Retreats & Convenings
Convenings
Our Convenings are often genre or theme-based and designed to offer an intimate experience both on the land and virtually. See below for our current offerings and reach out to programs@hedgebrook.org if you have an interest in curating a group of writers for a future one!
Participants of our Convenings are not considered alumnae of Hedgebrook, making them eligible to apply for our core Writers-in-Residence program and The Mother Tree Residency.
Upcoming offering:
Description: This 4-day virtual retreat is designed to foster collaboration and support for indigenous thought leaders, activists, and creatives of diverse levels of writing recognition. You will gather virtually through a curated Hedgebrook writers retreat space with two main goals in mind:
● To share in community the connections and obstacles in cross-movement spaces as you generate creative ideas for social equality and change.
● To dedicate time to your craft as writers to generate work in conversation with each other, free from distractions and obligations.
The Experience: Each day begins with a check-in and intention setting followed by a facilitated workshop with our illustrious instructors and advocates (see below!). After a lunch break, the group will come together for a collective activity and there will be community sharing time throughout to facilitate conversation and connection. Additionally, a thoughtfully curated writers box will be delivered to your door to support your retreat time.
To ensure an intimate cohort experience, space is limited. Don’t wait to register!
Our featured instructors and workshops:
2025 Social Justice Convening:
A Retreat for Indigenous Voices
Friday, November 7th - Monday, November 10th
9:30 am-3 pm PDT
Detailed schedule coming soon!
Blood Memory with Jaymie Campbell
I work with traditional materials, mainly found on the land within my visual arts practice. My writing and storytelling practice is about exploring the connection to these materials, both physically and ancestrally. How they feel, how they move. What we know about them, and what we do not - and how we live in relation to them and to our communities. How sometimes my hands know how to work with them even if my mind does not. In this session, writers will explore a relationship to one of these materials - perhaps hometan hide, fur, berries, porcupine quills or fish skin - to the animal or plant, the spirit it embodies, emotions it evokes, senses it heightens or to the material itself.
Hybrid Moments with Sasha LaPointe
We live in a time that challenges the binary and explores intersection and identity. In this workshop we will radicalize our approach to the personal narrative. What happens when we intertwine poetry and personal memoir? How do our stories of self become more realized when we break the constructs of traditional personal essay?
We will explore form and narrative and examine lyric essays by celebrated authors including Deborah Miranda, Layli Longsoldier, Carmen Maria Machado, and others. We’ll experiment with the braided form, and learn how to weave multiple ideas together into one cohesive piece. We’ll practice and discuss hybrid forms that celebrate both personal story and poetry.
We will read and discuss successful examples of lyric essays and engage in fun and experimental writing exercises meant to generate these kinds of pieces.
The Self, The Selves with T Kira Māhealani Madden
In this generative space, we will investigate speculative structures, parallel and ancestral realities and unrealities, hypothetical What If’s? and honor every version of the self as Narrator in order to weave familial and personal stories. We will focus on memory mapping, hauntings, identifying corporeal cues, and honoring our many wisdoms and responsibilities on the page. We will write, draw, string lei, read aloud, and deepen our observational waters.
Write like a Badass: No Cautionary Tales Allowed with Deborah Taffa
How do we create a memorable first-person persona in memoir? We dread flat writing. When using the “I,” we want the voice to be complex. We seek to add character contradictions to humanize our first-person narratives, but we don’t always think about subtraction. To build a self on the page, the nonfiction writer engages in artful cutting if and when it serves the story. This generative craft talk will explore the way essayists and memoirists are constantly mining the gap between who they want to be versus who they actually are.