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• The Mother Tree Residency

  • Start
    17 Apr 2024
  • End
    31 Dec 2025
  • Location
    Hedgebrook
  • Spaces left
    6

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  The Mother Tree Residency

  In 2025, we're innovating with an eye toward sustainability and this is a new option for women-identified writers to experience Hedgebrook. These partially subsidized residencies are a conscious act of radical reciprocity - the gift of time on the land for yourself and your creative practice works to sustain our historic free-to-writers residency program and allows us to continue to support women who are authoring change.

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• Minal Hajratwala - Online Class

  • Start
    18 Oct 2024
  • End
    18 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  How to Finish a Book, Really

  A pre-recorded online class with Minal Hajratwala

  Class Description: This class is about diving deep to understand your true needs and how to keep making progress on your book—all the way to the end—despite the obstacles you may be facing. Through writing prompts and exercises, we’ll diagnose where your book might get bottlenecked and figure out your best next step, and the one after that.

  You’ll learn how to anticipate sticking points before they block you, and create power and momentum for your book. You’ll leave the workshop with a roadmap to navigate your own book-writing process so that you can proceed with clarity, confidence, and joy as you move toward the day you finish your book.

  This class is for writers who are starting a book, have written a partial draft, or have a mostly complete draft that needs a boost.

  Class length: 92 minutes (broken up into 12 parts and includes participant sharing).

  Videos offer closed captioning.

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

  
  

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• Ellen Sussman - Online Class

  • Start
    18 Oct 2024
  • End
    18 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  Jump Start Your Novel 

  A pre-recorded online class with Ellen Sussman

  
  

  Class Description: This workshop is for writers who are ready to begin a novel or who have hit some roadblocks along the way. It would also help someone who has a fledgling idea for a novel and doesn’t know how to develop it.

  In this workshop, we will tackle essential novel-writing questions including:

  How much do I need to plan before I begin writing? What point of view should I use for this novel? Are my characters well-developed? Do I know who they are and how they’ll change? Do I need to know where I’m heading in this story? How much plot do I need to know? How will I write this novel?

  By the end of the workshop, students will discover how pre-writing can help them bring their novel ideas into focus and prepare them for first draft writing. They will also learn various ways to structure their time so that they can make writing a regular practice in their lives.

  Class length: 103 minutes (broken up into 16 parts and includes participant sharing).

  Videos offer closed captioning.

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

  
  

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• Sarah Sentilles - Online Class

  • Start
    18 Oct 2024
  • End
    18 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  On Silence: A Generative Writing Workshop about Refusal, Agency & Transcendence

  A pre-recorded online class with Sarah Sentilles

  
  

  Class Description: How do you write about what you don’t want to write about? How do you capture on the page what can’t be spoken? What does it look like to write what is unsaid? How do the stories we’re afraid to tell hold us back? And when is refusal a kind of agency? Join writer Sarah Sentilles for a two-hour generative writing workshop exploring miscommunication, secrets, and how language might show us a way through. Sarah will lead participants through a series of writing prompts designed to inspire and help you experiment, play, and break through blocks, habits, and writing ruts. Open to all genres and levels of experience. Everyone is welcome.

  Class length: 110 minutes (broken up into 9 parts and includes participant sharing and writing time).

  Videos offer closed captioning.

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

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• Claire Dederer - Online Class

  • Start
    18 Oct 2024
  • End
    18 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  The Surprising Power of Vulnerability

  A pre-recorded online class with Claire Dederer

  
  

  Class Description: What does it mean to “do your job” as a memoirist?  In “The Surprising Power of Vulnerability,” New York Times bestselling memoirist, critic, and writing instructor Claire Dederer expertly guides students towards saying the uncomfortable truth. Claire helps students see that writing those difficult truths is in fact the moral function of the memoir. Through a series of readings, discussions, and practical exercises, students learn how to build a structure out of their own discomfort so that readers might shelter there, and ultimately, feel less alone.  You’ll use scene as an essential vehicle to write the kind of vulnerable work that lays bare the writer’s own honestly stated ambivalence--an honesty which ultimately serves the reader.  Claire addresses the critical importance of self-exposure in memoir writing, and helps writers break through the catharsis (instead of getting stuck there) in order to take that material and write it into a gift for the reader that is a work of art.  

  Filmed at Hedgebrook, in the Gathering Space with a fire crackling and ducks quacking in the garden, this class offers writing exercises and strategies for writers to summon the courage needed to write difficult truths with real vulnerability in the memoir.   This class is structured to be of value to a wide range of students, at different points in their writing career.

  Class length: 75 minutes (broken up into 8 parts and includes participant sharing).

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

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• Natalie Serber - Online Class

  • Start
    18 Oct 2024
  • End
    18 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  Becoming Unstuck: Find Flow and Free Your Voice

  A pre-recorded online class with Natalie Serber

  
  

  Class Description: Recapture some joy at your writing desk! In this online class, we’ll spend time exploring what gets in the way of our creative freedom. Inner Critic slowing you down? I’ve got ideas to quiet that noise. Fear of failing? I’ve got a few antidotes. Worried about cutting too close to the bone? Let’s talk about how to stay safe and make discoveries. We all get in our own way. It’s important to remember that the opposite of fear is faith. Faith in ourselves, in our process, in our voices, in our unique story. I’ve got thirteen practical steps to overcome the sludge of stuck! Once we’ve dissected our difficulties, we’ll spend time writing together, using prompts as a backdoor into our manuscripts, whether we’re starting something brand new, or in the midst of a long project.

  Class length: 90 minutes (broken up into 10 parts and includes participant sharing).

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

  
  

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• Theo Pauline Nestor - Online Class

  • Start
    18 Oct 2024
  • End
    18 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  Structuring your Memoir

  A pre-recorded online class with Theo Pauline Nestor

  
  

  Class Description: After a honeymoon period of writing the initial pages of a memoir, writers often get caught up in a maze of questions regarding the book’s structure and content. In this class “Structuring Your Memoir,” memoirist and award-winning writing instructor Theo Pauline Nestor will lead you through a series of writing prompts designed to ferret out the questions that underlie your writing project and that hold the key to your dilemmas around where to begin, where to end, and what to include and what to leave out. Theo’s step-by-step approach helps you to discover the answers you already hold and offers practical ideas for putting those answers to work right away. Set in Meadow House at the retreat, this class offers the magic of Hedgebrook’s famous “radical hospitality” and the feeling of permission that women writers inevitably experience working in the Hedgebrook cottages.

  Class length: 73 minutes (broken up into 10 parts and includes participant sharing).

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

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• Sonora Jha - Online Class

  • Start
    18 Oct 2024
  • End
    18 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  Beauty & Rage in the Personal Essay

  A pre-recorded online class with Sonora Jha

  
  

  Class Description: A fat drop of dew holding on to the tip of a leaf can stun you with the beauty of the universe. A hot teardrop of rage can change the world. We will gather to bring such beauty and rage to our page in the form of the personal essay. Come with all the feelings that have coursed through you in these past months as our lives have posed new questions and changed old relationships. Let's write about memories, let's write about mortality. We will read brief excerpts from beautiful and rage-filled personal essays to inspire our own writing. We will leave with fresh writing to grow into whole essays or books.

  Class length: 72 minutes (broken up into 9 parts and includes participant sharing).

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

  
  

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• Monona Wali - Online Class

  • Start
    23 Oct 2024
  • End
    23 Oct 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

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  Finding Your Theme in Memoir

  A pre-recorded online class with Monona Wali

  Class Description: Structure can be elusive in crafting a memoir – there are so many stories and pieces that don’t often lend themselves to a cohesive narrative. Understanding theme is vital to organizing your material and bringing a spine to your memoir. It also is what transforms a me-moir to a story that can resonate with a larger audience.

  This will be a two-hour participatory workshop where students will respond to prompts, share work, and analyze their own writing to discover the underlying themes that inform the heart of their narrative. Fortified with clarity about the inner urgency of their work, students will be able to craft a roadmap for their memoir.

  Class length: 103 minutes (broken up into 8 parts and includes participant sharing).

  Videos offer closed captioning.

  Please note: your log in information to access the class is included

  in the confirmation email.

  
  

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• AMPLIFY: Hedgebrook's Book Club

  • When
    26 Jan 2025
  • Location
    Virtual

  Register

  Join us for our virtual book club!  We will read an alumnae book each month and then meet with the author to discuss the book, their process, and more.  

  The following is a schedule for the Winter cohort of alumnae authors:

  January

  Sunday, January 26th 5 pm PT
  

  Book: True Biz by Sara Nović

  February

  Saturday, February 22, 2025 10am PT

  Book: Incantation: Love Poems for Battlefields by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

  in conversation with Naomi Williams

  March

  Saturday, March 22, 2025 10am PT

  Book: Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing by Dionne Ford

  Thanks to a generous donor, ASL interpretation will be available for all book club meetings.

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• Women in Philanthropy Retreat

  • Start
    7 Aug 2025
  • End
    11 Aug 2025
  • Location
    Hedgebrook

  Register

  We are thrilled you have accepted this honor to spend a 3-night retreat at Hedgebrook with fellow Women in Philanthropy.

  Retreat dates:

  Arrivals: Thursday, August 7th, 2025 between 12:30-4pm 

  Departures: Monday, August 11th, 2025 before 12pm

  Please review your confirmation email for next steps!

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