2026 Weekend Writers’ Retreat with A Public Space

This year's retreat will be held Thursday, October 8, 2026 - Sunday, October 11, 2026 at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, featuring an expanded number of instructors and on-site accommodations. 

In the morning, join workshops with authors Jo Ann Beard, Mary-Beth Hughes, Tracy O'Neill, Han Ong, Robert Sullivan, Peter Trachtenberg, and Ada Zhang, with opportunities to engage in generative exercises. Enrollment will be capped at 8 participants per workshop. In the afternoons, attend literary salons hosted by Samantha Hunt and Amitava Kumar, a movement class by Sondra Loring, a site-specific talk, and more. The weekend culminates with a celebratory dinner on Saturday catered by Tables of Contents. 

Kaatsbaan Cultural Park—long a creative home and retreat for dancers, choreographers, performers, and composers—is located in Tivoli, New York, in the Hudson Valley, about two hours from New York City and one hour from Albany. 

APPLY HERE

DATES
Thursday, October 8 - Sunday, October 11
in person

LOCATION
Kaatsbaan Cultural Park
120 Broadway
Tivoli, NY 12583

COST
includes cost of attendance and all meals 

• Early Registration (June 2 – July 2): $875
• Regular Registration (July 3 - August 15): $975
• Late Registration (after August 15): $1,125

HOUSING
Retreat participants have the option of staying on-site at Kaatsbaan (Dancers' Inn and Gatehouse Apartments) or the Suminski Innski, located a 5-minute walk from the retreat. Dancers’ Inn provides motel-style accommodations, bucolic views, and private baths. The two-bedroom Gatehouse Apartments provide private kitchens, baths, and lounge areas. Suminski Innski is a bed and breakfast, overlooking the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains.   

On-site housing is offered on a first-come, first-served basis and while supplies last.

• Bedroom w/ Private Bathroom: +$600
• Bedroom w/ Shared Bathroom: +$475

Registrants who live locally or wish to arrange their own accommodations will also be able to indicate their preferences on the application.

APPLICATION

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. There is no fee to apply. Applicants must be 21 years of age by October 10, 2026. Capacity is limited, and applying early is recommended. Apply here.

You will be asked to submit:

• A work sample of five (5) to ten (10) pages. Please note that these are generative workshops; your work sample gives us a sense of your interests.
• A cover letter (not more than two (2) pages) that includes a bio, brief artist's statement, and your writing goals for the retreat.

Note that only PDF or Word files (.doc and .docx) are accepted. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

Applicants will be notified about their acceptance within two weeks. The acceptance will include your assigned morning workshop and housing. Participants will not be charged until acceptance.  

Questions? Write [email protected].

CANCELLATION POLICY

A full refund (less $100 for administrative fees) will be processed for cancellations before August 15.

A 50% refund will be processed for cancellations before September 1.

There is no refund for cancellations after September 15.

RETREAT SCHEDULE

MORNING WORKSHOPS

Jo Ann Beard | Interpreting Memory
In this workshop, we will focus on personal history narratives to discover what makes a compelling memoir. This will require both self-discovery and discovery of something outside the self. We’ll practice the art of thinking and of self-examination—both involving silence and separation from distraction, and the ongoing work of developing a relationship with one’s own intellect, and one’s own past. We’ll work on fluency through a series of in-class writings, and learn to apply keen editing skills to our own sentences and paragraphs.

Mary-Beth Hughes | Duets
This generative workshop is an invitation to explore characters in action as they connect with each other on the page. And to ask how these connections may shape a wider narrative as characters move toward each other, away, sideways, and sometimes backwards. These narrative duets might be fun for writers with projects long underway, curious to see well-known characters try something quite new. But also useful for writers with characters floating in imagination, that seem meant to be together but haven’t yet revealed just how? From near standstill to highest velocity, we’ll set characters in motion and often interrupt that motion by chance. Here is Merce Cunningham, dancer and choreographer, as inspiration and guide: “You do not separate the human from the actions…but you can see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways, to allow passion, and it is passion, to appear for each person in his own way.”

Tracy O'Neill | Propulsive Technique: Metaphor as an Engine for Plotting, Voice, and Character
The great Neil Postman declared, "A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception.Through metaphors, we see the world." A fecund metaphor recasts a grand societal pitfall, turns the reader's attention to a particular quality in a setting, or creates a startling image. Yet it can also serve as an engine for the work of the writer, attempting to see the world of the narrative yet to be written. In this workshop, we will not simply explore producing apt metaphors but dynamic ones that can help the writer to map and propel a narrative or essay. How can metaphor create plot pathways in the mind of the author? Define the voice of the project? Develop characters? How can metaphor seed possibilities for the writer while maintaining a sense of form and cohesion?

Han Ong — NEW
More details to follow.

Robert Sullivan | Reading and Writing Landscapes
We’ll use maps and drawings to consider how we picture ourselves in places and how places help us see where we are. The session will be a chance to unpack our awareness of where we are and maybe momentarily re-wire how we perceive places. We’ll read poems, prose fragments, and almanacs that touch New York Harbor (Nancy Holt, Joseph Mitchell and Diane Burns) and the Hudson River Valley (Washington Irving, Robert Boyle), and we’ll make a short survey of Tivoli—no survey preparation required, no previous survey experience necessary—in order to jump start our own re-surveys of the places we see everyday. For the last session, we’ll discuss a novella about summer.

Peter Trachtenberg | Who Do You Think You Are?: Creating the Narrator
In almost all memoir and personal essay and in much fiction, as well, one has a distinct sense of a person speaking from the page, maybe from beyond the page. Hence the recognition and even identification readers feel in relation to writers as different as Joan Didion and Annie Ernaux, David Sedaris and Samantha Irby, Eileen Myles and Hua Hsu. This workshop is dedicated to crafting the character called the Narrator, who comes into being as soon as a writer types the word I but nevertheless is not I, and not you, either—not quite. We’ll experiment with voice, chronology, memory, invention, and association and explore the moving line between revelation and oversharing, reticence and evasiveness.

Ada Zhang | Making Old Into New
It’s been said before that cliches are the compost of truth. To follow the metaphor to the end, that would mean that what’s been tried before can be put back into the ground and tried again, becoming the sustenance for new truths to flourish. For the ambitious writer, this requires risking unoriginality, cliché, sentimentality, and all manner of bad writing in order to break fresh ground.

In this workshop we will participate in the tradition of homage, looking at beloved stories from the past to create new work. The novelist Margot Livesey, in a craft essay from her book The Hidden Machinery, conceives of homage as a kind of “close borrowing [that] has been with us for centuries, perhaps as long as people have been making art.” We will use the framework from her essay to guide our inquiries, generating writing that is original not despite its origins but because of them.

LITERARY TALKS, CLASSES, AND MORE 

Samantha Hunt | Chalk Outline: Sinkholes in W.G. Sebald 
A close reading of W.G. Sebald's "Dr Henry Selwyn" (Chapter 1, The Emigrants) will unbury the soft places where memory is a destroyer as we uncover writing that hides cavities, decay, veneers, deceptive panels, wormholes and secret tunnels of connection with the dead.

Amitava Kumar | Naipaul Writing School
About twenty-five years ago, in a newspaper office in Delhi, I found pasted on a wall the "Rules for Beginners" that V.S. Naipaul had provided the young journalists working there. The rules were useful; I used them myself. But I have ever since wondered, and worked at compiling, what I think of as Naipaul's "Rules for Practitioners." I would like to share those rules with you.

Sondra Loring | Wild Mind in Motion
Writers know the wild mind: that uncensored, associative, endlessly generative place that the best writing comes from. This session takes it off the page and into the body. Through guided movement, somatic awareness, and open-ended improvisation, we'll explore how sensation, breath, and physical play can unlock creative states and dissolve the blocks that sit between you and your truest expression. No movement experience needed — come exactly as you are.