Wuthering Heights Writing & Wellbeing Retreat

Going on these days in Haworth:

Wuthering Heights Writing & Wellbeing Retreat 2018
by Hedge Arts in association with More Love Yoga
Fri, 14 Sep 2018, 17:00 – Sun, 16 Sep 2018, 15:00 BST
With Dr Alexandra Lewis, Ruby Robinson, Bernadette McBride, Karen Podesta.

Channel your inner 'Cathy' and join us in celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Emily Brontë this year. Hedge Arts, in association with More Love Yoga, will be hosting a unique writing and wellbeing retreat in Emily Brontë's homeland, amidst the setting for her acclaimed novel Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë's contribution to literature firmly marked female writers on the literary landscape. For this retreat, women will be walking together, writing together, and being well together.
Featuring special guest workshops with Dr Alexandra Lewis, editor of the forthcoming Norton Critical edition of Wuthering Heights, and Associate Director of the Centre for the Novel, and Yorkshire poet Ruby Robinson, her debut poetry collection, Every Little Sound, was published by Pavilion Poetry, an imprint of Liverpool University Press, in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Best Collection, 2016.
Participants will be based at a Victorian gothic mansion overlooking the wild Pennine moors, and will be welcomed with a guided Wuthering Heights book club dinner on the first night. All participants will make the famous pilgrimage to Top Withens the next day. Creative writing activities will be held along the way there and back. Participants will be treated to a grounding yoga workshop at the summit amidst the ruins of Top Withens; connecting them to the landscape, imagination and soul of Emily Brontë.
All of the creative writing workshops throughout the weekend will have a focus on women and landscape, nature, and place; internal as well as external. We will draw on extracts from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, for guidance and inspiration - a very early example of women's writing that completely captures the 'power of place'. Emily devoted her short life to writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, and both her walks in the moors and her writing were fundamental to her wellbeing and existence as a female in Victorian Britain. To reflect this, both walking and wellbeing activities will feature in the programme. Wellbeing workshops will include expressive arts therapy/writing as therapy, emotional freedom technique (EFT) for writer's block, and yoga for creativity. The programme also includes a trip to the famous Brontë parsonage where participants will write creative responses to the exhibits on display there, including original manuscripts and art. The programme is suited to all levels of writing and yoga, and the walk to Top Withens from the Brontë Parsonage is described as a moderate walk.
Accommodation, the programme with guest speakers, a guided walk to Top Withens, meals and entry to the Brontë Parsonage will all be included in the overall price. Guests just need to purchase their own drinks. Though YHA Haworth is the sleeping base, most events will take place outside to immerse ourselves fully in nature, landscape, and place, and the wellbeing benefits associated with being outdoors.