Since 2014
Past: May 11-17, 2014; May 3-9, 2015; May 22-28, 2016; May 14-20, 2017; May 20-26, 2018; May 19-25, 2019; May 23-29, 2021
Upcoming: May 15-21, 2022 (full); May 22-28, 2022 (full)
Hosts: Wairimu Mwangi, Ananya Sarkar, and Jordan Hartt
Location: Tahiti Village; Las Vegas, Nevada
The Retreat
Very short fictions are nearly always experimental, exquisitely calibrated, reminiscent of Frost’s definition of a poem—a structure of words that consumes itself as it unfolds, like ice melting on a stove. ~Joyce Carol Oates
Write new short work as part of the Desert Writers’ Retreat, which happens twice each May, in back to back weeks.
[W]here the poem and story meet. Maybe brevity—on sight—alerts a reader’s expectancy […] But the form costs—it sacrifices most of itself. Experience borders perilously on nothing. ~H.E. Francis
Whether you’re writing fiction, poetry, nonfiction, cross-genre, or un-genre work, short work is one of the most technically involved forms in our literature. To that end, we spend a week studying and writing the form.
A really good short-short, whatever else it may be, is a story we can’t help reading fast, and then re-reading, and again, but no matter how many times we read it, we’re not quite through it yet. ~John L’Heureux
You’ll leave the retreat with new written work ready for advanced revision or submission, with new community and memories, and with new inspiration in the writing life.
The shorter the story, the more writer and reader have to depend on hard moments of discovery, flashes of illumination that provide, in their suggestiveness and aptness, what other writers struggle for pages to make clear. ~C. Michael Curtis
Daily Schedule
Monday
10 am-noon: generative writing based on the work of Sandra Cisneros.
Tuesday
10 am-noon: generative writing based on the work of Gabriel García Márquez.
Wednesday
Free day.
Thursday
10 am-noon: generative writing based on the work of Toni Morrison.
Friday
10 am-noon: generative writing based on the work of David Lee.
Saturday
Departure by 10 am.