by Writing Workshops Staff
14 hours ago
A Writing Retreat in New Mexico: Inside the April 2027 Santa Fe Workshop, Hour by Hour
Applications are open for Writing Workshops Santa Fe, our writing retreat in New Mexico, running Wednesday, April 7 through Sunday, April 11, 2027, at La Fonda on the Plaza. Three cohorts. Ten writers in each.
Most retreat pages tell you how the week will feel. This one tells you what the hours contain, because at $2,995 you should know exactly what you are buying before you sit down to write the application.
Santa Fe is also the shortest and most reachable of our destination programs. Four nights, no passport. Writers who have wanted to give their manuscript a week of serious attention but could not clear ten days for Dublin or Tuscany tend to start here.
What Happens on Your First Night in Santa Fe?
Check-in at La Fonda begins at 3:00 PM on Wednesday. Dinner is at 6:00, in the hotel, included in your tuition. Thirty writers, three instructors, and two trip leaders sit down together for the first time. By the end of that dinner, you will know who is in your cohort and what they have been working on, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because the next morning you will be discussing their pages.
Willa Cather stayed in this hotel in 1925 and again in 1926, and it was during those stays that Death Comes for the Archbishop came to her. The book she went on to write is a useful thing to think about on your first night in a workshop. Cather described it as a narrative without accent, and she meant it structurally: she modeled the book on the flat, undramatized surfaces of medieval saints' legends, where no episode is given more weight than any other and the reader is never told which moment is the climax. That was a deliberate refusal of the machinery most novels run on. It is worth remembering when your own pages come up on Thursday and someone at the table asks where your story starts.
The city's literary present is just as live. The Institute of American Indian Arts sits a few miles from the Plaza, and its MFA program has become a center of contemporary Native writing. Tommy Orange and Terese Marie Mailhot were classmates there before There There and Heart Berries. N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer for House Made of Dawn in 1969, a novel that opens and closes with the same image of a man running, so that the book closes a circle rather than reaching an end.
What Does a Morning Workshop Look Like With Ten Writers at the Table?
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday mornings belong to workshop. Across three consecutive mornings with only ten people in the room, every manuscript gets full and unhurried attention.
Most writers do not know this before their first workshop, and it changes what you get out of one. The value is not in the advice. Ten readers will hand you ten opinions, several of them contradictory, and if you try to satisfy all of them, you will revise your manuscript into paste. The value is in the pattern of misreadings.
When more than half the room independently misunderstands the same paragraph, you have a structural problem, and it is yours to fix. When the room splits, you have a matter of taste, and you often opt to keep your version. That distinction is the whole reason to sit at a table with nine other serious readers rather than send your pages to one trusted friend. One reader cannot show you a pattern.
So bring a notebook to your own workshop session and do not defend anything. Write down only what people misread, not what they suggest. Sort it afterward into two columns: things more than half the room got wrong, and things one person got wrong. Revise to the first column. That is a practice you can take home and use on every manuscript for the rest of your writing life, and it is the single most useful habit I have watched writers pick up on these trips.
"Do this if you are serious about writing."
– Jeannette B., destination retreat alum
Each Santa Fe cohort is capped at ten writers, and applications are reviewed as they arrive.
Apply for Santa Fe 2027Why Is the One-on-One Conference the Part Writers Remember?
Fiction and nonfiction writers send two manuscripts ahead of the trip, up to 5,000 words each. The first goes to the table. The second belongs to you and your instructor, alone, in a room, sometime during the week.
That second conversation is where the real questions get asked. Group workshop is good at diagnosing a manuscript and bad at answering the thing you have been carrying around for two years: whether the book is worth finishing, whether the structural fix you are dreading is the one you already know you need, whether you should abandon the frame narrative you have rewritten nine times. Those questions do not survive a table of ten. They need one person who has read your work closely and has no stake in being kind.
Afternoons open back up. Daily craft and business-of-writing seminars are open to every writer in the program, so you hear all three instructors during the week rather than only your own. Friday morning the museum opens early for us: a docent walks our group through the Georgia O'Keeffe collection before the doors open to the public. Thursday there is a chocolate-making class at Kakawa. Saturday evening everyone reads, and then there is a happy hour, and then it is over.
Which Santa Fe Cohort Should You Apply To?
The Master Class and Generative Seminar with Virginia Reeves
Open to every genre, including poetry. Nothing is due before you arrive; you make the work in Santa Fe. Reeves alternates craft lectures on time and structure with generative sessions where you draft new pages in the room while nine other writers do the same. Her first novel, Work Like Any Other (Scribner, 2016), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and it is a book worth studying for exactly what she teaches: the inciting act happens almost immediately, and the remaining three hundred pages are consequence. Most novelists spend their first act building toward the irreversible thing. Reeves puts it up front and then shows you how much a book can carry afterward. She is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and teaches at Helena College. Every writer in this cohort also meets with her privately, and you may optionally send up to ten pages in advance for that conference.
The Nonfiction Workshop with Samantha Mann
For essayists and memoirists: a collection finding its shape, a memoir you are deep inside, an essay that will not end. Mann is a contributing writer for Vogue and The Cut, with work in Elle, Bon Appétit, and Washington Post Magazine. She wrote the essay collections Putting Out: Essays on Otherness and Dyke Delusions, and edited the anthology I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy. She already teaches essay writing for WritingWorkshops.com, so a good number of writers arrive in Santa Fe having already worked with her online.
The Fiction Workshop with Rubén Degollado
For novelists and story writers at any stage. Degollado's The Family Izquierdo (W. W. Norton, 2022) was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022, and was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction Award. It is a family saga built out of separately voiced chapters, and the pleasure of it is watching one household's story accumulate from ten partial accounts, none of which sees the whole. Writers wrestling with multiple points of view will get a great deal from three mornings with him. He has been an educator since 1994, and his online students at WritingWorkshops.com say the same thing about him with unusual consistency.
"Rubén Degollado packs a punch in every two-hour class, while providing a nurturing environment where students can take risks with their drafts and receive instant feedback."
– WritingWorkshops.com fiction student
If you are weighing Santa Fe against the rest of the year, our full destination retreats calendar runs through Dublin, Iceland, Paris, Tuscany, Portland, Mackinac Island, and New York.
Still deciding which destination and which cohort fit your manuscript?
See All 2027 RetreatsWhat Does the Retreat Cost, and How Do You Apply?
Tuition is $2,995 for your own room, or $2,295 to share a room with two double beds. That covers four nights at La Fonda, the welcome dinner, three mornings of workshop or seminar, written feedback on your submission, the daily craft seminars, your one-on-one conference, the private O'Keeffe tour, and the chocolate-making class. Meals beyond the opening dinner are on you, which in a city with Santa Fe's restaurants is not much of a hardship. A partner or guest can come along for $595, which covers shared lodging and all the group activities but not the workshops.
Accepted writers can pay in full or select Affirm at checkout for a monthly payment plan. Full tuition is due within fourteen days of acceptance.
The application asks for three things: a bio of up to 500 words covering your writing life and any publications, a purpose statement of up to 1,000 words on why you want to be there and what you would bring, and a writing sample of up to 5,000 words. The sample does not need to be published, and it does not need to be the piece you plan to workshop. A reading committee of writers and editors evaluates every application. You do not need a publication history to be admitted; our cohorts run from first-draft novelists to writers with books in print.
Most participants fly into Albuquerque, about an hour from Santa Fe by car or shuttle. Santa Fe Regional is closer but thinner on service. Travel is not included, and travel insurance is a good idea.
Ten seats per cohort, and applications are read as they come in. If Santa Fe in April is the week you have been waiting to give your manuscript, apply early. You can also read what writers have said about our programs on our testimonials page, or follow what our alumni have been publishing in our student publication news.
April 7 to 11, 2027. La Fonda on the Plaza. Thirty writers, three instructors, four nights in the high desert.
Start Your ApplicationAbout 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.
