Pack your poetry suitcase and get ready to travel around the corner, across the ocean, to your backyard, or to your past and future. We’ll focus on generating poems from physical landscapes, as well as the inner landscapes of memory, imagination, and belief. During generative morning and (shorter) evening workshops, we’ll draft, revise, and discuss poems in a supportive community. Afternoons are reserved for rest, contemplation, writing, and exploring the beautiful Bethany Retreat Center grounds. Arrive Thursday evening by 5:00pm ready to engage, experiment, write, laugh. Leave Sunday morning by 11:00am with new ideas and strategies for future poems.

Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 14 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (Paraclete, International Book Award and Illumination Book Award Winner); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (with her artist daughter Anna Lee Hafer—www.hafer.work—and other artists). In addition, she has published the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist International Book Awards), A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry; I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book), and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems. Forthcoming in 2024 are the books How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay Books) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse Publishers). She is co-editor with Jerry Wemple of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press). Finally, she is assistant editor of Presence and the 2023-2024 host of WPSU’s Poetry Moment. Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com

3:00pm to 5:00pm

arrival and registration

5:30pm

dinner

7:00pm to 8:30pm

evening gathering and initial workshop at house conference room

8:30am

breakfast and conversation

9:15am to noon

morning discussion, exercises, and workshop at house conference room

12:30pm

lunch and conversation

1:30pm to 5:30pm

free time for writing, contemplation, rest, and/or exploring the grounds

5:30pm

dinner

7:00pm to 8:00pm

evening writing exercises and workshop at house conference room

 8:30am

breakfast and conversation

9:15am to noon

morning discussion, exercises, and workshop at house conference room

12:30pm

lunch and conversation

1:30pm to 5:30pm

free time for writing, contemplation, rest, and/or exploring the grounds

5:30pm

dinner

7:00pm to 8:00pm

class poetry reading around the campfire

8:30am

breakfast and conversation

10:30am

optional Mass St. Agnes, Morrisdale. 

Those wishing to participate would need to leave by 10am.

11:00am

clean up and departure.