One week after our highly successful May retreat and I am sitting in Costa in Ruthin, evaluating progress to date - and feeling excited for the future...
Having established dates for core retreats through to the end of 2023, we are also looking at adding some more specialist retreats for the autumn: a poetry writing retreat, a photography retreat and a Shakespeare-centred retreat are all on the horizon, as the potential of our unique location and places to write (and develop photography skills 😃) become ever clearer. Watch this space!
But it's not only the retreat programme that has developed rapidly: the amazing new images that appear on our website, produced by Sue Warhurst (one of our guests on the May retreat), have really captured the incredible beauty and atmosphere of our location, and inspired me personally to explore the spaces, places and imagery around me with my, albeit antiquated, phone camera! Appreciating the light and shade and colour of the place should have been easy for me, given that my PhD thesis is about all those things 🙄, but seeing them captured so vividly in Sue's images has opened my eyes to the landscape around me in most unexpected ways. If we can make the photography retreat happen, I will be the first to enroll!
On the admin side, we can now take bookings and deposit payments directly through the website and we are also running a series of google ads and working on our search engine optimisation (SEO) to help get us higher up the rankings on google. I am also exploring ways to develop our instagram presence with more of the glorious visual imagery from our surroundings.
So the present evaluation, as I enjoy my morning coffee and lemon cake 😊, is that the last few months have not only been a successful beginning for A Place to Write but, despite the cost of living crisis and its obvious impact on everyone's disposable income, the future of our fledgling project looks more exciting and rewarding than I ever imagined.
As someone recently said to me: 'I think what you have here is even more amazing than you realise'. I'm beginning to think they are right 🤗.
[There are still some places available on our June fiction-writing retreat with Emily Barroso: if you've read this blog to here, you deserve a reward 😉 - so when you pay the deposit for this retreat, send me an email quoting 'BlogOfferJune', to get 1/3 off the balance of payment for the retreat 🎁!]
Comments