The Interrogation Retreat challenges writers to interrogate where their poems are truly coming from and teaches how to bring the heart of their ideas to the surface. By the end of this three-day retreat, facilitated by Ari B. Cofer and Caitlin Conlon, writers will leave with a greater understanding of why they write in the first place and how to engage with their own work in a meaningful way. If you’re a writer that feels stuck in a rut, a writer looking to delve deeper into their craft, a writer looking to experiment and grow their work in a safe, supportive community, or a combination of the three, the Interrogation Retreat is for you.

It’s no secret that social media algorithms often reward shareable and relatable content – if you’ve tried to market yourself online as a creative, you’ll probably know that experience firsthand.  We’re inviting you to spend a weekend with us doing the opposite. Unrelatable is about embracing and cultivating the stories that only you can tell. Through workshops focused on authenticity, detail, and narrative, we want you to write your ugly, your strange, your specific and unique experiences with us. Unrelatable asks: who are you when you aren’t trying to please other people? Where does your life stop being relatable and start just being yours? Let’s answer that together.

The Instinct Retreat is a crash course in intuitive writing. It aims to teach participants how to let go of their reservations and listen to the creative voice inside of them. The Instinct Retreat is about producing first drafts and not worrying about making them perfect on the first try. It will encourage participants to jump into a poem headfirst and see where it leads them, rather than agonize first over the planning. The Instinct Retreat is for anybody who has struggled with just getting their thoughts out of their head and onto the page. It’s also for anybody that feels like they’re in a “writer’s block” and wants a fresh perspective on their craft. We’re excited to write with you.

 Our bodies house all of our memories, poems, and organs. Many of us have complicated relationships with them, or have difficulty looking at them with tenderness. When the body reveals itself in our art, it’s not always intentional—or it is, and we don’t know how to negotiate it. 

In Excavation: Writing The Body With Intention, we’ll make the body the subject of our poems rather than a ghost lingering in the background. We’ll talk about the role bodies play in our art and how we can address their presence with care and purpose.

Through this process, we’ll investigate where our trepidations towards writing the body with honesty come from, and how we can move past them.

Our environments impact our relationships to our surroundings, as well as how we view our own selves. This is also true within writing. When we have a sense of place in our poems, we can greater understand its contents. This fixed identity gives us the freedom to think in greater terms than what occurs between the first line and the last line of a poem. How does it reverberate outside of those parameters? Who listens to its call? The Hometowns Retreat will teach participants to think of their poems as stories, with defined settings, characters, and arcs. Through workshops and craft talks that emphasize the importance of context, drawing on personal memory, and cultivating “home,” participants will leave the Hometowns retreat with a greater appreciation for the towns that built them, and the tools to craft writing with intention.