Hedgebrook upcoming events

Minal Hajratwala - Online Class (18 Oct 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Ellen Sussman - Online Class (18 Oct 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Sarah Sentilles - Online Class (18 Oct 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Claire Dederer - Online Class (18 Oct 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Natalie Serber - Online Class (18 Oct 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Theo Pauline Nestor - Online Class (18 Oct 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Sonora Jha - Online Class (18 Oct 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Monona Wali - Online Class (23 Oct 2024)

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Jourdan Keith - Online Class (8 Oct 2025)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Witness & Resistance

A pre-recorded online class with Jourdan Keith

Class Description: The class looks at the connection between the larger context of the story you have to tell, and framing that story in a way that allows people to hear the vulnerable issues that are shaping our world, and hopefully, compel them to take action. Through writing, you’ll explore how to move essays, poems and conversations from “bumper sticker,” to a place where the vulnerability of our own stories comes through and invites people to hear something they might not be as comfortable hearing otherwise. The class will read from Fire and Ink, The Robot Scientist's Daughter by Jeannine Gailey, Naomi Shihab Nye, and from Jourdan’s own poem, Homophobia’s Hidden Carbon Count, illustrating how a personal story can move people to see the connection between homophobia and climate change that affects us all.

Class length: 48 minutes (broken up into 7 parts and includes participant sharing).

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

in the confirmation email.

Deposit for your Mother Tree Residency (6 May 2026)

Wed, 06 May 2026 07:00:00 GMT

The Mother Tree Residency

Once you have been selected, please select this option to pay your non-refundable deposit.

Once you make your payment, please check your email confirmation for next steps.

Remaining Balance for your Mother Tree Residency (6 May 2026)

Wed, 06 May 2026 07:00:00 GMT

The Mother Tree Residency

Please select this option to pay the remaining balance for your residency.

Cancellation/Rescheduling Policy: We would prefer to work with you to reschedule your Mother Tree retreat, as we rely on programs like these to fund our core residency program. If you find you must reschedule your residency after it has been confirmed, we will be happy to work with you to reschedule within one year of your original residency arrival date. The deposit is non-refundable.

Once you make your payment, please check your email confirmation for next steps.

2026 Women in Philanthropy Retreat (28 Aug 2026)

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:00:00 GMT

We are thrilled you have accepted this honor to spend a 4-night retreat at Hedgebrook with fellow Women in Philanthropy.

Retreat dates:

Arrivals: Friday, August 28th, 2026 between 12:30-4pm

Departures: Tuesday, September 1, 2026 before 12pm

Please review your confirmation email for next steps!

Great Minds 2026: Optimism, Speculative Futures, and the Worlds We Dream Into Being (17 Sep 2026)

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:30:00 GMT

Join Hedgebrook this September for Great Minds: On Optimism, Speculative Futures, and the Worlds We Dream Into Being. We're bringing together three brilliant voices in speculative fiction: Kira Jane Buxton (Hollow Kingdom), Kathleen Alcalá (Spirits of the Ordinary), and moderator Rashida J. Smith (aka author Jasmine Silvera) for a night about the futures we have the power to write.

Expect a reading by SAL’s Youth Poet Laureate, performances by Bushwick BookClub Seattle, an audience Q&A, and a reading list to take home. A reception will follow with light-bites and fresh-squeezed apple cider from our retreat center on Whidbey Island.

Readers and writers alike are invited to imagine the worlds we dream into being.

September 17, 2026 | 6-9pm

6:00 pm: Doors open

6:30 pm: Program Begins

8:00 pm: Reception

Hugo House | Seattle, WA
Presented by Hedgebrook. A huge thanks to our partners at Clarion West, the celebrated speculative fiction organization, as well as Seattle Arts and Lectures, Bushwick BookClub, and Hugo House.