Since 2017
Past: April 23-29, 2017; April 22-28, 2018; April 21-27, 2019; April 24-30, 2022
Upcoming: April 23-29, 2023
Host: Jordan Hartt
Location: Aina Nalu; Lahaina, Maui

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

The last full week of each April, we hold the Maui Writers’ Retreat: a week of generative writing time, workshop time, and private retreat time.

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. Our goal is to complete one new written work of 1,000 words or fewer. And, each participant gets an hour-long workshop on their newly drafted piece.

[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

You’ll leave with one new written and workshopped piece ready for advanced revision or submission, with new community and memories, and with new inspiration in the writing life.

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

 

Daily Schedule

Sunday
4 pm-onward: arrivals, getting settled
Monday
10 am-noon: craft discussion and generative-writing session based on the work of Virginia Woolf
Tuesday
10 am-noon: craft discussion and generative-writing session based on the work of James Joyce
7 pm to 8 pm: evening freewrite
Wednesday
Writing day
Thursday
Writing day
Friday
10 am-noon: workshop sessions
Saturday
Departure by 10 am