JOURNEY TO JUPITER is a four-day, three-night writing retreat where a small group of participants with an existing project will work toward distilling their authentic authorial voice, recognizing and deepening the themes and preoccupations of their work, and coming to a greater understanding of how to create narrative that transcends familiar tropes and techniques and goes into the realm beyond. This communal experience will allow each writer to tackle their greatest creative challenges in a supportive group environment.

The Journey to Jupiter Workshop will assemble a group of committed writers working in all genres who are willing to keep grappling with the hard stuff, to support and bond with other writers, and to deepen their understanding of themselves and the stories they are trying to tell.

What we’re offering is a chance to go to Jupiter together–to go farther and faster than you ever have before. In our time together, you will develop skills that allow you to access deeper authenticity on the page, get clearer on your voice, and better execute the story you urgently want to tell.

At this year's retreat there will be group discussions, and craft exercises for writers to do alone or in small groups. These activities are aimed at exploring the creative process, accessing our personal vulnerabilities, strengthening our story telling habits and helping writers find their own authentic voice. Together we’ll interrogate our characters, buttress story arcs, troubleshoot lumpy middles, sharpen protagonists, shine a flashlight on elusive endings, and tackle other challenges that keep us writers up at night.

This experience is not designed as a traditional workshop with discussion of exchanged pages. Instead, we will map our journeys through the solar system by exploring the paths taken by others before us. We will use a few curated selections; a novel as well as some essays and short stories and perhaps more – to trace some author’s trajectories across the stars and examine how their choices might inform ours. Writers will spend much of their time on Jupiter working on writing adjacent exercises built to inform drafting and / or revision and will leave with a toolkit designed to support them after we’ve returned to Earth.

We welcome to the Jupiter crew writers working in a wide variety of genres and narrative approaches including novels, memoirs, short story collections, novellas, and other shapes and sizes of longform. We are less interested in the type of book you're working on and very much interested in your commitment to thoughtful, authentic storytelling. We expect the work of the Jupiter crew will represent a wide variety of genres and narrative approaches.

This retreat is driven by our deep need to acknowledge the audacity of writing as both art and profession. Words on the page can elicit emotion, spark ideas, and inspire action, and we are driven toward these goals by a deep humility, working hard to find the words that cut through the noise and connect with another human being.

We are also driven by a deep urgency to spread joy. By joy, we don’t mean the sugary sweetness of laughter and frolic. We mean the joy of community and connection. The joy of going deep with our writing. The joy of believing in ourselves and each other, in survival in the face of chaos, in achievement in the face of obstacles. Going to Jupiter together will be a journey marked by the joy of overcoming fear and seeing into the unknown. The work you do there and the discoveries you make will stay with you long after the retreat ends and we part ways. Jupiter is in the night sky even when you can’t see it. Sometimes you have to reach for it in the dark.

Are you ready for a journey that will take you and your writing farther than ever before? Are you ready to explore outer space with a community of like-minded people who have got your back?

APPLY NOW!