Dear Reader,

I'm so excited to be teaching my first in-person writing retreat in a long time...and this is going to be a really special one!

I speak from experience when I say that group retreats, like this one, can be truly transformative.

Several years ago, I was feeling I'd hit a plateau; I wasn't sure what was next—

I cleared my schedule and set up a solitary writing retreat—but not much happened.

Then, I went away with some friends to a group writing retreat, and something magical happened: I had a real turning point in the project I was working on and new insights into myself and my direction forward.

Sometimes, when we're in the company of other people, we're able to get out of our own way and dive deeper. When we have supports, community, and guided practices, we're able to let go enough so that our true vision can shine through.

I'm deeply honored to facilitate a Five Day Writing Retreat of magic and unexpected breakthroughs with my dear friend, the wonderful poet and teacher, Holly Wren Spaulding, at Omega Institute in beautiful Rhinebeck, New York, this fall.

The retreat, Finding Joy through Writing Poetry in Challenging Times, will be an extended period to focus on your creative vision.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the world around us and to lose our way.

We'll use poetry as a guide, but you can write in any genre.

You don't need to be working on a writing project—you don't need to even think of yourself as a writer. All you need is a desire to explore.

We'll move together, meditate, and write. You'll generate new work and connect with community.

We'll be inspired by the natural world around us, and there will be plenty of time and space for reflection and the transformative power of joy—whether you're in a period of loss and mourning or a period of celebration, we'll tap into wonder with a gentle spaciousness.

This is the ONLY in-person retreat I'll be leading in 2024, and I really do mean it when I say that something special happens when we come together in person like this :).

Omega is a beautiful center with trails, lovely single-person rooms, delicious food, yoga classes, and more. It's a place that thinks deeply about impact, community, the environment, and I'm truly honored to be teaching there, where so many teachers I admire often teach.

The week is designed to leave you feeling energized, with a greater sense of direction.

​Sign up here and learn more below! It would be so much fun to work with you in person!

Don't hesitate to reach out to me with any questions. Just hit "reply" to this email. :)

with love,
Nadia

Visionary Writing:
Finding Joy through Writing Poetry
in Challenging Times

Five Day In-Person Writing Retreat (Sep. 29-Oct. 4): An Overview

From personal crises, such as illness and loss, to the global climate crisis, threats to democracy, and war, we exist in a suffering world.

This poetry workshop will give you creative tools to meet your life with greater openness, to embrace both pain and joy, and to find your own powerful voice amidst it all. Come immerse yourself in the restorative power of poetry.

Nadia Colburn and Holly Wren Spaulding, two beloved teachers and acclaimed poets, together have more than 40 years of experience as writers, meditators, and activists.

We’ll guide participants in close readings of work by poets such as Joy Harjo, Rainer Maria Rilke, Audre Lorde, and Mary Oliver to fill our creative well with rich language.

We’ll share our own work and inside tips from lives in writing.

And we’ll offer prompts paired with improvisation, meditation, and embodied practices, including yoga and movement, so that you create not only from the head, but from a place of integration and insight.

The majority of our time together will be spent in interactive activities: in meditation, gentle movement, writing, sharing, and discussion. Together, we will enjoy the connection, presence, consolation, and healing powers of poetry.

The workshop is appropriate for all levels.

Poets, secret poets, memoir writers, personal essayists, therapists, healers, activists, earth-workers, and teachers will be at home in this retreat.

Go home with greater awareness, deeper understanding, new skills and techniques as a writer, and a revitalized sense of creativity and agency that you can incorporate into your personal practice or share with students and clients.

Students will learn about...

• The psycho-spiritual-emotional benefits of writing as a contemplative practice.
• The transformative power of writing about and through our experience of being alive at this time, both in your unique life and in human history.
• Techniques to come out of overwhelm and channel experience, emotion and vision onto the page.
• How our private vulnerabilities, traumas, and questions can enrich our creative work, creating connections with others.
• Creative conversations and community as an antidote to isolation, loneliness, and climate anxiety.
• How movement can help us relax and find our center and strength.
• How writing poetry cultivates mindfulness, presence, and greater engagement.
• The therapeutic value of listening deeply.
• How a writing practice revives our mind, senses, and agency.

Students will bring home...

• Re-found passion for writing and their own voice and vision.
• Creative writing techniques: how to begin, how to keep going, and what to do with early drafts to make them more impactful.
• Deeper understanding of the mental and physiological benefits of a writing practice.
• Techniques for entering the creative trance and encouraging flow.
• The felt-experience of deep relaxation and creative flow.
• Multiple pieces of new writing.
• Access to Nadia’s teaching library (free videos, meditations, prompts and more)
• Invitation to join Holly’s Casual Union of Working Poets for ongoing creative community and support.

This retreat is for....

• All levels, backgrounds, experiences...
• Poets, secret poets, memoir writers, personal essayists, therapists, healers, activists, earth-workers, and teachers will be at home in this retreat. :)

Participants learn through...

• Hands-on experience
• Group discussion
• Free-writing
• Brief lectures

More than half of our time together will be experiential!

Course materials

• Readings will be provided by the instructors.
• Students only need to bring notebooks and writing utensils.
• We will encourage students to leave their devices outside the classroom in favor of an analog experience.

Instructors

• Nadia Colburn, PhD, is the founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Align Your Story has a community of over 30,000 mindful writers. Nadia is also the author of the poetry books The High Shelf and I Say the Sky, and her work appears in the anthology Anatomy of Silence: All the Sh**t That Gets in the Way of Speaking About Sexual Violence. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books, Lion’s Roar, Spirituality & Health, The Sun, and Boston Globe Magazine. Nadia holds a PhD from Columbia University, a BA from Harvard and has taught literature and creative writing at MIT, Lesley, Stonehill College, Grub Street and Northeastern, where she is the current Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service. Nadia has offered lectures and retreats at many places including Harvard Divinity School, Copper Beech Institute, and Mass Poetry Festival. She lives in Cambridge, MA, with her husband and two children.
  ​
• Holly Wren Spaulding is an award-winning writer, teaching artist, and the founder of Poetry Forge, who has guided creative retreats at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Healing, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Beargrass Writer's Retreat, and elsewhere. In addition to teaching creative writing since 1996, she has facilitated workshops and trainings for grassroots activists and community organizers on the topics of nonviolence, consensus decision making, creative resistance, and direct action. In 2003, the organization she co-founded, Sweetwater Alliance, was honored with an Environmentalist of the Year award from N.M.E.A.C. In 2023 Holly was among the guest experts featured in Lisa Weinert’s Narrative Healing hybrid course at Omega. Her many publications include the books Familiars: Poems and If August, published by Alice Greene & Co., as well as numerous chapbooks, essays, articles, and interviews. ​
  ​​