Come write in the Portuguese country-side with me
Reviewing the realties of putting together a full-scale 4-day writing retreat - and planning the next one!
Hi! It’s been a while but I’m back (for the last quarter of 2023, anyway). I don’t know about you, but I love September for planning and resetting. It’s comeback season, baby. A rebirth month. The second January, if you will. I’m currently in the throes of planning the next Take World: a writing and creativity retreat for women that I launched back in May. I’d thought about running a retreat for years, long before I moved to Portugal, and I’m so glad I got this off the ground. Fun was had, words were written, mountains were hiked…and it’s less than 2 months until the next one, which kicks off on November 8th for five nights.
Want to come along - or know anyone else who would? There’s still space!
Take World writing and creativity retreats (so-called in part due to the name of my 2021 travel book, Black Girls Take World) are for women, with the primary focus on women of colour and those from underrepresented backgrounds. They take place in Sintra, a UNESCO-protected town of pine forests and misty hills just outside of Lisbon. Take World offers the chance to work on creative projects with like-minded people, to switch off, write well and eat good, in a beautiful setting for a few days.
Sintra is where the Portugese aristocracy and writers like Hans Christian Andersen used to hang back in the day. Last time we stayed in a charming romantic chalet with rooms that boasted stand-alone baths and floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked green forests and palaces in the distance (Sintra has so many palaces). The whole thing was giving Queen Charlotte-level-bougie.
The next Take World will be in Sintra, in a bigger mansion (that also has a pool!). Similar to last time, we’re having daily yoga with a local teacher, scheduled goal-setting and writing time with unlimited snacks and coffee, on-hand, and vegan/vegetarian lunches prepared each day by a local chef. Dinners are scheduled at some of the best restaurants in Sintra and there’s also a beach hike to the stunning Praia da Ursa beach, and talks from leading authors and agents. (Last time we had Nikesh Shukla and Ore Agabaje-Williams as well as presentations from myself, and my good friend and the incredible author and editor, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, who runs Take World with me.) I’ll also be curating gorgeous goodie bags for all the attendees again; last time they included Portuguese sweet treats, hand-made scrunchies from Nigerian haircare brand, Ori Lifestyle, and of course, some brilliant books.
Take World was a huge success. There’s something quite magical about women coming together from all over the world (we had Brazil, USA and UK in the house) to work on their something they love, undisturbed and uninhibited by expectations from other people. We had journalling and poetry sessions on the beach, 1-on-1 feedback sessions about our writing, and plenty of time to just…be.
For black women to come together and break bread, share ideas and generally just create a vibe, was special - for many reasons. As I’ve written before, leisure travel holds a deep meaning that’s rooted in both the political and the personal for black women. For centuries, the movement of our bodies been tightly controlled and highly scrutinised, our access to leisure travel strictly policed. The wellness and the retreat space is still largely marketed to wealthy non-whites and retains that feeling of being elitist and exclusionary. Add to the fact that neo-liberalism breeds structural discrimination that continues to impact black and brown women more severely than many other groups, and that the publishing industry remains almost exclusively white and privately-educated meaning that POC writers are either low-balled with their advances or overlooked entirely as they are seen as commercial risks, and you can start to understand why we need our own spaces - like Take World.
This is partially why for this next Take World, I decided to open up a fully-funded space to a writer who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to go. We’ve had so many great applications for this, and I hope to continue to offer fully-funded spaces at all future experiences. Seeing the impact of the last Take World reminded me how important it is for women to rest, write and reclaim our time, and money shouldn’t be a barrier to access something like this.
Take World was definitely a lot of work to create. I ended up doing things that I didn’t foresee. When you run a full-scale four-day you wear a lot of hats. I was responsible for everyone’s wellbeing and safety on the hikes. I searched for the fuse box when the power went out, and an iron when someone needed to get ready. I washed pots and pans after lunch to help the chef, and liaised with the photographer about nabbing the drone shots. And of course there was the prep work beforehand too; the near-weekly online promo, the creating of reels and posts, the tracking of online stats, payments, emails, questions etc.
Still, it was undoubtedly the most fun I’ve ever had ‘working’. To hear everyone’s motivations for coming along, their hopes and ideas for their stories, and to talk openly and freely about the things that annoy us about being a creative, was both motivating and affirming. I loved every aspect of planning and finalising the details around Take World and ended up offering coaching and mentoring to two of the attendees, as a thank-you for coming along, and because I wanted to continue nurturing our little community.
I learned a lot about myself and where I want my career to go, too. I love writing on my own terms as a freelancer and author, but I hate the isolation that it so often brings. In my future I can definitely see more hosting, events and mentoring.
There’s still a couple of spaces left for the November cohort in the group rooms (shared with 1 or two other people). We’re doing last-minute discounts on these, so if you register your interest, I can send over photos of the house and more info about the discounts. I’m so excited to get going with the next one and I hope to see some of you there! If not, I hope your Autumn gets off to a fab start and you use this last quarter to prioritise what’s important to you - whether that’s rest, writing, travel or something else entirely.
All my love,
Georgina x