2018 Retreat Summary Page
2018 Writers Retreat
Designed to encourage reflection and creativity, the 2018 Delaware Writers Retreat provided writers with a collaborative atmosphere to write, revise, and recharge. It was a meaningful opportunity to make progress on their work while drawing inspiration from a community of peers.
More About the Retreat
Twenty-two writers from around the state attended the Division’s 2018 Delaware Seashore Poets and Prose Writers Retreat. In addition to giving writers time to write, the Retreat featured guest instructors Sandra Beasley and Leslie Pietrzyk who led workshops and gave craft talks.
A collection of poetry and prose written by the 2018 Delaware Seashore Poets and Prose Writers Retreat attendees is currently being edited by Billie Travalini and John Newlin.
Here’s what some of the writers said of the experience…
“I was able to work with diverse participants, obtain really constructive feedback on my work and learn new frameworks for improving my skills.”
“I loved the retreat, sharing work with other writers and having that time to immerse myself in my work. I wrote for hours and hours, happily.”
“I came home feeling uplifted, like I’d accomplished something important and new in my own writing and I felt very connected to the other writers and think this will be a lasting thing as we meet again during the coming year at readings, workshops, etc.”
The 2018 anthology, Rooster in the Henhouse, is for sale on Amazon.
2018 Workshop Leaders
Sandra Beasley
Poetry Facilitator
Sandra Beasley is the author of Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. In fall 2018, the University of Georgia Press will publish her anthology Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She is also the author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir and cultural history of food allergy. Her prose has appeared in such venues as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Oxford American.
Honors for Beasley’s work include a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize; distinguished writer residencies at Wichita State University, Cornell College, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and the University of Mississippi; three DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowships; and residency stays including the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Jentel Artist Residency, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches as part of the University of Tampa’s low-residency MFA program.
Leslie Pietrzyk
Prose Facilitator
Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of Silver Girl, released in February by Unnamed Press, and called “profound, mesmerizing, and disturbing” in a Publishers Weekly starred review. Her collection of unconventionally linked short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous novels are Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Short fiction and essays have appeared/are forthcoming in Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, The Sun, Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Iowa Review, The Collagist, and Cincinnati Review. Pietrzyk is a member of the core fiction faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA program. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia. www.lesliepietrzyk.com @lesliepwriter