As a young poet starting out, Desireé Dallagiacomo looked at prestigious writing retreats and conferences like the Vermont Studio Center and the Tin House Summer Workshop and thought: Nope, those places will never let me in.
Writers at the Heart of It retreat in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, in January 2020. (Credit: Astrid Nicole Ortiz)
Dallagiacomo, who is of Choctaw and European descent, grew up working-class in Chico, California, and at the time, she did not have a college degree. She also specialized in slam poetry, often uploading her work onto YouTube, a format she didn’t believe would be respected by admissions readers accustomed to seeing publications in reputable literary magazines.
“I was so scared of applying and being rejected, and then I felt like I was a fake poet, you know,” she says. “I was sure I wasn’t going to make it into these spaces, and so I was too scared to even apply.”
So at the age of twenty-six, Dallagiacomo did the next best thing: She started a writing retreat of her own.
In 2017 she borrowed the New Mexico home of a mentor, poet Ava Leavell Haymon, and launched the Heart of It Writing Retreat, inviting eight poets to Haymon’s space for four days of generative workshops, critiques, and in-depth discussions of poetry and poetry-making. “Our first year, everybody paid two hundred bucks and paid for their own travel, and that [covered] supplies and groceries and paid for me to get to New Mexico,” she recalls. “That was really it.”
Eight years later, following a pause for the COVID-19 pandemic, Dallagiacomo’s once-tiny DIY retreat has a year-round staff of three and invites close to fifty writers annually to its gatherings at a working farm in Mendocino County on California’s northern coast. As her costs have risen, so has tuition, which is $1,500 in 2025, but Dallagiacomo works to make the gathering accessible to writers who, like her, might feel excluded from more traditional conferences and retreats, offering scholarships for rural writers, Indigenous writers, trans or nonbinary writers of color, and writers without a college degree.
Gatherings like the Heart of It are in the vanguard of a boom in writer-run retreats and workshops that serve as scrappy alternatives to established organizations like Yaddo and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Some, like the Heart of It, grow out of tight-knit literary communities, while others piggyback on online writing classes taught by their founders. But to one degree or another, all benefit from the power of the internet to help fledgling writers find the mentors they think can bring their work to the next level. They also satisfy a post-pandemic hunger for community and in-person events. Such retreats can offer kinship that some writers say is difficult to find elsewhere.
“It can be a hard hill to climb when you’re workshopping your work with people who are not your ideal readers,” Dallagiacomo says. “So my hope is to have a workshop full of people’s ideal readers.”
Xiomarra Milann, a Chicana poet and high school English teacher from Laredo, Texas, says she quickly picked up on this spirit of inclusiveness when she attended the Heart of It in 2023. “At some writing conferences, there’s this competitiveness of, ‘Well, I’ve been published here,’ and ‘I’ve been published there,’ and, all right, cool, that’s good for you, but, you know, I just want to meet writers,” Milann says. “It’s lonely being a writer. This retreat was very welcoming, and it was just very honest, and it was nice to have that sense of community right off the bat.”
Like Dallagiacomo, novelist Courtney Maum started out with a funky, low-cost retreat for artists and writers, which, in her case, was called the Cabins. The retreat, set appropriately enough in a group of lakeside cabins near Maum’s Connecticut home, brought together a disparate collection of artists for four days to collaborate and teach one another. “One time we had a clown teaching movement arts,” Maum says. “We had a writer who taught pasta-making as world building. We had people teaching specific forms of dance. It was very gritty and DIY and amazing.”
She tried to keep costs as low as possible—she estimates that 70 percent of attendees paid nothing—which meant she spent eight months a year fund-raising and organized everything, including travel arrangements and food catering, herself. After eight years and a global pandemic, Maum shuttered the Cabins and launched a more traditional writing retreat called Turning Points. The new retreat, staged at a remote ranch two hours southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico, represents a sharp departure from the Cabins. Meals at the eight-day retreat are prepared by a private chef, and in addition to writing workshops and sessions on the business of publishing, attendees are treated to classes on butchering meat and ranch skills such as roping and dowsing. The cost for the next retreat in October is $4,600, which includes several private coaching sessions with Maum in the weeks leading up to the event.
At Turning Points, which draws many of its attendees from her online classes and coaching work, Maum says she set out to counter aspects of writing workshops she found misguided in her own experience both as a student and as a teacher of previous workshops. Rather than putting the focus on critiquing a single fifteen- or twenty-page writing sample, workshop sessions are designed to take in the entirety of the writer’s current project, including any nonliterary stumbling blocks like time management or lack of confidence.
“I want to follow the campsite rule and leave people in a better state than when they came to me,” she says. “That means, number one, truly boosted confidence, with an actual game plan for revision or the writing of the book and a true road map of solutions for whatever they’re dealing with.”
This approach appears to have paid off for Pennsylvania-based writer Elizabeth Austin, who attended the 2024 Turning Points retreat. Austin had taken some of Maum’s writing classes online and swears by Maum’s publishing industry primer, Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book (Catapult, 2020). She arrived at Turning Points hoping to find a new structure for a memoir she is working on and retool her query letter. Maum pointed her in the right direction on both, she says, but perhaps just as important, the retreat afforded Austin—a single mother whose daughter recently survived a three-year bout with leukemia—a rare chance to focus solely on her creative work for a week. “Women are so often saddled with so many responsibilities that we have to actively get away and carve out time for our work,” Austin says, “whereas my male friends who are writers really tend to be able to prioritize their work even when they have families, even when they have other responsibilities, and it’s never really questioned.”
This is a common theme in discussions with writers both attending and running retreats, which seem to attract an overwhelmingly female clientele. At the Red Clover Ranch Writing Retreat, founders Amy Shearn and Sarah McColl decided to take the next step and admit only women. “We didn’t start off that way, but then the first year, it did end up being all women,” recalls Shearn, author of Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). “A lot of the women there, we talked about it, and I remember one woman said, ‘Oh, if there were men here, it would have ruined it.’” Shearn notes that many women writers, particularly those raising children, feel guilty when they carve out time for their writing. “I think that it speaks to large systemic questions in our society about people’s relationships with nonpaying labor and creative work and their own ‘leisure time,’” she says. “I think that often women feel more starved for those things and also more eager to come together in community and just talk.”
This sense of guilt over the monetary value of their time, Shearn and McColl say, bleeds into how they feel about the money they earn from running the retreats themselves. Like the Heart of It and Turning Points, Red Clover is set at a remote ranch—in this case, the Driftless region of eastern Wisconsin. And it’s not inexpensive, with spots at the three-day retreat running between $1,700 and $2,100, depending on the level of accommodation attendees choose.
Shearn and McColl say roughly half the money they take in goes directly to the Red Clover Ranch, which provides room and board for the retreat, and they pay a local stargazing expert to hold a “star party” for attendees. On top of that the pair have to pay for their own travel and lodging, plus administrative and advertising expenses. In the end they estimate that between 20 and 30 percent of the fees come back to them as profit.
Shearn and McColl say they struggle with balancing their desire to provide a service to writers and their need to earn a living from their work. “I’ve tried very hard the past few years; I’ve been pricing my own services with my private clients and classes that I run to battle any impostor syndrome and the voice in my head that’s like, ‘Oh my God, who would pay that?’ Because I never have that much money to pay for any of these things,” Shearn says. “But I’m a single mom living in Brooklyn. I need to make it worth my time or I literally can’t afford to do it.”
Finances are even tighter for Dallagiacomo, who said that last year the Heart of It retreat brought in $55,000 while costing $53,000, leaving just $2,000 in profit for her. “I don’t know what I’ll get on the back end of this, but hopefully I can keep a little money in the account so that we can pay for things in the coming year, and maybe I’ll make some money,” she says. “But my priority is taking care of the people who are doing the work.”
Novelist Ron Tanner took a different route when he and his wife bought a historic farm in rural Maryland twenty-five miles northwest of Baltimore and decided to run it as a nonprofit, with a group of buildings on the property set aside as a writing retreat. Fees paid by the 120 writers who stayed at his Good Contrivance Farm retreat in the last year help pay for farm maintenance and for a slate of visiting writers who give craft talks and daylong writing workshops.
Nonprofit status comes with its own headaches, Tanner says, including setting up a board of directors that meets four times a year and filing highly detailed financial statements. “Financially we might have had an easier time had we made this a business instead of a nonprofit, because businesses get tax deductions and require far less governmental oversight,” he says. “The payoff is that you get street cred for doing good work, and most people look at your organization with appreciation.”
However the financing works, running a retreat or workshop outside of a large organization or university gives writers the freedom to conduct their programs the way they like and allows them to build on their platforms as writers and teachers. McColl, Shearn, and Maum write popular Substack newsletters and teach and coach writers online, all of which draws writers to their in-person retreats.
In this way, writer-run retreats are one more element in the ongoing atomization of the creative writing profession. As it grows increasingly difficult to find a tenure-track job in an MFA program and the odds of supporting oneself solely on royalties from literary fiction or memoir grow ever longer, writers are going out on their own, building followings based on the quality of their work and their reputations as teachers and writing coaches. At the same time, writers who are confronted with rising tuition costs and tightening time constraints are looking beyond the traditional MFA route and cobbling together their literary educations through online classes and independent writing retreats.
“Sarah and I have talked about this, how there’s just so much hustling in our lives,” Shearn says. “We’re publishing books. I can’t even count how many jobs I have. I teach many different places. I work with private clients. I am a freelance writer. I’m publishing a novel in 2025 with Putnam, and it’s still always a challenge every year to survive financially.”
Not all writers operating retreats approach them as labors of love. Seeing the demand for such events, a small number of writers have started events with ample zeal but less commitment to seeing through the logistics—or, rarely, an interest more in money to be made than in the experience of attendees. If you’re considering attending a writer-run retreat, take the time to research the gathering, and the person running it, before you commit. A retreat can be something of a logistical high-wire act, so look for writers who have run them successfully in the past, either on their own or with other writers. If possible take an online class with the writer before you sign up to ensure that you can benefit from how they teach and mentor writers, or speak to previous attendees about their experiences.
While many writer-run retreats are fairly new, and their founders are still tinkering with the format, some like Dallagiacomo are plotting ways to turn them into lasting institutions. In the years since she founded the Heart of It, Dallagiacomo has finished her college degree and is now a Helen Zell Fellow in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. But even as she’s attending classes and planning next summer’s retreat, she is also thinking how she can take the retreat model to the next level.
“My big dream—this is my like big secret dream—is to get a book deal that will be enough to be able to put a down payment on a property and then be able to have essentially a commune,” she says. “This would be a place for working-class writers to have a bit of a work exchange and just to have space. We have a lot of writers in our community who experience housing insecurity, and so being able to have a space for these writers is the big dream.”
Michael Bourne has been a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine since 2011. He is the author of the novels Blithedale Canyon (Regal House, 2022) and We Bring You an Hour of Darkness, which is forthcoming in October from DoppelHouse Press.
