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2019 Annual Retreat
Wednesday, September 25, 201912:00 PM EDT to Sunday, September 29, 2019
Category: Retreats and Regional Gatherings

The 2019 Annual Retreat returns to Albuquerque, New Mexico, September 25-29, with registration starting at 12pm on Wednesday, September 25th, and our Open Board Meeting beginning at 4pm. Workshops begin on Thursday, September 26th. We're excited to welcome novelist, speaker, and journalist Nicole Blades as the workshop leader.

Whether you are just putting pen to paper for the first time or you have a dozen published novels under your belt, the writer’s life can be a difficult one, fraught with professional pitfalls and emotional highs and lows. We often find ourselves isolated, working alone from a limited perspective on the world. And when rejection inevitably comes, we may find that it hurts so badly and feels so personal that we’re hesitant to try again to get our work out there—especially if we haven’t developed a support system.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! Pairing her inspiring speaking style with practical interactive lessons and activities, Nicole will help us find strength and encouragement from our own writing communities; expand our single-lens perspectives to develop empathy, compassion, and understanding that will power our stories, engage our audience, and attract a loyal readership; and use rejection to fuel our work instead of our doubts.

About Nicole: She started at Essence magazine, later co-founded the online magazine SheNetworks, and worked as an editor at ESPN and Women’s Health. Nicole's work has appeared in The New York Times, Women’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, HealthWashingtonPost.comMarieClaire.comBuzzFeed, and more. Her latest book, Have You Met Nora?, is out now, along with her previous novels The Thunder Beneath Us and Earth's Waters. You can catch Nicole and her sister on Hey, Sis!, their bi-weekly podcast about women finding their focus and place in business, art, culture, and life.