Writers Retreat

Word-Soup Kitchen with Ignatius Valentine Aloysius

Come join me in prose and poetry’s kitchen as we explore ways to generate a colorful amalgam of personal creative writing examples in this workshop, which can help set your sights on publishing more confidently. Bring your writing tools, ingredients, and spices with you. Bring your fountain pens, pencils, and ink, and learn how to dish up a daily fare of good, rich writing that understands the flavor and lushness of lyricism. What is your favorite genre? How can it read better and move the reader more meaningfully across the page? With its focus on rhythm, sound, and concise meaning, poetry encourages writers to experiment with language, emotion, and imagery. On the other hand, prose’s more expansive and plot-driven narrative style, offers a broader canvas for storytelling and character development. By exploring both in this course, writers can learn to blend the precision of poetry’s form with the freedom of prose’s structure, creating new ways to express your thoughts and ideas. These explorations foster a deeper understanding of language’s power, pushing boundaries and allowing for your unique voice to emerge. All genres, all levels.

Sold Out: Where's the Action? with John Mauk

Stories come from conflict, a problem that must get addressed. That problem may be internal: an emotional need, moral quagmire, or intellectual puzzle. Or the problem may be external, one involving rivals, boundaries, or physical threats. Of course, the internal and external usually intermingle. They write together and create a complex knot that characters (and readers) must untangle. But no matter the nature of the problem, stories must get acted out, dramatized in the most physical and material ways possible. Readers want to live in the flesh of others, to sense the world, to experience the terrifying or beautiful friction of the moment. In other words, readers yearn for action—not necessarily car chases or barroom brawls, but people acting and reacting to the material conditions around them. In our workshops, meant for story, memoir, and creative nonfiction, we will help writers to determine the primary conflict of their stories—either real or imagined. From there, we will chart out key scenes, moments that best dramatize that conflict. Whether totally new to fiction or committed to an ongoing project, participants will write, share, and receive our support each day.

Crafting Joy: Writing Literary Bliss with Anne-Marie Oomen

Our goal? To explore the craft of joy on the page. While writing about the hard stuff continues to be on many writers’ minds, this year, let’s couple those skills with something different. Let’s examine what it means to write joy. In so many workshops, we are taught to start with trouble, that conflict and tension will draw us in, that the hard stuff sells. All true. But as antidote to these darker themes, how do we craft work that textures those qualities with the opposite? How do we write in a way that doesn’t gloss over the hard stuff, but offers language laced with those rare qualities of joy—fulfilled jubilance and elation. We’ll look at models from C. S. Lewis to Ross Gay, and we will practice inventive forms from ekphrasis to hermit crabs. We will plumb what it means to write from and into a position of delight. For all genres, all levels.

Blurred Lines: Where Life and Art Collide with Christine Maul Rice

“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.” — E.L. Doctorow

Has anyone ever told you that your life (or parts of it) could be a book? If so, which genre will contain it? Fiction or nonfiction? You won’t know until you start writing. A writer’s primary medium is the imagination—but memory is a slippery beast. In this generative workshop, you will develop hard skills to translate lived experiences into compelling narratives. We will study writers of traditional creative nonfiction (Jesmyn Ward) who toe the line between fiction and creative nonfiction (Pam Houston), writers who unabashedly fictionalize elements of their life (James Baldwin), and writers whose fictional scenes are so close to reality we see right through the author’s thin veil (Tim O’Brien). You’;ll take risks, experiment, consider how to cross- pollinate genres and/or implement hybrid forms. You’lll identify your most compelling material, play with point of view, structure and form, and push new work or work in progress in useful directions, with the goal of discovery and pages to keep working on. Open to all levels.

Writing the Unsaid: Finding Power in Silence and Subtext with Cyn Vargas

In this generative workshop, we’ll explore how absence can be as powerful as presence on the page. What happens when we write into silence, suggestion, or the words we don’t say out loud? Through daily prompts, we’ll experiment with ways to use gaps, shadows, and negative space to create tension and resonance. Together we’ll generate new work across genres—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—focusing less on what’s stated and more on what’s implied. Writers will leave with a portfolio of fresh starts and a deeper understanding of how to use the unsaid to shape powerful, layered stories. For all genres, all levels.

Make'Em Laugh with Mary Kay Zuravleff

Humor is an invaluable tool in storytelling. We’ll take a look at absurdity, wit, satire, gallows humor, and slapstick in this workshop, as you practice different ways to include humor in your fiction or memoir. Come prepared to share moments you laughed out loud and moments when you laughed to keep from crying. Returnees welcome (pick up where you left off!) and new voices celebrated.