October 2-9
w/Guest Fellows: Heather Aimee O’Neill & Sally Bayley
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.
This year, Heather will be hosting a workshop residency open to writers of all genres. Sally will be leading solo, individualized retreats for writers who are looking to prioritize individualized feedback in the style of an Oxford Tutorial; her residency will not feature a group workshop.
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
In Heather’s residential workshop, 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 Heather’s supervision. 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.
In Sally’s residency, writers will have the opportunity to submit a more extensive excerpt for feedback (up to 10,000 words). Each writer will receive 4-5 hours of individualized tutorial learning, as well as a recommended plan of individualized study for the week and guidance for mapping a larger project. We recommend this residency for writers working on a full manuscript, who wish to prioritize their own writing time and forego the group workshop. This residency will feature a 30-minute fellow’s chat, and writers within the cohort will have the chance to socialize and collaborate in optional seminars and non-writing hours.
After attending any 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?
How do I write something that has trans-media potential?
The Fellows
Cohort Six: Led by Heather Aimee O’Neill
Heather Aimee O’Neill has worked with hundreds of novelists, memoirists, short-story and essay writers in her roles as the assistant director of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and as an independent editor and writing coach. She helps writers start, finish, polish, and find publication for their work. Many of her students and clients have gone on to publish with major publishers, including Viking, W.W. Norton, Harper Collins, Double Day, Flatiron Books, and Simon & Schuster, among others. As a Lambda Literary Poetry Fellow, Heather co-authored the poetry collection "Obliterations" with Jessica Piazza, published by Red Hen Press. Additionally, her poetry chapbook, "Memory Future," earned the University of Southern California’s Gold Line Press Award, selected by judge Carol Muske-Dukes.
Cohort Seven: Led by Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a child, she absorbed the sounds and rhythms of poetry, ballads and folksongs, and these patterns inform the structure of her story-telling. In 1990, Sally was the first child to go to university from West Sussex County Council Care services. She studied English at St Andrews University, and then went to America, where she taught aesthetic education in midwestern schools and universities and foundation arts courses to adults in inner city Ohio. She is interested in the Liberal Arts model of education and believes anyone can think or write to a high level with the right encouragement and practice. One reader has described her books as rhapsodies which means ‘to stitch a song’.
She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction interested in the shifting relationship between genres. Girl with Dove (William Collins, 2018), is a literary coming of age story. It has been lauded as a completely original work that invents a new genre. The second part of this sequence, No Boys Play Here (William Collins, January 2022), combines forms of drawing and song with scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. Both are literary experiments that remain true to unconscious instincts and impulses: the life of the body as it meets with the imagination. The final part of the trilogy, The Green Lady (William Collins, July 2023) sees the child-narrator complete her journey from reader to writer with the help of folklore and the laws of nature, guided by the histories of ancestors and ancestral spirits introduced to her through her grandmother’s knowledge of the natural world.
Sally is currently working on Pondlife, a fictional biography of two women living in a provincial seaside town. Pondlife is inspired by Virginia Woolf's "Lives of the Obscure" and questions our current social media habits as well as the spreading /intensifying epidemic of loneliness.
Sally also hosts and performs the highly successful immersive podcast, A READING LIFE, A WRITING LIFE, which offers innovative forms of storytelling set to music and soundscapes as well as creative prompts for writers, readers and creatives.
Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches on the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.
Info & Lodging
Dates:
October 2-9, 2024 (arrival on the 2nd and departure on the 9th)
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