Explore the Wilds of the Kripalu Campus

When people travel, very often they want to share their experiences with family and friends in personal blogs, journals, newspapers, and magazines, online or in print. Travel often becomes a spiritual journey, inward and outward.

In this retreat, you will go on “travel assignments” on the grounds of Kripalu. With short writing drills followed by reviews of writing critiqued in real time, you will learn how to write better and from the heart.

This workshop offers you all the tools you need to write about your personal journeys, whether out in the world or in your inner world, with guidance on how to get published, if that is your goal.

Takeaways from the retreat include:

• Improved self-expression, a noble transformative endeavor
• Confidence that your own feelings and experiences can be validated and affirmed by a larger audience
• A feeling that writing about places far away or nearby brings us all together no matter how different we may seem or where we come from

Each session begins with a prompt which brings you into the here and how, where great travel writing always should begin. From there we examine various examples of travel writing about spiritual pilgrimage. Perry will deconstruct the style, structure, and tone, and then share the same of his own travel pieces.

You will undertake short travels to places around the Kripalu campus, writing about what you see, smell, hear, and feel, and share with each other. We will write a proposal as if we are submitting to some publishing outlet. We will have a pitch session, with participants and Perry serving as an editorial board of decision makers. We look at works in progress that you may already have begun but feel stuck.

Leave with a writing project, new friends, and a renewed sense of creativity.