Why attend a travel writing retreat?

Retreats do several things very well. First, they give us permission to be slow. Instead of stealing an hour between jobs and appointments, we are allotted tidy blocks of time to try, sometimes fail, and try again.

That’s when the odd, stubborn, creative sentences arrive. The ones we couldn’t have written if we were rushed.

Second, being in a place that asks us to look, really look, sharpens our senses. We notice the small shop windows with jars of salted lemons and crocheted blue booties, the fishermen mending their nets in conversation with their sons, the women donning aprons and straw hats as they hang out washing in the bright Algarve sunlight. These details are the currency of travel writing.

Our retreat near Tavira, May 18–21, will remind us that travel writing is not just a solo confession or an opportunity to develop a pretty description. It’s a conversation. We will learn to listen to guides and market sellers, to strangers on trains, to fellow writers at lunch and then to translate what we’ve heard without flattening it into clichés. Retreat sessions are where we learn restraint: when to linger and when to move on, when to withhold and when to let everything spill in prose and narrative.

What a retreat gives you is practice, perspective, and a community. A good facilitator will say, gently but bluntly, “This feels like background noise. What’s the one element or image here that matters?”

Come with a plan and curiosity. Bring unfinished drafts or develop a scene, and come with an openness to reading aloud; you’ll learn more about rhythm and voice that way than from any lecture. Be prepared to take notes on everything: gestures, smells, slips of language. And be prepared to waste some paper. Not everything you write at a retreat will be salvageable; the point is to try, and to keep what feels right.

Travel isn’t just movement. It’s also a chance to see the familiar and the local rearranged, to engage and allow the ordinary to reveal itself as strange and luminous. A good retreat teaches you how to notice that rearrangement, how to turn a market stall, a late-night conversation, or a misread bus sign into prose that both inspires and delights.

There are only a couple of slots left for our rural retreat in the Algarve. For more information and booking contact me, Sue Hall or Stephen Powell or check out this blog post.