If you're feeling stuck in your writing process, stalled on your fiction or memoir project, hungry for creative community, or just ready for a revitalizing break, please join us October 6-9, 2023 for the Red Clover Ranch Writing Retreat. 

This 3-night retreat includes locally sourced farm-to-table meals and cabin accommodations at the Red Clover Ranch in the Driftless region of Wisconsin where the conditions for clarity, quiet, and awe are part of the natural landscape. This retreat is open to writers of all genres and all levels who are looking to connect (or reconnect) with their creativity. Workshops will be generative, and you can use the time to add to something you're already writing, or to create something brand new.

Participants can take part in two generative writing workshops, one led by memoirist Sarah McColl and one led by novelist Amy Shearn. There will be open time to go deep into your own writing, explore the two mile-long trails at the Ranch, sweat it out in the sauna, or just stare off into space. On our last night, all writers will be invited to share their work at an open mic. Writers can also choose to have a 1:1 consultation with Sarah or Amy if they’d like another set of eyes on their work.

A long weekend can be deeply restorative and inspiring, while also fitting within the realities of life. We hope this opportunity is a good fit for parents, working writers, or anyone else with a complicated schedule. The focus will be on connecting to that vital force that is creativity, and coming away feeling reenergized and whole. 

REFUND POLICY: 

We can offer you a full refund until September 1. 

Eating well is a way of life at Red Clover Ranch. You will be welcomed to the ranch with a cocktail (low- and no-ABV options available). At breakfast and lunch, writers have the option to sneak off with their meal to read, write, or have a solo picnic in the wild apple orchard. (We get it. Writers need alone time.) In the evenings, we’ll dine communally on Chef Dani Lind’s seasonally inspired meals, largely sourced from surrounding farms. 

Home to organic farms, artists, musicians, and other makers, the Driftless is a unique and bewitching place. Bypassed by the last glacier that flattened other areas of the upper Midwest, the region offers a dramatic ancient landscape of craggy rock faces, narrow valleys, steep hills, and forested ridges. It’s a place to embrace quiet, take deep breaths, and watch the fog lift. The  land is the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi nations.

The nearest airports are Madison and La Crosse, Wisconsin. You can also fly in and drive from Minneapolis-St. Paul or Chicago, both about 3.5 hours away.

Sarah and Amy are both working writers, teachers, and mothers, who know just how restorative it can be when writers get together to reactivate their creative powers. 

Sarah McColl is the author of the debut memoir, Joy Enough (Liveright Publishing/Norton, 2019). She also writes Lost Art, a monthly newsletter about the creative work of (mostly) dead women.

Her essays have appeared in Paris Review, McSweeney's, StoryQuarterly, Departures and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, where she was named the 2017 Mary Carswell Fellow, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Wrangell Mountains Center, and a Pushcart Prize nominee for her essay on singer-songwriter Connie Converse.

Before receiving her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, Sarah was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. Her food writing has been featured in print and online for Bon Appétit, House Beautiful, The Guardian, Food52, Modern Farmer, Extra Crispy and others. 

Sarah has facilitated creative writing workshops at Sarah Lawrence College, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, Catapult, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, her own independently run workshops for writers who are mothers, and for many young writer programs including the University of Virginia, Brooklyn Friends School, and Wordstruck. She lives with her family in Northern California and fell in love with the Midwest as a college student in Minnesota.

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City (Red Hen Press, 2020), The Mermaid of Brooklyn (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2013), and How Far Is the Ocean From Here (Shaye Areheart/Crown, 2008). Her next novel, Dear Edna Sloane, comes out in 2023 from Red Hen Press.

She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers’ Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, the Yale Writers' Workshop, and the Writing Co-Lab, which she helped found.

Amy's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. Amy received a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and has been awarded residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Unruly Retreat, and The Cabins. She has also hosted and curated many literary events in New York City, including a reading series called Lit at Lark and an author talk series, Bookish, at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. She is originally from the Chicago area.

Sarah and Amy first met in a windowless Conde Nast editorial office in 2009, when Sarah told Amy she was the cutest pregnant lady, and Amy was totally starstruck because she’d been a faithful reader of Sarah’s lifestyle blog for years. They’ve been meaning to work on something cool together ever since.