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Want to be a writer? First, spend a minimum of $4,095 to travel to Guatemala, where you’ll be treated to a beachside massage and a traditional Mayan Shaman fire ceremony. You can then hone your craft during a week on the Queen Mary 2 ($1,175, not including the cabin) or at an estate in Tuscany ($4,200), or while indulging in writing in a French chateau and visiting local artisan markets ($4,200).* Spend the mornings doing yoga and the afternoons horseback riding, two activities that are so common that I’d consider asking for my money back if they didn’t appear on my itinerary. At these high-end writers retreats, chef-prepared meals are de rigueur, and what’s the point of a trip to France or Italy without ever-flowing wine? Maybe—if your jet lag and the wine from the night before have worn off—you can even sneak in a little writing time.
I’ve been bombarded by offerings to spend money to develop my writing skills over the course of my 15-year career: editors for hire, online and in-person workshops, private consultations with book gurus, and many, many retreats. But recently, the amenities on these trips have become so luxurious and the prices so eye-popping that I’ve begun to wonder: Just what kind of amateur writer goes on these five-star literary retreats? And, more to the point, how many of them are being ripped off?
My first thought as I perused these offerings was an unfair one: Anyone with the time and money to embark on one of these vacations couldn’t possibly be a “real” writer. Real writers sit under flickering fluorescent lights in musty conference rooms and workshop short stories about sad suburbanites. The people on these excursions must be easy marks for so-called experts peddling a high-priced secret to literary acclaim and riches. My second thought was: Why haven’t I been invited to teach at any of these?
Artistic retreats (call them “colonies” if you’re fancy) have long been a staple of creative life. Yaddo has been hosting artists from Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin to Miranda July and Ta-Nehisi Coates in Saratoga Springs, New York, since 1926. Bread Loaf, in Vermont, has been around just as long and boasts Robert Frost, Toni Morrison, and Justin Torres as alumni. There are also famed weeklong writing seminars at places like Sewanee University that pair expert instructors with students chosen through a highly competitive application process. What separates these organizations from the five-star offerings that stretch from Kenya to Reykjavik and beyond? You don’t need an approved writing sample to go on these luxury retreats. All you need is cash and time.
Allison K. Williams is an experienced writer and teacher who organizes the retreat on the Queen Mary 2 and other trips to Tuscany, Portugal, and, soon, India. Her offerings level the playing field, she says, opening up the experience of writerly instruction and camaraderie to a wider range of people who may not have had the time and training to produce a polished writing sample.
“The retreats that I teach, they’re all first come, first served,” Williams says. “A lot of the writers that I work with are not yet at a place in their writing career where something like Bread Loaf is right for them. They’re not going to benefit from it as much because they’re not working at quite that level of craft yet.”
Of course, there are clear class divides at play here, which means these retreats don’t bring out the most diverse cohort of writers. Williams knows that this is a flaw in the system and brought it up before I even had a chance to ask. “Every writing event I have ever been to in my entire life, both talent-tested application retreats and pay-to-play retreats and conferences, are all 98 percent white ladies,” she says. “Women of an age where they are able to boss their own life and choose their own calendar. And for most women, that’s somewhere around 60 or 70.”
Whether they’re on their fifth novel or just putting pen to paper, writers need a community and readers willing to look at their pages with a critical eye. Many of the people going on retreats, attending local writing conferences, and signing up for virtual classes are women who have started writing late in life not because they didn’t want to write earlier, but because job and family demands kept them from diving in.
This is one of the points where I began to reflect on my own hypocritical position in the writer-industrial complex. My own MFA cost about 10 times what any of these retreats will, and despite being in Texas, I didn’t get to ride a horse once.
MFA programs aren’t known for diversity among the faculty or the students. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs conducted a survey of MFA programs in 2015 and found that 73 percent of attendees were white, non-Hispanic students. I went into my program knowing I’d have only one instructor who was a person of color and that most of my cohort would be white. Still, I wanted to build a community of writers and improve my craft.
Marjie Alonso, a nonfiction writer who lives in Provincetown, has attended multiple retreats. She believes it’s incumbent on the organizers to do more to address demographic issues. She sees them “taking no responsibility for bringing in young people, people of color, different cultures.” She adds, “They should be doing scholarships. They’re not. They could do raffles or giveaways, and they’re not.”
For novelist and writing instructor Andromeda Romano-Lax, the steep cost and lack of diversity are far from the only potential downsides to a writers retreat. Romano-Lax has taught in multiple MFA programs and has hosted her own writing gatherings, yet she warns writers that there are risks they might not have considered. “What I’ve seen at multiple workshops is a lot of people coming in unprepared for the experience, vulnerable, and not only leaving sessions in tears but feeling like they lost the will to write,” she says.
This risk is heightened by the fact that so many of the writers who pick up the pen after retirement are working on memoirs, telling sensitive family stories, and working through their own trauma. Books about children who died, recovery from substance abuse, and the aftermath of rape and sexual assault are common topics.
Romano-Lax fictionalized some of her experiences in her novel The Deepest Lake, which is set at a high-end writing retreat in Central America. The novel was based partly on a specific retreat known for an intense workshop style that’s shaken many writers and left them floundering. Karen Rand Anderson, a visual artist and writer, reached out to me with a similar story. “The participants were encouraged to lay bare and share their traumatic memoir themes, while [an instructor] commented with their personal take on our writing, and often made bold and inconsiderate corrections and assumptions,” she says. “Rather than making me want to dive in and pursue my writing project, I chose to take a big break from it after that exhausting workshop experience.”
Writers with the resources to travel the world and indulge in a high-end retreat should do their research and make sure the organizers are qualified, trained, and equipped to deliver an experience that will help them move forward with their craft. Williams emphasizes that writers need to really understand what they’re getting into because each retreat will be different. “It’s really important to identify up front what [writers] are paying for,” she says. “ ‘You’re going to get this many hours with this many teachers, and you’ll get this kind of feedback.’ ‘On this retreat, we read your pages in advance.’ ‘On this retreat, we don’t read your pages in advance.’ ”
When I was getting my MFA, the program director told us that one of the degree’s benefits was the colleagues we made along the way—some of whom still share early drafts today—and the same seems true of these retreats. Alonso, the Provincetown-based writer, told me something similar: “Writing is a solitary pursuit that’s also a team sport.”
Andrea Eschen, a nonfiction writer, emphasizes the valuable network she is able to build on retreats. “One of the primary reasons I go is because I expand my network so much. And that’s really, really helpful,” she says. “I have three or four [writers] that I continue to be in touch with. We read each other’s work sometimes or get ideas or help in one way or another.”
From graduate degrees to free workshops at local libraries, there are countless paths to finding a writing community. And if you just want to fork over a few grand to hang out in France and maybe do some writing if you feel like it, well, that’s your right. In fact, maybe I should get in on this. I hear one of Williams’ old students is launching a rival retreat, also on the Queen Mary 2. While I can’t offer you a cruise, for only $900 we can hang out in the park near my house in Austin. There’s a pool! I won’t talk to you or read your pages, but there are some nice trails nearby. Deposits due soon.
Correction, Aug. 25, 2025: This article originally misstated that one retreat offers a week on the Queen Mary. It is the Queen Mary 2.
