November 3 - 7, 2022

Retreat to a writer’s sanctuary, a safe space with experienced teachers and helping professionals to explore and tell your story about violence against women and girls. 

Trauma-informed. Big-hearted. Not afraid of the tough stuff.

The core of our five-day retreat emphasizes the roots of all creative writing: planting the seeds of a successful project, cultivating the mindset and habits to stay engaged over the long term, and growing a supportive environment to ensure that our work bears fruit. 

All writers are welcome.

In this retreat you will receive:

• Lectures from faculty to address the unique challenges of writing for a young audience about violence against women and girls (VAWG), particularly on how to do so with integrity and compassion for yourself, your subject matter and your readers. Topics include:

  
  

  • Exploitation vs Excavation: How to share personal and fictional accounts in order to help end VAWG and avoiding using VAWG as merely a plot point

  • Literary Analysis and Review of current and canon work on the topic: what works, what doesn’t

  • How to support your mental health when triggered by your WIP

  • Building a speaker’s platform to discuss difficult topics with young people

  
  

• Generative writing workshops to develop fresh material, as well as exploratory work to go deeper with your current work-in-progress

  
  

• Small group work and 1:1 meetings with group leaders to offer insight for your story, process, and writer wellness

  
  

• Meditation techniques to support working with difficult emotional material

  
  

• Fireside chats to go deeper with the day’s work and topics

  
  

• Access to career professionals with insight into navigating the waters of writing, publishing, writer mental health, and working with difficult story material 

  
  

• Extensive prep materials and reading list to support your work, including mental health resources

  
  

• Community with other women working on similarly challenging material

This retreat is focused on three core areas of writing about VAWG for a young audience:

Integrity and Empathic Storytelling

How do you write about the difficult topic of violence against women and girls for young readers so that they are informed, but not traumatized (or re-traumatized)? What are best practices for this kind of work? .Through our required & recommended reading list, pre-workshop explorations, and in-retreat workshops and lectures, we’ll be exploring how to approach this topic with integrity and empathy so that our stories create a safe space on the page for young people to learn about this topic, heal if they themselves are victims, and open up opportunities with peers and adults to talk about what your work brings up for them. 

Topics include: 

• Do’s and Don’ts of writing scenes that include rape, sexual assault, and other forms of physical, emotional, and verbal violence against women and girls

  
  

• Moving beyond stereotypes of rape culture – what will your story add to the conversation?

  
  

• Toxic Masculinity, Truth Telling, and Whose Story Is It? 

  
  

• Effective ways to approach challenging topics in ways that do not traumatize or re-traumatize readers

Writer Wellness

Writing a book about VAWG can be extremely painful for writers, especially if they themselves are survivors or are close to someone who has been a victim. A large part of this retreat is focused on how you can move through working on your project in a way that is healthy and safe.

Our faculty includes a certified meditation teacher with a special certificate in Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness and a mental health professional with a decade of experience in both the mental health and publishing worlds.

We will also be joined by the founder of Rebecca Dykes Writers, Jane Houng, who began this program in memory of her daughter, Rebecca Dykes, who was raped and murdered by a taxi driver. Jane will be on hand to share her story with us and what she has learned along the way about grief, the ripple effect of violence, taking care of oneself, telling difficult stories, and how our work can help end violence against women and girls. She is the author of several books, most recently a picture book about genocide that gently introduces this tough material to children or acts as a healing space for children who have suffered severe trauma as a result of displacement due to conflict.

We’ll also be adding a middle-grade author to our team with an expertise in writing difficult material for elementary school children.

Wellness support includes:

• Daily meditation and mindfulness sessions

• Opportunities to work 1:1 with our mental health and mindfulness professionals

• Exploratory writing to support what is coming up for you both in this retreat and your WIP

• Tools, resources, and support for writer wellness

• A trauma-informed approach that holds space and enables you to always remain in choice - you know what’s best for you and we are here to support

On-Site Assets

A retreat is not a vacation. It’s an entire life re-set.

Give your creativity the refresh it needs to grow wildly by enjoying the autumn colors amid the hills of Pennsylvania and food prepared by a top-flight chef. Every garden needs to be watered. Retreating from the cares, responsibilities, and demands of everyday life is a reboot that sets us up to more skillfully balance our creative pursuits with the rest of our lives, allowing for more integration when we return home. Time spent away from your routine amidst your sister writers as you concentrate on your creativity will yield a bounty of increased focus, insight, and productivity. This soil is ripe for Eurekas! A retreat is a gift you give yourself, and will leave you with reserves of energy and patience for the important things in your life, so you can write and adult. One-on-one access to workshop leaders ensures that you’ll return home with a plan for how to take the proper next steps on your creative journey. 

It’s even more important to retreat and receive support when you’re working on incredibly difficult material. The strategies and modalities you will learn here to support your WIP and your writer wellness will serve you long after our retreat is over. 

Tuition & Retreat Center Costs

We want this retreat to be as accessible as possible.

In addition to the Rebecca Dykes Writers scholarship, Highlights is offering a matching scholarship - this includes tuition and travel costs.

Highlights also offers affordable payment plans and has a host of other in-house scholarship opportunities.