Ali Harper's Blog

The Magic of Writing – A Tutored Writing Retreat

Monday 22nd – Saturday 27th July 2024

Anna Chilvers and Ali Harper are thrilled to announced their next tutored writing retreat, to be held again at Cober Hill, five miles up the east coast from Scarborough.

Anna and Ali have worked together on many retreats and are passionate about enabling writers to express themselves creatively. The course includes workshops, [writing] exercise classes, seminars, writing time and the chance to recharge your creative batteries.

Check in is available from 3pm on Monday. The course starts at 4pm and includes full board and accommodation in single, or double, en-suite bedrooms. This is our fourth time at Cober Hill. It’s a beautiful place, within walking distance of the coastline and with gorgeous grounds, including a tennis court and croquet lawn. There are separate lounges for our exclusive use, in addition to the training room. The bedrooms are all single occupancy, with ensuite facilities and wifi. There are a limited number of double or larger rooms which cost slightly more. Please state when booking which type of room you would require. There is also a bar!

BOOKING ARRANGEMENTS:

The cost for the course is £740 and includes full board from Monday dinner to Saturday breakfast. You can reserve a double room for an additional payment of £50 (there are only a limited number of double beds available, so these will be allocated on a first come, first served basis) or a larger twin or triple room for an additional premium of £25. (Please note these will still be single occupancy!)

If you would like to reserve a place please email the following information to harperchilvers@gmail.com: Name, address, email address, telephone number and any dietary or mobility requirements you may have.

A deposit of £100 is required to secure your place.  The full fee must be paid no later than 31st January 2024.

After a fantastic week in 2023, we’ve booked to go to Cober Hill again next year. Dates are Monday 22nd July to Saturday 27th July 2024.

Writing workshops, focus groups, social activities, space to write – accommodation is full board, single occupancy (unless you choose to share!). Costs and full agenda to be announced, but if you want to reserve a place in the meantime email harperchilvers@gmail.com.

It has been a while. I’m not going to count the days but I’m going to explain why I haven’t been posting lately and it is going to involve the C word – for which I apologies, but it’s kind of necessary.

When the C@*?! pandemic hit, I’d just left a job and was thinking of having a couple of weeks/months writing before finding another one. Ha! It soon became clear that there weren’t going to be many job opportunities around in a world where everyone was talking about furlough schemes. I wondered how I was going to survive.

One of the best things I learned during the last two years, is I am more adaptable to change than I thought. I set up online creativity classes, online writing retreats, I wrote a non- fiction – a creative writing manual. I schemed and I hustled and I also set myself a target – once the world returned to normal (if anyone can remember what that is) – a proper job.

Whilst I don’t want to appear to be delighting in others’ misfortunes – I got lucky. The pandemic meant some people couldn’t work and I was taken on as a temporary lecturer (on zero hours contracts) at four different universities. This involved a lot of ‘can you cover a lecture on [speech therapy/postcolonial literature/academic skills for sports students] at 9am tomorrow morning?‘ type emails, which have been hair-raising on more than one occasion. Just call me Jack.

Throughout C@*?! I balanced four lecturing roles with running my own business, a part-time admin job and private work editing other writers’ manuscripts. When, last month, I was offered a full-time job as a lecturer in creative writing, I had to compile a list of all the people to whom I had to write a letter of resignation, in order to make sure I didn’t forget anyone.

The Holy Grail? It is to me – because it includes the one thing I didn’t get much of these last two years – writing time. I’ve fallen back into the novel I was working on before everything went pear-shaped and it feels the same way it does when you get that first day of luke-warm sun after a long winter.

In the last week of July, for the past seven years, I’ve tutored a five-day, residential writing retreat at Wentworth Castle in Stainborough. It has become a regular fixture in my diary – akin to an annual pilgrimage. Me, my co-tutor Anna Chilvers, and 16 writers from the just-starting-out to the well-established. (Louise Jensen came one year to write what became her debut novel, the best-selling The Sister.)

Writing retreats are intense, as anyone who has been on one will know. One particularly memorable year, we got people to sit in colour of clothes order and a fight broke out in the red corner. Mainly though, people form friendships that sustain them through the rest of year and we get some writing done. For the last three, I used the time and space to send off my next novel to my agent.

This year, of course, we had to cancel – taking the decision almost as soon as lockdown measures were announced. We refunded deposits, briefly considered the idea of a winter retreat but decided, with everything up in the air, we should write off 2020 and focus instead on 2021.

Then, as we adjusted to the new, locked-down world, we heard from isolated, frustrated writers and found ourselves wondering whether we could do something on line. Was it was possible to create the feeling of a retreat (a hideaway) with writers spread across the country? Could a sense of community be built virtually? Would it make us feel better or worse?

We knew we’d have to imagine a different set of circumstances – no handy on-site cafeteria for starters [or main courses, for that matter ;0)]. Writers would no longer be turning up having left behind busy working lives – instead we knew they’d spent the last few months bored and furloughed, needing projects to get stuck into.

We reworked the agenda, halving the number of workshops and making space for one to one tutorials and smaller group work. We doubled the number of guest authors – it’s easier to get someone to drop by when you don’t have to arrange their transport and accommodation – and we increased the number of writing tasks.

We changed the title from The Art of Writing to Everything You Need To Know About Writing A Novel to reflect a more goal-orientated approach. Trying to get the balance right was difficult – we didn’t want to wear everyone out and we knew we needed to give people time for cooking their own meals and making their own beds.

We decided to hold it during the same period we would have held the physical retreat and despite less than 2 months’ lead-in time the course quickly booked up. (We capped the numbers at 16 – possibly because that’s what we’re used to – the truth is we could have taken more.)

It was immediately apparent that it was a different cohort to our usual group – more inclusive. Two writers I spoke to said health issues prevented them attending physical retreats and others remarked it only became affordable as an online event (without food and accommodation the price dropped by nearly 75%). The environmental cost also reduced – twenty fewer return journeys from all around the country. We had women with young families, who hardly ever attend the physical retreats, and more men too.

The discussions felt deeper and the sense of achievement higher. We got more done with fewer distractions – some writers had sent their families away in order to recreate the feeling of retreat at home. I discovered you cover more in an hour’s workshop on Zoom than in a classroom.

The surprising thing was the feeling of community (which, to me, defines a physical retreat) was the same – it didn’t seem to matter we weren’t meeting in the flesh. Perhaps the group took a little longer to gel without the boozy nights in the bar – but gel it did – and there were no fights to break up either.

I’m coming to the end of the first season of my online creativity class, based on a book I started writing at the start of this topsy-turvy year. The idea for the class came from a what if moment on the night of 16 March 2020 – the evening Boris Johnson announced pubs were to close.

The class was thrown together, because the idea behind the book is about working with the energy of the seasons – and spring was only days away. If I didn’t start soon, I’d have had to wait til summer, and who knew where we’d be by then? I sent out an email late at night and within two days forty people had signed up. Slight issue in that I hadn’t written much of the spring section – I’d been concentrating on winter. But, I like a deadline and anyway, spring is about surprises, so on March 21st, we set off together on a journey of creative discovery.

Fast forward nearly thirteen weeks later and we’ve become a tribe. I’m happy to report that almost everyone who did the first week’s exercise made it to the last – we lost only two on the way.  We’ve risen to ridiculous challenges –  from spring cleaning [not very popular] to discovering dead bodies [hugely so].  We’ve written haikus and monologues, dribbles and drabbles, sonnets and songs. We’ve mined memories, music, settings, films, books and collage to find ideas. We’ve planted seeds, baked cakes, made soups, made friends. We’ve sewn and stitched and upholstered.  We’ve pulled each other through difficult times, always able to see the silver in the darkest of clouds. I’ve laughed, cried, watched on as we’ve driven each other mad, but at the same time, always been there for each other.

To me, creativity is radical. It’s the opposite of consumerism. Consumerism teaches us to devour. Creativity teaches us to exhale – to give out. Creativity is consumerism’s antidote.  I am re-energised by the experience of the last thirteen weeks, by the people I’ve met. I’m reminded not only of why creativity is more important now than ever before, but also of how much fun it can be.

So much so in fact that I’m starting a summer season as soon as spring ends. Nutter.

[image error]It’s weird, this social isolation business, because I’ve had more social interaction in the last couple of weeks than I’ve had all year. Suddenly writing from home has never been so busy.

I’m reminded of the Cyril Connolly quote: “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” I hate this quote, firstly because it’s written by a man and even in this day and age I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of men I know who have primary responsibility for their children. [If in doubt, the person who has primary responsibility is the person to whom the question, ‘Where’s my underpants/hairbrush/book bag…?‘ is always addressed.]  And secondly, because the use of the word ‘good’ lends it a judgemental tone. Yes, mothers can make art, it seems to say, but it won’t be worthwhile.

This is how we keep women down. We burden them with primary responsibility for the home and family and then dismiss their art as domestic and trivial.

My own experiences are at odds with Mr Connolly’s quote. I wrote my first novel when my children were one and two years old.  I only finished that novel because I had children. Because they’d taught me that life was now, not some distant point in the future. Because having children made me, for the first time in my life, want to try my best. Because they’d taught me to live in the present, to grab my moments and to not worry about the what ifs…

Of course, my children no longer require prams. They not only sleep through the night, but also most of the day. They do have an alarming tendency to throw back a door and announce they’re starving – somedays I feel like I’m running a 24-hour room service in a medium-sized hotel – but generally speaking, they’re quite low-maintenance.

But. There is still a but. Before isolation I’d see them off to school, go for a run and then settle myself at my desk.  I could mentally parcel my entire family up and stick them in a box marked, ‘Not My Responsibility Till 3pm’ and that left my head free for writing. These days its harder to get the mental space.

I recently watched Roald Dahl settle himself into his writing day and it occurred to me that that’s what I need. Not so much a shed at the bottom of the orchard (although that would be nice, obvs.) but a ritual. A ritual that brings me to my writing world and away from the world of lost property and room service.

Now, I just need to devise one.

[image error]It’s ten weeks since I stopped working full-time and returned to writing. My original plan was to have a few weeks off, perhaps revisit a writing project or two, before returning to the safety, structure and security of full-time work.

When I first finished work, I missed my co-workers and the warmth,  humour and good-natured banter of the office. It felt so lonely coming back to the world of writing.  I wrote a list of creative projects to give me structure to my days; a scaffold to cling to. I was scared of too much time, of the blankness of the page.

When I’m writing, it’s easy to feel on the outskirts, that the rest of the world is engaged, useful and productive. But as the weeks passed, and I slipped back in to my new reality, I realised how much I’d missed it, had forgotten what a good, faithful friend writing is. How I love being immersed in something; the flush of feeling when it clicks into place.

The world has changed beyond recognition in these past ten weeks. Now it seems that instead of me rejoining the world of work, the world of work has come to me – to join in –  this alarming, glorious, unsettling isolation. There’s still part of me that wishes I was at work – how much more useful I could be right now, if I were a nurse, or a doctor, or a greengrocer.

But in times like these all we can do is embrace what we are. I’ve set up an on-line creativity course for groups of writers – who are all hellbent on rising to the challenge of our collective isolation. This week we’re writing haikus and dribbles (50 word stories) and establishing our new daily routines. I love the camaraderie of the shared experience – the office may have changed, but the co-workers still rock.

Ok, I’ll be honest. This wasn’t something that was originally on my fifty creative projects to do when I’m 50 list. However…

I’ve been writing a new book lately – a non-fiction, which is a first for me. I’ve just submitted the pitch for it to my agent – I’m not sure what the title of it is yet, but the tag-line is, A Year of Living Creatively. It’s a weekly creative writing class for those that can’t get to a weekly creative writing class and each week there’s a topic and a related task.

Events of the last few weeks have overtaken me though and it’s become apparent that very few classes will be running over the next few weeks. I was teaching my last creative writing class on Monday night (all foreseeable events having just been cancelled) and I realised how we are all going to have to be more creative to combat isolation.

And then it hit me, that I could offer an on-line class, based on the exercises I’ve been writing for the book, which would bring all the creative people I have taught, met, laughed and argued with over the last few years, together.

I fired off an email that night, almost without thinking, and soon saw there was enough interest to make it viable. And so, here I am. About to start running an online creativity class, which was so not how I saw my life going a few weeks ago…

The course is based around working with the energy of the seasons, and so the first part will be spring and starts this Monday. People who sign up will receive an email  at the start of the week with the week’s topic attached and a creative project to do.

There will be small Facebook groups, around 10 participants in each, where people can share their work, and their experiences of working on each week’s project.

The cost is £8 per 4 weeks for unwaged and £16 per 4 weeks for waged. If you’re interested in joining please email me: aliharperwrites@aol.com. If, like me, you are self-employed and you’ve just watched your earnings plummet, please let me know as I’m sure we can sort something out.

I’m really excited to see what we can all make out of this.

Love to everyone, Ali [image error]

I’ve been writing a new book lately – a non-fiction, which is a first for me. I’ve just submitted the pitch for it to my agent – I’m not sure what the title of it is yet, but the tag-line is ‘A Year of Living Creatively’. It’s a weekly creative writing class for those that can’t get to a weekly creative writing class and each week there’s a topic and a related task.

Events of the last few weeks have overtaken me though and it’s become apparent that very few (if any) creative writing classes will be running over the next few weeks. I was teaching last night and realised again how we are all going to have to be more creative to combat isolation. I am convinced that creativity is the answer to these uncertain times.

And then it hit me, that I could perhaps offer an on-line creative writing class, based on the exercises I’ve been writing for the book.

I fired off an email and saw immediately that there was enough interest to make it viable. People who sign up will receive an email from me every Monday morning with the week’s topic attached and a task to do (all Coronavirus friendly tasks of course…)

There will be small Facebook groups, of around 10 participants in each, where people can share their work, and their experiences of doing the task. I will also take part in these groups.

The cost of this would be £8 per 4 weeks for unwaged and £16 per 4 weeks for waged. If you’re interested in joining please email me: aliharperwrites@aol.com. I aim to start the first classes as early as next week, to coincide with the start of spring.

If, like me, you are self-employed and are worried about money, please let me know in your email.[image error]

[image error]A month ago I set out to have a go at 50 creative projects in my 50th year and I honestly thought it would be about week 49 before I got around to this one: start a new thing. After working full-time for a year, I felt so far away from new ideas – had almost got to thinking I’d never have another one.

But ideas are funny like that. You never know when one will turn up out of the blue. And this idea didn’t even do that. I realise now, as I write this, that it’s been loitering around the edges of my mind for years, but I’ve only just noticed. Or I’ve only just paid it the right amount of attention. Maybe the window of opportunity opened. I don’t really know.

But I’ve had an idea and in the last 36 hours I’ve written six and a half thousand words and it’s like they won’t come out of me quick enough. I’m splurging, burping, vomiting onto the paper. Of course it’s all crap, the words are in the wrong order, and they’re jumbled, unpunctuated thoughts but I can’t judge them, I just have to get it out. Throw the clay onto the wheel, worry about shape and form later.

It’s also a great time for a new thing to show up as next week’s creative challenge is to switch the internet off for a whole week.  I can’t believe how much I’m already freaking out about just the thought of it, and I’m convinced I won’t make it. But if I don’t respond to comments – you’ll know why. But maybe my new thing will appreciate the acres of spare time I’ll have.

See you on the other side.