Writing retreats

Writing retreats are where a draft stops being a intention and becomes pages. People come to them with a half-finished novel, a dissertation chapter, or a stack of notes about a parent’s life, and they leave with something that can be read by someone else.

A writer retreat is not a holiday with a notebook. The building is usually remote, the days are long, and the company is other people doing the same hard work. Writer retreat listings gather here by where they sit on the map and by what they ask of the writer who arrives.

Geography splits these listings before anything else does. California holds A Reason to Write, the Northern California Writers’ Retreat, Lit Camp and Barrelhouse; Florida has Sweetwater Writers Workshop; Pennsylvania has Murphy Writing; North Carolina has Wildacres Retreat; West Virginia has Longleaf; Washington has Writers’ Cabin. Cross the Atlantic and the map changes again: Moniack Mhor in Scotland, Tŷ Newydd in Wales, Varuna in New South Wales, and Acorn Writing Retreats in Ontario. If you have a month, a fortnight, or a single weekend, the difference between a residency and a workshop with beds is what you are choosing between.

The other split is what the retreat asks of you once you arrive. Some exist so a manuscript gets finished in silence; others put you at a table with other writers and run structured sessions. Boyds Mills and The Inner Loop sit closer to the second kind. Read what each one says about the working day, because a writer retreat that fills the hours with classes is not the same animal as one that hands you a key and leaves you alone. Pick a branch by the draft you are carrying, not by the landscape.