Writing With Voice and Style

About This Retreat

This retreat is going to be hard and joyous and mind bending. I am going to make you think and learn and read and write in ways you haven’t before even if you’ve already written a lot. I’m drawing on many years of practice here, not just as a writer, but as someone who researches how creativity works and the best methods for teaching it. This is a Master Class in writing with style and voice which will draw on a wide range of texts from Anton Chekhov to Viginia Wolf to The Hunger Games Series and Miranda July, and the non-fiction of Ta Nehisi Coates and Maggie Nelson.

I want to teach you to write work that moves and challenges us. I want you to fall in love with thinking about how books work. I want to show you how to make work which is alive and vibrates, stories which draw us in and compel us to keep going.

I’ve developed the material in this course with a desire to give participants real, practical, tried and true strategies for writing as well as looking at some broader more philosophical ideas about how stories work. I hope to be entertaining and thought provoking and maybe even frustrating at times.

The goal is to help you refine and acquire and think about the technical the skills to be a better version of your current writing self whatever that means.

I love teaching books and writing. I love working with words. Most of the best moments of my life have been in doing both things. Oh and also, I just love to host. I love to bring people together around conversation and good food and books. I like helping people have a good time. My dinner parties are legendary. This retreat is going to be like the best dinner party you’ve ever been to with the added bonus that there’s an infinity pool overlooking a tropical jungle.

Who is this retreat for?

Maybe you are dreaming about writing a book of fiction or non-fiction? Maybe you’re on a second book or halfway through a book or you’ve finished your book and it needs some refining. If you are writing a collection of stories, a memoir, a novel, a collection of essays or something that exists in the hybrid spaces between these forms, this retreat is for you.

Do you love books? Do you have an open mind? Do you want to be challenged to be a better version of you? This retreat is for writers but also for readers and teachers who want to go deep into how stories work. If this retreat sounds exciting to you, then it’s for you.

There will be a maximum of 10 participants.