A life is told in stories.
We help you capture the experiences, relationships, and lessons that have shaped your life, transforming them into a beautifully written memoir to share with your children, grandchildren, and generations who may never meet you, but who will nonetheless be impacted by your legacy.
You are cordially invited to a two-week retreat, where you will make sense of your life stories, extract the lessons, and decide how these lessons should shape future generations.
Most people in your position leave their loved ones a trust, a portfolio, and a set of house keys. We want you to leave something much more valuable: a deep understanding of the story of your life, memorialized as a book, so that your legacy stays in the family for generations.
What is a memoir writing retreat?
You will spend two weeks at a private estate or luxury resort in a small group, making sense of your life, finding the shape of its story, and beginning to write your memoir.
Who are memoir retreats for?
Most participants have spent decades building companies, institutions, and families. They have built a legacy. Now, they want to make sure that they memorialize their wisdom so they can leave it to their families as an heirloom.
The finished book is never the most valuable heirloom. The more valuable heirloom is invisible. When you write the story of your life, you make meaning of your experiences, extract the lesson these experiences taught you, and decide how the story should be told so that it strengthens the generations who come after you.
What should I expect during the two-week retreat?
Each day sets aside time for writing, one-on-one editorial guidance, and structured exercises built over three decades of memoir work. Exercises are drawn from research on family resilience and will help you find meaning in your life experiences, turn regrets into family wisdom, and tell the hard parts in a way that leaves you stronger for having written them.
You cannot see the shape of your life from inside your own hectic calendar. The retreats therefore include unscheduled time to explore nature, rest, and reset.
Every Retreat Begins With a Conversation
Tell us a little about your project, and we’ll schedule a call to talk through the story, the timeline, and what the next steps would look like.
Where are retreats held?
Retreats are held at private estates and luxury resorts chosen because they make sustained, serious work possible. Possible settings include a hacienda in the Santa Barbara wine country, an oceanfront estate in Hawaii, and a farmhouse deep in the English countryside. Each property is chosen for its natural beauty, refined accommodations, privacy, and exceptional hospitality. Guests enjoy the comfort of a luxury retreat, with the peace and freedom to focus on their writing.
how much do your memoir retreats cost?
Cost depends in part on the location and the number of attendees. That said, the retreat is a significant investment, more than a conference or a holiday, and priced accordingly. The luxury location is the means, but it is not the outcome. Instead, you will leave with the architecture to hand your life lessons to the people you most love.
Will I Leave the Retreat with a Finished Book?
It is possible to complete the manuscript during the two-week retreat, but you will more likely leave with the entire first draft outlined and a clear plan for finishing the book. The two hardest parts of any writing any memoir—the first draft and the architecture—will be behind you.
You will also not leave alone. Your accountability group and book shepherd will keep meeting after the retreat ends, so the momentum you build carries the manuscript through to its completion.
How is this different from Hiring a ghostwriter?
When you hire a ghostwriter, you speak your story, and the ghostwriter writes it. The ghostwriter also largely shapes your memoir, deciding where the story is going, which moments carry the meaning, and where to press you for more details.
Memoir retreats are for people who want to write their own story. You will learn how to find the architecture of a life, where its meaning is hiding, and how to get it onto the page.
Neither is better; they are purely a matter of preference.
With a ghostwriter, your part is to talk. The ghostwriter does the rest: the sense-making, the structure, the writing of a book in a voice built to sound like yours. It is a generous, unhurried way to be listened to, and your effort is measured in conversations.
But some people don’t want to hand their story off. They want to decide for themselves what mattered, what the lessons were, what they’d do differently. That deciding is its own kind of heirloom, and it is the focus of the retreat.
Ghostwriting also runs on a different clock. It unfolds over many months, scheduled through a life that’s still going on around it. Much of the early work consists of bringing the ghostwriter up to speed: You’ll explain your family dynamics, timeline, and context necessary before work can begin. At a retreat, that phase doesn’t exist. You arrive already knowing everything. Two weeks accomplishes roughly four months of what you would do with a ghostwriter at an ordinary pace.
Do I need to be a writer?
No.
The writing process itself is likely more accessible than you might expect. We have created structures for every part of the work: exercises that surface the stories, templates that hold the architecture, and tools that turn a morning of talking into pages you can shape in the afternoon. Every exercise is designed for people who have never written anything longer than a wedding toast, but if you get partway in and decide you’d rather have it written for you, that’s an easy conversation. Some people come to the retreat and discover they love the writing. Others discover they’d rather talk, and we finish the book that way. Both are good outcomes, and either way, you will leave the retreat with the hard part behind you.
