by Byron Turner
2 hours ago
Writing Retreats With Award-Winning Authors: What to Expect and How to Apply
A writing retreat with award-winning authors is not a vacation that happens to include a notebook. It is a week of close instruction from writers who have published the books, won the prizes, and worked on the other side of an editor's desk. At WritingWorkshops.com, our destination retreats put you in a small room with faculty who teach because they love it, in cities chosen because they sharpen the work. If you are weighing whether one of these retreats belongs on your calendar this year, here is what to expect and how to decide.
Which Writing Retreats Are Led by Award-Winning Authors?
We run destination retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Portland, on Mackinac Island, and in New York City for our publishing workshop. The locations change the texture of the week. What stays constant is who stands at the front of the room.
Take Paris as a representative example. Recent faculty there have included Karen E. Bender, whose collection Refund was a finalist for the National Book Award; Ramona Ausubel, a fiction contributor to The New Yorker; Joan Kwon Glass, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and a contributor to Best American Poetry; and Kelly Luce, a novelist and an editor at Electric Literature. These are not celebrity names attached to a brochure. They are the people reading your pages and sitting across from you when it is your turn to talk.
See every destination, the dates, and the authors leading each week.
Browse Destination RetreatsWhat Do You Get When an Award-Winning Author Leads Your Workshop?
Access, mostly. The kind that is hard to buy any other way.
Each genre workshop at our destination retreats is capped at no more than ten writers. You submit two completed pieces before you arrive. One is workshopped by your cohort and your instructor in the room. The second is read closely by your workshop leader for a private, one-on-one conference, the conversation many writers say changes how they see their own work. Daily craft talks stay open to all participants, so a poet can sit in on a fiction discussion and a memoirist can learn from a generative session held out in the city. An author who has published at a high level and worked with editors carries a particular kind of knowledge. They can tell you not only what is working on the page but what an agent or an editor will think when they reach paragraph three.
Our mission is to bring your writing out of the wilderness and into community.
– WritingWorkshops.com
Are Writing Retreats With Award-Winning Authors Worth It?
It is a fair question, and an expensive one to get wrong. We make no promises about publication, because no honest program can. What we can point to is a record built since 2016. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us. Alumni have signed with literary agents and published books, been selected for the TODAY show's Read with Jenna book club, won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction and the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and earned admission to graduate programs including Iowa, the Michener Center, Syracuse, and Columbia.
A retreat will not write your book for you. What a good one does is compress months of slow, solitary progress into a week of concentrated attention, and it hands you a small group of serious readers who often stay in your life long after the last session. That community is the part former students mention most.
See where our students have published and what they have gone on to do.
Read Student Success StoriesHow Do You Apply for a Writing Retreat?
Start at our destination retreats page, where every current location, set of dates, and faculty roster lives in one place. Each retreat has its own page. Some open with an application; others, like the Paris retreat when a season has filled, open a notification list for the next year so you hear first when seats become available.
Admission is selective and the cohorts are deliberately small, which means the most sought-after weeks close early. If a destination is calling to you, the practical move is to apply or join the list as soon as a session opens. You do not need an MFA or a publication history to apply. You need pages you are serious about and a willingness to work. Read our student testimonials if you want a sense of the room before you commit.
Find the destination that fits your work and apply for an upcoming retreat.
Apply for a RetreatAbout WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
