September 24-October 1
w/Guest Fellows Adam Leipzig & Ben Taub
Join an intimate group of exceptional writers on a life-changing residency in Greece.
Applications Now Open
Join us for a life-changing week in the verdant escape of Halkidiki Greece. In the company of 9 select writers and a distinguished guest mentor, you will refine your work, hone your craft, and develop your voice.
Engaging with new genres and perspectives, you will be challenged to push the boundaries of your storytelling. Whether you are working on a novel, memoir, play, musical, collection of poems, screenplay, pilot, or other genre-bending pursuit, this is an opportunity to propel your progress alongside a group of exceptional peers.
The Retreat
Stretch your technical capacity and harness the power of long-lasting community
Write, collaborate, and workshop with a group of exceptional writers from across the globe. Rosemary’s House was founded with the mission of providing writers with the environment, expertise, and community to develop their work.
Engaging in intimate group workshops and receiving individualized mentor feedback, you’ll be invited to identify and confront the holes in your writing. Each cohort is curated to ensure that there is a diversity of strengths and expertise so that all participants accelerate their growth. Writing does not have to be a lonely enterprise. Benefit from a community of committed peers and take yourself seriously by devoting time and space to your craft.
Find inspiration, ground your creative process, and build a career
Resting in a location that the ancients used to call “phlegra” or “land of fire”, Rosemary’s House lives in communion with a place where thinkers, like Aristotle and Alexander the Great, have inflamed precedent, kindled ideas, and passed the torch.
Taking an applied approach to learning about world-building, sensory motif, time scale, and character, we lead excursions to thought-provoking environments like local archeological sites and islands.
What You’ll Learn
Each week-long retreat is designed to balance collaboration and individual exploration. Invited writers will submit an excerpt of their work for critique ahead of the residency. Most mornings, each cohort will convene for a multi-genre workshop, under the supervision of the guest fellow in residence. The schedule will also feature a formal “fellow’s chat” and Q&A, optional genre-based seminars and writing exercises, and ample time for writing.
You will refine your ability to give feedback and, in doing so, advance your capacity to critique your work. Advancing your understanding of dialogue, plot, structure, world-building, character, and narrative, you will expand your toolkit and leave with an inspiring community of collaborators to serve you throughout your career. After attending a Rosemary’s House residency, you will have life-long access to the RH alumni community.
Developing Craft
How do I make my writing more immediate?
Is my crutch plot, landscape, or character?
What is the heart of my story?
Building Community
How do I work with writers across genres?
How do I build the stamina to finish a long-form project?
What audience will my work appeal to?
Finding Professional Direction
How can I work towards making a living in writing?
How do I find an agent and get published or produced?
How do I write something that has trans-media or multi-season potential?
The Fellows
Photography by Michael Bezjian
Cohort Four: Led by Adam Leipzig
Adam Leipzig is a filmmaker, producer, educator, and author. His work focuses on quality features and documentaries made with exceptional collaborators; establishing supportive opportunities for content creators; and sharing skills and knowledge to expand access and careers for upcoming generations. He has worked with more than 10,000 creative artists in film, theatre, television, music, dance, poetry, literature, performance, photography, and design.
As senior executive at Walt Disney Studios, president of National Geographic Films, and working independently, Adam has been a producer, distributor, or supervising executive on 38 films that have disrupted expectations, including March of the Penguins, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Dead Poets Society, Titus and The Way Back. Adam's movies have won or been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, 11 BAFTA Awards, 2 Golden Globes, 2 Emmys, 2 Directors Guild Awards, 4 Sundance Awards, and 4 Independent Spirit Awards. Collectively, his projects have generated over $2 billion in revenue on $300 million production spending, and twice he has been responsible for the “most profitable picture of the year.” A Plastic Ocean, one of his recent documentaries, has inspired more than 100 new laws around the world, and was invited to the United Nations, and US Embassies around the world, where Adam moderated discussions with international scientists and environmental policymakers. Through his company Entertainment Media Partners, Adam has guided and advised dozens of companies and individuals in film production, international finance, and high-impact storytelling.
Adam’s upcoming films include the accidental romance Sicilian Holiday, directed and written by Michela Scolari; the Galapagos adventure feature documentary Lions of the Sea, directed by JAMAICANOPROBLEM, the nom de cinéma of Ecuadoran filmmaker Luis Felipe Fernández-Salvador y Campodonico; and the science and policy short film Nature’s Guardians: Lions of the Sea.
Adam is CEO of MediaU, the first entertainment industry ed-tech platform. MediaU provides online film, television, and media training centered around accelerating careers and scalable mentoring. MediaU’s courses are facilitated by currently working media professionals in order to give participants hirable skills.
Adam has a history of working with artists as they explore new realms of their creativity – including producing or supervising the first films directed by Jon Turteltaub, Julie Taymor, Joe Johnston, Cherien Dabis, Michela Scolari, and Mary Agnes Donoghue, and the first plays directed by Robert Altman. He has also worked with many established directors, including Robert Benton, Lu Chuan, John Curran, Barry Levinson, Dan Petrie Jr., Donald Petrie, Roger Spottiswoode, Fernando Trueba, Peter Weir, and Peter Yates. Actors he has worked with include Ellen Burstyn, Nicholas Cage, Colin Farrell, Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah, Ed Harris, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Jessica Lange, Queen Latifah, Julianne Moore, Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Saoirse Ronan, Forest Whitaker, Robin Williams, Bruce Willis, and Elijah Wood.
Adam is the author of two books published by Macmillan, Filmmaking in Action and Inside Track for Independent Filmmakers.
Adam serves as professional faculty at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in both the MBA and Executive Education programs. He has advised and trained senior leaders in some of the largest companies in the world, including Google, Salesforce, Lam Technologies, US State Dept., Adobe, Apple, international government entities and media hubs, and more.
Adam began his career as one of the founders of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. As the first dramaturg in the United States outside of New York City, he collaborated with contemporary playwrights and directors, and translated works from French, Italian and classical Greek. In 1985 the theatre company built and opened the Los Angeles Theatre Center, a four-theatre, 1200-seat performing arts complex in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. As both producer and dramaturg for the center, Adam produced and supervised more than 300 music and dance concerts, performance art events, and produced the early works of then-emerging playwrights Jon Robin Baitz, David Henry Hwang, Donald Freed, Reza Abdoh, Marlane Meyer, Charles Marowitz, Mabou Mines, William Mastrosimone, Michael Frayn, Steve Carter, and Miguel Piñero. He continues to produce theatre from time to time.
Adam publishes the popular digital magazine Cultural Daily, a curated forum for creative people expressing their perspectives on our culture. To date, Cultural Daily has published more than 4,000 writers, including 1,500 poets. Adam holds a degree in Literature from Yale University. He also publishes DCReport, which focuses on perspective and policy.
Cohort Five: Led by Ben Taub
Ben Taub is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He has written for the magazine about jihadism, crime, conflict, climate change, exploration, and human rights, on four continents and at sea. In 2020, he won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for his work on the lasting effects, on former detainees and guards, of American abuses in Guantánamo Bay. He has also received a National Magazine Award, two consecutive George Polk Awards, a Livingston Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, and other honors, and his work has appeared in recent editions of “The Best American Magazine Writing” and “The Best American Travel Writing.” Taub also received the ASME Next Award for Journalists Under 30, and was named one of Forbes's 30 Under 30 in Media.
Info & Lodging
Dates:
September 24- October 1, 2024 (arrival on the 24th and departure on the 1st)
Address:
Rosemary’s House
Nitiki, Sithonia
Greece
Location / Travel:
Rosemary’s House is located on Halkidiki’s second peninsula, Sithonia. It rests between the villages of Nikiti and Marmaras, perched on a cliff that overlooks the Aegean Sea. We provide complimentary airport transfer from the local airport Thessaloniki (SKG). The journey is about one hour by car.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or need assistance.
Lodging:
While Rosemary’s House, its common spaces, private pool, and private beach are open to all attending writers, we house the majority of our writers in accommodations in neighboring hotels and houses. All accommodation options are within walking distance of the main house, and we additionally operate a shuttle bus that is available to all writers throughout the day. Fresh linen and clean bedding are provided in each room at the beginning of the retreat. Attending writers can opt for various tiers of housing and privacy, which are detailed here.
Meals:
Acclaimed local chefs and taverns cater all meals, providing a hearty Mediterranean diet of freshly-caught fish, regionally sourced vegetables, and locally-pressed wine. Attendees will have access to a plentiful garden on the premises, as well as daily access to the breakfast buffet at the neighboring five-star hotel Athena Pallas. We work with our partners to ensure that we can accommodate dietary restrictions and allergies and provide all participants with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Vaccination:
To ensure everyone’s safety and well-being, we ask that participants have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 when attending the retreat. If you are not fully vaccinated at the time of the retreat, we require proof of a negative COVID-19 test within 48 hours of the retreat start date.
Pricing & Application
Your admission includes full access to the retreat, all guest workshops, group excursions, airport transfers (SKG), 6 nights/7 days of beautiful accommodation, and full catering, which includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We have a team of acclaimed local chefs who will be preparing our beautiful, nutritious cuisine. It does not include the cost of your flight. Our standard admission rates include shared lodging, but you can upgrade to a private room. Our private options are detailed here.
Our early-bird rate is available to attendees who apply up to two months before the start date of the retreat.. As our admissions are rolling, we can’t guarantee that spots will remain available, so we encourage you to apply at your earliest convenience. With only 10 spaces available in each cohort, our process is selective, and we’re looking for motivated and talented writers who are ready to harness the opportunity that this experience provides. We look forward to receiving your application.
Early bird tuition: €3995
Standard tuition: €4995