Writing Journeys: Prague | St. John | Australia

Writing Journeys

Writing Journeys are individual adventures offered to anyone with a genuine love of writing. These are not simply vacations we take as tourists, or chances to study abroad, but deliberate passages into living the writer’s life. Annual Writing Journeys are offered to the city of Prague in the Czech Republic, the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands and the city of Melbourne, Australia, with a week spent on Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania.

In past generations it was commonplace for artists to journey out into the world as a way of locating the places inside themselves from which they made their art. It was possible for artists to catch an ocean-liner to Italy or Africa, to spend a summer writing a novel in a run-down French cafe or painting seascapes in Morocco. Even American artists of slender means could hop a rail car to the Mission in San Francisco, the Village in New York or the jazz clubs of New Orleans.

The writers who made these journeys went to experience first-hand what it meant to be living, eating, writing and sleeping in a city that inspired them and set fire to their imagination. These days, we spend our time attending to the daily business of living—working, paying the bills and getting the kids through school—while trying to live as artists in the hours left over. Meanwhile, we are living in the first footbreath of the century, an amazing time to be a writer. This is a powerful moment in history to bear poetic witness to what we see, what we remember and all that we can imagine.

Our Writing Journeys offer the opportunity to write from inside a place, witnessing some of the most beautiful and troubled landscapes in the world with the permission and elegant eye of the writer. On these Journeys you will live in a community with a small group of fellow writers working, reading and learning the skills and rhythms that will allow you to get your life into your writing, and daily writing into your life.

Open to any interested student, regardless of level of experience, these Writing Journeys provide a community in which to share your work and the time and space to do the work that matters most—to write.