2008 Retreats Nightwriters in California The Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg, California Sunday, May 4 - Friday, May 9, 2008 Nightwriters for One Ashland, Virginia Make your own schedule

          "You are getting ready to participate in the practice of writing.  It's not about being a good writer, or a published writer, although those are certainly desireable states of being.  The writing may be good or bad, but the practice is a way of life.  Like any practice, it is vivid, flexible and changeable and growing.  It is a relationship.  The deeper one becomes involved in an artistic practice, the more the finished object becomes a side effect of the daily work."

                                                                       Novelist Alice Dark

           "Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  This is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.  Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths ...we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

                                                            Henry Miller "On Writing"

            "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours."

                                                             Henry David Thoreau