Page to Stage

A quarterly book club in partnership with The Garden District Bookshop at The Rink

Join Third Lantern Lit board and community members as we explore the stories and authors that define New Orleans.

Each quarter, we’ll focus on a novel or story that takes place (at least in part) in the Crescent City. We’ll explore different genres and time periods, reading the visions and histories of the many and varied individuals who call New Orleans home.

Participants are welcome to enjoy their own copy of that quarter’s selection or purchase a copy of the chosen book in advance from The Garden District Bookshop at The Rink.

Then, join us for book-themed cocktails and conversation at The Rink where Bar Epilogue will be open and serving yummy cocktails, mocktails, and light bites.

Workshop leader: Bill Loehfelm

The best mystery and thriller writers use their settings to dig into a place's geography, its buried history, its politics, its wounds and contradictions. The setting becomes a character, as complicit in the story as anyone holding a weapon.

In this workshop, we will look at how skilled crime writers use setting to heighten tension. We will investigate what setting reveals, hides, and says about the people who live there. We'll talk through a few authors who do this especially well, then dig into a set of writing prompts designed to help you use place as a way into your own crime, mystery, or thriller writing.

About Bill Loehfelm

Bill Loehfelm is the author of the critically acclaimed crime fiction series about NOPD rookie Maureen Coughlin, as well as the stand-alone novels Fresh Kills and Bloodroot. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in several anthologies. He lives in the Irish Channel with his wife, Anne Compton Lambeth, a writer and owner of Wild Lotus Yoga, and their dog, Roux.

This event is free and open to the community. No RSVP required.

Join board member Michelle Kelleher every second Tuesday for this new daytime writing series. We’ll run through a new set of unusual writing prompts every session, pulled from craft books, classes, and imagination, before moving into forty minutes of free writing. Treat these prompts as a catalyst to create something new or as a warm-up before moving on to an existing project. Every session of Uncommon Prompts will be different. Come try something new to keep your creativity flowing throughout the year. 

This event is free and open to the community. No RSVP required.

In partnership with Twelve Mile Limit, we are hosting a FIVE HOUR writing marathon open to all local writers.

Be there at noon to spend some time with your fellow writers and grab a coffee at the bar. At 12:30, we’ll start our silent writing. We’ll have one more 30 minute break halfway through to stretch our legs and some time at the end to share our experience. For those who make it all the way through, stay and celebrate with a drink at the bar!

This is a generative writing event meant to give us busy writers a few hours of focus free of our daily obligations. We hope you’ll join us and give yourself the writing time you deserve!

This event is free and open to all local writers. No RSVP necessary.

Workshop led by Adrian Van Young

Do you love to be moved and thrilled at once? Is your childhood library 60% Stephen King and Anne Rice paperbacks? Do you always stan Gone Girl, no matter what? If the answer to any of these is yes, then this generative workshop on writing the literary pageturner is most definitely for you.

Through a mixture of short writing prompts to generate new material, craft-oriented discussions of published work, and seminar-style class discussion, this workshop will explore unreliable narrators, setting as character, information-delivery techniques, narrative pacing, and tension & suspense, to name just a few page-turning essentials. Come for the pulse-pounding, stay for the pathos--and keep your reader in their seat!

This event is free and open to the community. No RSVP necessary.