Writer’s Retreat

In February, I drove east for eleven hours, through Ohio and the very mountains of Pennsylvania I used to call home, to the town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. I turned left onto the property of the family that created the magazine Highlights for Children and pulled up to a small cabin with two twin beds, a shower, a small refrigerator and a desk. I hauled my books and my computer into the cabin…and I got ready to do nothing but write for ONE GLORIOUS WEEK!

I had attended various Highlights Foundation writer’s workshops over the years with great editors and authors doing talks on all kinds of things but this workshop was one I was particularly looking forward to. Time to write…just write! What a gift!

Of course, I and the other seven writers occupying cabins near me had to sustain ourselves so we did a bit of eating (breakfast, lunch, appetizers, and dinner!) in the main cabin. And we needed company and feedback, so we gathered every evening after dinner to read whatever we’d written over a glass of wine. And we wanted to take advantage of resident editor Carolyn Yoder’s expertise so we signed up to meet with her for hour or half-hour sessions each day.

But most of the time, we wrote. We just wrote. For this writer, it was a little bit of heaven!