Co-hosted with poet Maya Stein, this unique getaway is designed to surprise you with outside-the-box approaches to writing, and tools that will support your creativity on and off the page. We’ll gather in the picturesque town of Belfast, Maine and explore the surrounding mid-coast Maine area from August 2-6.
With an eye to cultivating community and conversation, we’ll guide writers through a variety of experiences and exercises created to help find delight in the unusual and the everyday. We’ll be experimenting with how to use exploration outside of the writing space as a tool to get into the writing space. This retreat is not a how-to in the sense that we will not be leading workshops on specific aspects of writing (i.e. how to write a persuasive essay, how to edit your work, how to sell your novel), but rather an experiential immersion that will connect and deepen creative work. One day we might melting crayons as we investigate the intersection of control and chaos, or gathering "suspicious-looking” pebbles on the beach as a way of looking at how to transform uncertainty into curiosity. “Off the Page” is an invitation to invigorate our work through inquiry, improvisation, and joyful investigation.