Forest Cabins, Garden Sheds, and Other Niches: Spaces of Retreat and the Potentiality of Writing
Writing practices have long been associated with withdrawal and retreat, often into nature. From Henry David Thoreau’s cabin in the woods to Virginia Woolf’s garden shed in Sussex, spaces of retreat appear to be central to creative practice. They promise time, focus, and a calmer environment removed from everyday distractions, raising the question of what constitutes an “ideal” space for writing and creative work.
This conference seeks to examine secluded, marginal, and sometimes remote spaces of retreat more closely, with a particular focus on writing as practice. What forms of writing emerge in such settings? How are writers shaped by spaces of withdrawal? Which strategies accompany retreat-based writing practices, for example, walking and writing or a particular attunement to surroundings?
Following the 2025 workshop “The Cabin in the Woods and Other Utopian Confinements: Hopes and Horrors of Living in Small Houses in Remote Areas” at JLU, this year’s workshop places creative practice and writing at the centre of its exploration of spaces of retreat, including cabins, garden sheds, and other hut-like environments.
Author Conversation: Private/Public, Natural/Made: The Textures of Retreat in an Enmeshed Writing Life with Wendy Walters (Columbia University) and Dennis James Sweeney (Amherst College)
What is the role of retreat in the creative act? How does the so-called natural world shift as we step deeper in our writerly relationship to it? And how does retreat as a source of inspiration engage with, avoid, or imagine futures beyond an extractive relationship with the natural world and the people in it? Placing two writers who blur literary genres in conversation with one another—Wendy S. Walters and Dennis James Sweeney—this event explores the edges of the experience of retreat and conceptualizes new continuations for this fraught concept. Walters will read from a new essay “Before The Sheep Meadow: A Lost Neighborhood and the Roots of Belonging.” With a historical example from the 19th century as context, she will discuss some of the moral questions that arise when a living neighborhood is demolished and transformed into an essential public park. How do the conventions of property impinge upon the idea of a public retreat? What happens to the imagination when these moral concerns linger in place, long after the fact? Sweeney will read from You’re the Woods Too, which examines wilderness retreat’s intrinsic tie to patriarchal, exploitative relationships to land and nature. Critique, however, has its limitations, as Sweeney will show in conversation with a previous, unpublished work on the same subject. In You’re the Woods Too, envisioning the possibilities of moss-consciousness (and other lyric alternatives) becomes one potential way out of the morass of extractive inspiration. Together, the writers will open a conversation toward enmeshed involvements in literary/natural retreat, in which the retreat leads us to an examination of the ways the acts of inviting order and disruption might engage similar impulses
Event co-organised by Prof. Dr. Kirsten von Hagen and Carolin Jesussek.
Find the programme below:
