unknown feels: a queer writing retreat
September 8 - September 13
£795
unknown feels: a queer writing retreat by declan wiffen
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
- James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78, The Paris Review.
Unknown Feels starts with the idea that writing has an intimate relationship with the unknown. When we begin, we don’t know which words will come out or in what order. Often we are unsure what it is we are actually writing about. Sometimes we may even be surprised at what turns up on the page. As Queer people, this may be tied up with various fears and struggles—internal & external—to express ourselves, of feelings of having to leave things unspoken, along with not having had the opportunity to explore our own unknowns.
This retreat will offer space and time to write into the unknown and explore writing as a practice that both helps us ‘find out’ things we didn’t know before we put pen to paper and to embrace the inexplicable, the nonsensical, a lack of mastery when it comes to knowledge.
Over the course of four morning workshops we will explore desire & the unspeakable; intuition as methodology; strategic obscurity; bliss & the infinite.
In an additional evening workshop—Writing into the Dark—we will think about the embodied experience of writing at night, trusting senses other than sight to tune into different types of knowing about the environment and our inner lives.
Afternoons will be free time for you to continue writing or explore the local area.
The workshops will be led by prompts that will be suitable for whatever genre you are working in, be that poetry, fiction, non-fiction, or forms that don’t fit these labels.
There will also be an opportunity to have a one-to-one tutorial to speak about your writing projects and get feedback on up to 3000 words.
For more details and booking go to https://writesouthwestscotland.com
8th-13th Sept 2025