"What a week to be treasured! I keep telling people it feels like I crammed a year's worth of graduate school in a week in the Dordogne. In a castle. In the most beautiful month of the year." Lucy Price

Writing Workshops

Participants will attend two writing workshops. Our Award winning instructors will vary from year to year; however, we will have workshops in fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry and screen writing. Workshops are designed to assist writers in the craft and the business of writing. Each workshop consists of 12 - 14 participants. All participants--except beginners--must submit their manuscript 60 days prior to departure. Your work should be either a prose work of no more than 25 pages, a short story perhaps, or a chapter from a novel, memoir, or play no longer than 20 -25 pages (instructors set the page limits), a group of poems--no more than eight--, or screenplay.

You'll be in workshops, three hours a day for five days. In each session, in addition to discussing specific elements of craft, the group discusses two, sometimes three, participant manuscripts. During the course of the week, one manuscript by each participant is critiqued. To ensure that each piece of writing receives concentrated attention, there will be no more than 14 writers in the group. Each piece of writing will be read by all participants, with the aim of providing constructive, critical feedback and engaging in supportive dialogue with its author.

Master workshop with Robert Olen Butler
	You will be given an assignment before you leave, this assignment is crucial. First you must read Robert Olen Butler's book, "From Where You Dream", so you'll be able to get the most out of your workshop. Having read the book prior to arrival will free the class to a rigorous and very productive week. Every night you will be assigned to write a two page exercise.

Russell Celyn Jones

This will be a fiction only workshop. Students will bring at the beginning of the week either a couple of short stories or a section of a novel of no more than 10,000 words in total. This will form the body of students' submissions throughout the whole week. The class, led by the tutor, will offer constructive criticism and advice to each student on a rota basis, and they will be expected to revise in their own time their work and produce the revisions for later workshops. By the end of the week each student should have had two sessions at least devoted to their writing in class, and one tutorial with the tutor and gained some sense of development in their writing."

Participants reading a play.

"I feel very, very blessed to have had an opportunity to work with Rebecca Walker. After the first day of the workshop I turned to my oneof my peers and said, "I think my life as a writer will change after this week's workshop." She responded, "I think mine already has." I'm not trying to be melodramatic, but Rebecca set a tone during the week that allowed us to reveal our depths as memoirists. She taught us toconsider the "I" in the piece--to consider how we as writers relate tothe people, places and situations we write about. We discussed technique and craft as it applied to our work. She led us in writing exercises that illuminated our workshop pieces and provided new ideas for future work. I feel like I take myself and the material I amworking on much more seriously after a week in her workshop." --Beth Newberry

Dorothy Allison instructing a writing workshop.