Wake Up Retreats

Discover how to transform lived experience into powerful, resonant nonfiction. This immersive five-day intensive invites you to explore the heart and craft of memoir. Through a blend of instruction, generative writing, and guided revision, you’ll learn to shape compelling true stories. We’ll examine core elements of craft and use them in unique ways to build strong narratives. You’ll experiment with braided, segmented, and hermit-crab forms, discovering how structure uncovers new layers of meaning. We’ll study what makes an ending feel earned and practice strategies that help your drafts find their true shape. Daily prompts, developmental tools, and supportive conversation will deepen your work and strengthen your voice. Ideal for all experience levels, this intensive will leave you with pages of new work, fresh insights on previous drafts, and a renewed connection to your writing life.

Explore or rediscover your love of writing! Whether you’re just beginning to dream about getting  those old journals out again or are considering submitting your work for publication, join us to spend time writing together, trying out new ideas, and getting feedback about your fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

Discover how to awaken and transform your creativity through writing prompts and mindful awareness practices in the peace filled setting of the Christine Center. You’ll have time to relax while learning to combine the art of paying close attention with writing that deepens every experience. Give your true voice space to roam and reawaken your intuitive self through guided written exercises, discussion, and reflection.

Appropriate for beginning writers as well as those with more experience, all that is necessary is the curiosity to listen deeply to yourself, the desire to pay close attention to all that is around you, and a willingness to explore your imagination. We’ll utilize techniques proven to enhance creativity, create opportunities to gain insights, and take time to write in a safe and nurturing environment. Any sharing of class writing is completely optional.

Words have the power to uncover truths, heal wounds, and illuminate the path forward. Journaling the Inner Journey is a writing-focused retreat that invites you to engage in meaningful dialogue with your inner most self through reflective writing practices, mindfulness, and meditation.

Centered in stillness, this program uses mindfulness and meditation to quiet the mind and create space for deep listening. From this place of presence, you’ll engage with prompts crafted to guide you into the heart of your inner knowing, uncovering layers of insight, wisdom, and clarity.

Join us as we explore the transformative possibilities of this new stage of life. The Second half of life is not defined by a particular age. Rather  it begins in a moment brought about by all manner of life changing circumstances–a time when we recognize the need to reconsider who we are apart from occupations, daily duties, and our past.

Psychologist James Hollis writes that the second half of life is a time of deep change. A time when people, “for whatever reason–the death of a partner, end of a marriage, illness, retirement, whatever–are obliged to radically consider who they are apart from their history, their roles, and their commitments.

Through writing, discussion, creative play, and mindfulness exercises we’ll create out own unique paths to the second half of life. Join us for this program of exploration during which we’ll gently uncover the transformative possibilities inherent in times of deep change.

Time to share written or other creative work is available, but never required!