’s not our intention. It’s all super risky, and full of accidental confessions. It’s the reason most people don’t make art.

He spoke about narrative strategy, and in summary, Christopher asserts that the organizing principles that inform the telling of a story are as important as the story itself. Find the shape of your piece, and then like Meghan O’Rourke directed on Tuesday, radically edit.

Speaker: Hannah Pittard

I know, above I lamented that Chris and Hannah read to us, but Hannah had fun with it, often improvising and adding self-deprecating commentary about her piece: “I'm gonna skip this Henry James part that just answers everything. It's the smart part. If it's not smart yet, that's the part I'm skipping.”

Hannah was trying out material she hopes to publish in The Sewanee Review later this year, and it was textured with lists, writing advice, and dark humor. If I do get the chance to read it, I bet I’d spend equal parts crying, laughing, and highlighting. It was affecting from the start; she says she is the child of a custody fight that lasted from the time she was 6-years-old until she was 16, and she learned to perform in Atlanta courtrooms. 

“A sentence could determine where you slept that night…Narration was leverage,” Hannah notes. Her stepmother began documenting with photos and video cam footage. Hannah kept lists from an early age, and I don't remember why, other than it was a compulsion to document things she did, words she liked, future plans. “[My stepmother] and I were doing something similar in different registers, trying to fix the records. She was building a case—I was building a self.” The same events, presented in a different order could change the meaning and reframe the entire courtroom narration. 

I am currently wading through the muck of a divorce, and Hannah put words to what I’ve been noticing about how the legal system works. I bought Hannah’s book, “We are Too Many: A Memior [Kind of],” hoping to wring out more of her humor and courtroom wisdom, and how to protect my daughter from entering into a similar custody-battle.

If my ex’s lawyers are reading this…oh, hi…Hannah’s a wonderful writer, go ahead and read along with me. Maybe we’ll all learn something.

Hannah wants concrete nouns and her practice of writing lists, jotting notes as things catch her attention or curiosity, gives her material for the future. She tells her writing students at University of Kentucky, “I want an object I can drop on my foot. Return us to the sensory world rather than hovering above it.” 

One idea of Hannah’s I loved and I’m not in a practice of doing in text: “Put two things next to each other and they begin talking.” She gave paradoxical examples, and to keep it real concrete, one was a stuffed animal beside a court summons.

Time to hike down the hill for the last two sessions of Aspen Summer Words.