about
Our second Kentucky retreat will happen July 15–24 at the Dwelling Place Monastery in Martin, KY. The Dwelling Place is an ecumenical community of Benedictine women located in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, on 20+ acres near the top of a wooded ridge, a lovely, quiet site with walking trails and a labyrinth to explore.
Each writer will have a small private bedroom, with shared bathrooms. We eat together in silence, and everyone has a few simple chores like cleaning up after meals. We will have a chef to keep us well fed, and food restrictions are accommodated. This retreat is fully funded; non-local writers are only responsible for travel between their homes and the Lexington KY airport.
The Stillwright retreats are intensives in which artists gather in silence and make a piece of work entirely from scratch. The retreats are structured by Erik Ehn, who leads the group in regular sessions of writing exercises that punctuate the days.
Unlike other retreats or residencies, this is very much geared toward the generation of new work; it doesn't work well for writers who want to revise an existing play, or even write a play they already have in mind. Some playwrights have come away from these retreats with plays they were later able to produce, others have left with work which interested them, but which they didn't want to put forward for a further life, and both groups have found the retreat equally valuable. The real goal of the retreat is to have a chance to work in a thoroughly absorbed and uninterrupted fashion and to perhaps work in a new and entirely idiosyncratic way. The silence is part of the challenge, and part of the unusual level of concentration the retreat creates.
More information about Dwelling Place at https://mtabor.com. For more of a sense of what it’s like to do a Stillwright retreat, here is the 2015 American Theatre magazine article about them.
Note: All participants will be required to adhere to whatever Covid safety protocols are required by the retreat site and by Stillwright organizers at the time.