island – Josephine Moon

This course is HOT!!

By popular demand… this is the SECOND workshop (the first one sold out!)

Writing retreats are, hands down, one of the most important things you can do as a writer. Having just come back from my twice-yearly writing retreat week, I am bubbling with enthusiasm to share the joy. Why not join me for a weekend of writing at Bribie Island (Qld) this October to find the time and space to go deeper.

Are you writing a novel, memoir, short story or lived experience self-help book?

You’re invited to join a small group of fellow word lovers to spend quality time diving deeper into your project.

Writing retreats take us physically out of our everyday, which translates nicely to transporting our minds to different places too. Writers can and will write under any circumstances, if they are so determined. Yet, in my considerable experience of writing retreats, absolutely nothing comes close to the value of dedicated writing time and (possibly more importantly) mental space for our creative brains to expand and grow.

I’ve balanced this retreat with enough structure to give you guidance but also enough free time for you to follow your heart.

Retreat Structure

Our home base will be in the Bribie Island Library on Saturday and Sunday, from 9am to 2pm.
We will spend time talking about our projects and brainstorming our way through problem areas. We’ll practise different ways to access the deeper parts of our characters and their backstories.
We’ll break between 11am and 12pm for coffee and lunch. You can wander solo or join with others to continue chatting over food.
We’ll leave the library at 2pm, at which point, you decide how to best continue your retreat. You might head for coffee and cake with fellow writers and continue book chat, wander the extensive walking path along the foreshore and get some sea air to allow your subconscious some processing time before heading back to your accommodation to write some more, or head out again for dinner. It’s your call.
The theme of this weekend is Diving Deeper, with the focus on adding depth and value to our words rather than racing to add words to our total word count. (Don’t worry, though, we’ll also do that too.)

The maximum number of spaces for this weekend is 7.

Your Investment: $225pp.

(Accommodation is not included. See below for suggestions.)

Yes, Please! I’m in!

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The Area

This lovely library is situated on the foreshore of Pumicestone passage (Bongaree) and is an easy, flat, few minutes walk to cafes, coffee, ice cream, and various shops. I recently ate at Annie Lane cafe every day while on retreat and enjoyed coffee and incredible cakes from Scoopy’s, just over the road. I also enjoyed the foreshore walk, which has a wealth of historical photos, information and quotes to inspire a dozen new stories or characters that you might even weave into your own project.

Accommodation

Bribie Island has a wide range of accomodation options available so you are sure to find something to suit your needs.

Bongaree Caravan and Cabins has simple but affordable options that can suit up to 4 people art once, in some cases. They are also just a stone’s throw from the library!

Big4 also has luxury cabins available.

And of course there are the usual online accommodation searches to find plenty of other options (e.g. AirBnB, Wotif, Booking)

I look forward to sharing a weekend of writing with you soon!

Since I started writing The Cake Maker’s Wish (all the way back in 2015), my imaginary idea of reviving a dying little village by importing people from around the globe has gone a little more global (and viral).

Today, you can buy an Italian house for only 1 Euro, in the same country that previously gave away castles, monasteries and towers. Ireland has called for residents of Australia and USA to emigrate to the tiny island of Arranmore. Spain has had a problem of abandoned villages across the country, so the officials from Galicia set about giving away one of these villages. In all of these examples, the goal has been to give the properties to someone who has detailed plans to renovate, restore and add capital back into the local area, to save a dying population and/or economy, and restore economic trade to the local business owners. This is exactly the premise that I used for the setting of The Cake Maker’s Wish, though at the time, I didn’t know it was really ‘a thing’.

Where it all began…

In 2015 I travelled to the UK on a writing trip to meet with my UK publisher and agent, to delivery an author talk in Abergavenny in Wales and to do research to look for a new story. I travelled with my dad, my sister and my sister’s baby (who was 14 months old). As part of that trip, we rented a stone cottage in the Cotswolds where we based ourselves for ten days and travelled the area from there.

I was lucky enough to get to know some of the locals. Two of them—men who’d grown up in the village in the fifties—made me a cup of tea to tell me about what life was like when they were young. In that conversation, they lamented the fact that the village had changed so much from when it was owned by the Lord of the Manor, which had created a unified, collaborated feel through the workers, with a thriving community spirit. Over time, as the village was sold off, wealthy investors from the city would buy up cottages as holiday homes, but that meant that most of the properties were sitting empty for most of the year. The village couldn’t function as it used to, no longer community-sufficient, with people having to travel further and further away to find work and services and the house prices forcing workers out of the market.

I was really touched by their sadness and went back to my rented cottage and sat down with a notebook and pen and thought, well, I’m a writer, surely I can bring this village back to life on the page. And that’s how it started.

And now…

I confess to being truly delighted that my imagination has conjured something that isn’t completely out of the box at all, that its themes and efforts of small communities trying to survive and hold onto their connections is very real, and that equally real efforts are happening around the world right now to save them. In my heart, I am a girl from the village. I may have been born in Brisbane but I have now spent almost fifteen years living in small country towns. I know the huge beating hearts that live in them and how important it is to support them and celebrate them. This is exactly what my new novel does.

The Cake Maker’s Wish is out 2 June but you can pre-order it now from all good bookstores and online retailers. I look forward to sharing the imaginary village of Stoneden in the Cotswolds with you very soon!