Give Yourself Permission
A Restorative Winter Retreat for Writers
The Fairmont Château Le Frontenac
Quebec City, Canada
Wednesday, March 5 - Sunday, March 9, 2025
Friends & Family BOGO 50% off (11/29/24)
Key to the Castle Workshop
Welcome to our generative workshops where writing, art, and yoga co-mingle.
OUR MISSION AND VISION
As instructors in these forms of art and as active creative citizens in various maker communities, we have witnessed the magic of the multidisciplinary approach. Our mission is to demystify the generative process and offer students a chance to locate their own key to their own castle, no matter where that castle lives. Is it in a physical space? Or, an emotional one? Perhaps, in a place that holds room for both?
We offer adult students a chance to look both inward and outward and see where the paying attention - to body, mind and soul - leads. Our immediate goal is to provide time and space for those individuals who are looking to leave their usual creative comfort zone and locate a new one - for just a day, or a weekend, or even a full week - with our longer vision to grow a supportive community of creative people who nurture and celebrate each other along the way.
OUR PROCESS
In our teaching work together, we regularly offer prompts to our students and ask them to take the ideas or questions into a walk-through nature, then onto their yoga mat, and ultimately to the canvas and / or their blank page. We encourage students to approach their process without judgement and look to nature, our community and their own internal musings for guidance. We promote full engagement with the senses and believe this too offers opportunity to shake up memories and ways of seeing the world: past, present and future.
WHO SHOULD APPLY?
The ideal participant is open to adventure and discovery as a community of artists. One benefit of working as an artist in community with others is the gaining of new insight, particularly when it comes to ways of seeing and valuing their own work—both process and product. This applies on the page, the mat, out in the natural world and on the canvas. An ideal student also recognizes the importance of getting away from their own day to day life to experience the illuminating effects of travel and the sharing of culture—in all ways. Many students attend our workshops to collect fresh understandings of their own promise as artists and to gain the variety of perspectives that come from being in a new place.
ARE YOU READY TO APPLY?
The word courage comes from Old French, corage, which translates to mean heart. We believe our mission, as demonstrated through our workshops, has a beating heart. It pulses and changes and can break and be open.
It takes courage to embark on a workshop away from our comfort zone, perhaps in a foreign country, with new people and routines, to trust that the lasting bonds that are formed and the creative growth that is sparked can become keys to whatever it is an artist hopes to open.
Meet the Team
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Kathy Curto
WRITING INSTRUCTOR
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Patricia Dunn
WRITING INSTRUCTOR
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William Papaleo
PAINTING INSTRUCTOR
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Angela Derecas Taylor
WRITER. FOODIE. YOGINI.
WORKSHOP PLANNER
Testimonials
