Poetry of Nature Retreat
Saturday, October 5 , 2024
Innisfree Retreat Center, East Bend, North Carolina
How fast the year’s wheel turns! It seems we’ve barely sown our seeds and already the harvest and Samhain are upon us. Celebrate summer’s end and lean into the dimming days with Charlotte Lit co-founder Kathie Collins and poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi at Innisfree Retreat in North Carolina’s beautiful Yadkin Valley. In addition to structured activities listed below, the day will include a picnic lunch, labyrinth walks, trail hikes and, with any luck, an opportunity to stretch out for a rest beneath the softening sun.
Beginnings and Endings: A Writing Workshop with Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Some say the veil between the living and the otherwise is thinnest at this time of year. In this generative class, as we look toward All Souls Day, we’ll contemplate what revelations we might discover in our relationship to the natural world—plants, animals, and people. What does Nature mean at this luminous time of beginnings and endings? What do we reach for when the veil lifts and lowers all at once?
Changing Landscape as Self: A Makers Workshop with Kathie Collins
How are the changing landscapes of Autumn reflected in your ever-changing self? What in your life or inside you is dying back or gone to seed? What fullness has yet to be harvested? What dreams still shimmer with possibility? In this workshop, we’ll contemplate symbols of self reflected in both the larger landscape and the artifacts it leaves behind, transforming found objects into assemblages for winter altars.
Other Details:
The retreat day is 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. Charlotte Lit members: $150, non-members: $200. What’s included: all class materials, lunch and snacks throughout the day, happy hour light bites and beverages.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Kathie Collins
About the Retreat Leaders
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 – 2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
Kathie Collins (she/her), lives on a gorgeous slice of wooded farmland near the Yadkin River in East Bend, NC, where she’s founded Innisfree Retreat. She is a poet, mythologist, and life-long student of Jungian psychology. She’s also co-founder and creative director of Charlotte Center for Literary Arts and editor-in-chief for Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit. Kathie is author of Jubilee (Main Street Rag). Her poems have appeared in Flying South, Immanence, Kakalak, Major 7th Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, Pinesong, and Santa Fe Literary Review. She’s a 2023 Pushcart nominee, and her poetry manuscript Grass Widow was named a finalist in both the Iron Horse Lit Review and Palette Poetry 2023 Chapbook competitions.
Transportation & Lodging
East Bend is an easy 90-minute drive from Charlotte, NC, 25 minutes from Winston-Salem, NC, and 20 minutes from King, NC. We’ll send directions to you directly after you register.
If you decide to stay in the area overnight, there are options. In addition to the most common chain hotels in all three cities, you might check out a local bed & breakfast, including:
A Mighty Oak Bed & Breakfast, Pinnacle, NC (near Pilot Mountain): https://amightyoakbedandbreakfast.com/
The Shaffner or Summit Street Inn, Winston-Salem, NC: https://historicinnsws.com/summit-street-inns/