A writing retreat in England is special. A writing retreat in Devon, arguably one of the most beautiful counties in the country, makes a brilliant setting for creative inspiration: the moment when a poet reads a line aloud in a room and the air changes. The conversation that begins over dinner and is still going at midnight. The walk through a landscape that unlocks something in your writing you have been circling for months. The particular alchemy of human beings gathered in one place, for one purpose, with nowhere else to be.
Writing retreats matter. And this is why, in April 2027, I am bringing together two of the most extraordinary creative voices in Britain for a weekend at Ashley Court in Devon that I believe will be unlike any writing retreat in England you have attended before.
The Writing Retreat in Devon
Writing retreats in England and the United States have a long and distinguished tradition — and for good reason. There is no substitute for gathering in person, away from the ordinary demands of life, in a beautiful place, with extraordinary people. The conversations that happen at a writing retreat are different from the conversations that happen online. They go deeper, range further, and stay with you longer. You leave not just with new craft tools but with something harder to name: a renewed sense of who you are as a writer and what your work is for.
Ashley Court in Devon is the perfect setting for exactly this. Tucked into the Devon countryside, it is the kind of place that does the work of a writing retreat before the first workshop even begins — simply being there, surrounded by the landscape and the quiet, loosens something in the writing. Our winter retreat in January 2025 sparkled and popped!
Gathering in Person Matters
In an age when so much creative learning has moved online — and online learning has genuinely improved, as The Living Line demonstrates — there remains something irreplaceable about the writing retreat as a form. When you sit in a circle with other writers, something different happens. When you walk outside together in the morning with a notebook, the landscape enters the writing in a way it simply cannot through a screen. When you share a meal with a poet of Kathleen Jamie’s stature and ask her, over the table, what she was thinking when she wrote a particular line — that exchange is not something any digital platform can replicate.
The writing retreat is, at its heart, a practice of presence. Of being here, in this place, with these people, at this time. For writers whose work engages with memory, landscape, belonging, and the complexities of a lived life, that practice is not optional. It is the work. The outcome of that moment of sharing and being with others cannot be predicted.
What Awaits You at Ashley Court
Over the course of the weekend — 2 to 4 April 2027 — the writing retreat will move through poetry, prose, song, and the deep questions of what it means to write in the world right now. Writers of narrative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, songs — all invited to grow as artists under expert tutelage.
Kathleen Jamie will lead workshops on poetry and prose, drawing you into the line, the image, and the art of attentive seeing — an experience that writers at all levels find genuinely transformative. Jon Boden will teach the craft of songwriting across the weekend and then, in one of those closing moments that retreat participants carry with them for years, perform the songs the group has made together. I will lead sessions on The Narrative Life — what the tools of the page can teach us about how we live — and on writing narrative nonfiction in an age of artificial intelligence: why the lived, witnessed, embodied story matters now more than ever.
Between workshops there will be long meals, good wine, walks in the Devon countryside, and an after-dinner conversation with Kathleen that will stay with you long after you leave. This is the full, living, breathing version of everything The Living Line promises — poetry, prose, and song, all in one glorious spring weekend in one of England’s most beautiful counties.
Who This Writing Retreat in England Is For
This writing retreat is for writers of all levels — from those just beginning to those deep into an established practice. It is for essayists, memoirists, nature writers, and poets. It is for anyone who has felt that their writing is capable of more than it is currently doing, and who wants to spend a weekend in the company of people who can help them find out what that more might be.
You do not need to have completed The Living Line online course to attend the retreat — though if you have, the weekend will feel like a glorious homecoming.
Places at the Retreat into the Devon Countryside are limited by the nature of the venue and the intimacy we are committed to protecting. This is not a conference. It is a gathering. Limited to 25.
If you would like to join a live online course with Kathleen and Jon this summer, consider The Living Line: Poetry, Prose, and Song with Kathleen Jamie, Chris La Tray, Jon Boden, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Kathryn Aalto (All Levels) – SUMMER TERM (May 10-August 16) – Kathryn Aalto.