Whitehead Island 2025
Living the Creative Life
Women’s Retreat & Residency:
August 10 - 20, 2025
““What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
”
We imagine, and then go beyond what we’ve imagined.
Wide Open Writing has already become so much more than any of us could imagine. Ten years ago Tuscany called, a wild bunch of writers answered, and we began to grow a “salty and elegant, therapeutic and wise,” transformative retreat experience for writers of all stripes.
In 2024 on the Maine coast, we invited a new imagining. It was a thrilling success. Our participants wrote:
Perfect balance of open and structured time…
The most loving gift to oneself as a writer, a person…
Fun! Full of humor and exploration of self and others, craft and inspiration…
If you want to seriously focus on what you want from your writing and/or your creative life, WOW provides the time, place, process and skill for you to thrive and go deep within yourself.
This retreat will open your mind to a universe inside you.
Now Presenting:
THE TEN-DAY RETREAT EXPERIENCE:
August 10-20, 2025
The writing rhythm we’ve cultivated over the years works beautifully. Structure, but not too much. Flexibility, with guidance. Writing taken seriously, ourselves taken lightly. But often, these wonderful retreats we’ve created – of 5 days, or 6, or 7 – end too soon. We heard you: You wanted more time to write uninterrupted. More room to expand on what emerged in the retreat. More firelit and starlit nights. More kinship.
Enter The Lighthouse Session 2025: A 10-day experience combining the very best of retreat magic and residency spaciousness. The experience begins with more structure - prompts, workshops, and daily guidance – and adds in increasing opportunities for spacious and uninterrupted project time over our days together. Our classic retreat model gets things moving, promotes new skills, and immerses us in the WOW positive feedback model. The residency component then builds in an even deeper experience of sanctuary for words, images and spirit. Through it all, coffee and writing on Adirondack chairs perched on the porch, quiet time on rocks above the surf at sunrise, morning yoga and breathwork, swimming, kayaking, laughter, utterly delicious food, skillful support and delightful dynamic company abound. That’s what we do. We invite you to ask yourself where you’d most like to be with your writing life. If your imagining includes nature, inspiration and solid support, and if it includes both structure and spaciousness for your writing, please consider joining us for this expanded vision of what Wide Open Writing will make possible in your life.
Space for this enhanced writing experience is limited to 9 participants. We anticipate filling very quickly.
THE LOCATION
What is it about Maine? Writers and artists, composers and actors have found their muses here since before the railroads, when steamboats carried city folk “downeast” to cottages and inns on the foggy coast of this summer-glorious state of being.
And a lighthouse? “What does a lighthouse do?” asks Lisa Wingate in The Prayer Box, “ I ask myself. It never moves. It cannot hike up its rocky skirt and dash into the ocean to rescue the foundering ship. It cannot calm the waters or clear the shoals. It can only cast light into the darkness. It can only point the way. Yet, through one lighthouse, you guide many ships. Show this old lighthouse the way.”
For Virginia Wolff, “She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”
Her book, To The Lighthouse, could have been written no other place.
The protected cove on the side of the house is perfect for swimming or kayaking.
ACCOMMODATION
Join Wide Open Writing for ten days on Whitehead Island, Maine. We’ll gather in what was once the lighthouse keepers home to write and relax and explore this gem of an island off the Maine Coast. Our home’s library holds juicy news of this Maine island’s history and the surrounding grounds provide spacious venues for yoga, hiking, dancing, and whatever else you could possibly want to do. Rooms are spacious with en suite bathroom and ocean views. Single and Double rooms are available.
DULCIE WITMAN A founder of WOW, and a founding editor of Minerva Rising, Dulcie has had work published in The Pitkin Review, Rawboned and elsewhere. She’s taught creative writing in Eindhoven, Netherlands with Watershed at their summer program, Camp Cushy. She completed a novel, Crooked Love, and is currently working on a professional memoir, Confessions of a Therapist. She believes sharing creative space gives power to the connections that fuel the creative process – giving life to something that wasn’t there before.
NANCY COLEMAN Being in Nancy’s yoga class is not unlike listening to her read something she just wrote – feeling alive with the ocean, wind and hardscrabble earth, and, at the same time, what it is to be human, right here, right now. Nancy is a writer of songs, poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and now with a full-length fiction manuscript, I See My Light Come Shining, in consideration for publication. She is the award-winning author of Wide Open Writing: Embrace Your Creative Genius. She’s had work published in The Sun, Minerva Rising, and in the compilation, Maine Voices.
COST
THE RETREAT/RESIDENCY
August 10-20, 2025
Full cost of this Retreat/Residency is $3850 for a shared double. Single rooms occupancy rooms are $4450.
Includes accommodation, AND:
Three meals daily, with wine if you choose, plus all outlined activities/expeditions. Yoga is offered and included each day as well as individual sessions for anyone who is interested.
Put down your non-refundable $1000 deposit right away to secure your space!
The final payment will be billed and due by May 30, 2025.
(Flexible payments are available if needed with advance arrangement).
*Prices are per person and include tuition, lodging, all meals and boat transportation to the Light Station.
CANCELLATION POLICY
Deposits and full payments are non-refundable.
If you have any questions about whether or not this retreat is for you, please contact us. We'd be happy to answer your questions or even put you in touch with a past participant.