Last fall, my partner Ray and I had the incredible opportunity to spend two weeks researching and writing on our respective book projects during a writing retreat at Creekside Arts, an artist collective located outside Eureka in Northern California. Creekside Arts is a non-profit organization that hosts an artist residency program every April and artist retreats throughout the year.

The caretakers of Creekside Arts are Rich and Joey McCutchan (Rich also built many of the on-site buildings and is a talented sculptor himself). They were wonderful hosts during our retreat, offering us eggs from their chickens and free use of their herb garden.

The grounds of the retreat had many lovely spots for writing, including a small library, a gazebo (complete with a taxidermied hummingbird in the rafters), and a treehouse studio built near a towering redwood (my favorite place to work!).

Below are a few photos of us writing in and enjoying Creekside Arts’ many on-site buildings (including a greenhouse with a hobbit door).

While my partner worked on his new project (a biography of William Wells Brown), I spent the mornings and afternoons exploring the California Coastal National Monument for a research project and editing a new poetry collection at night.

Many evenings, my partner and I met at Trinidad Beach to watch the sunset together or went on a hike in a locally managed redwood forest just down the road from Creekside Arts. We got to see (and admire) so many beautiful banana slugs during our hikes (“beautiful” and “slug” are two words we never expected to go together).

Below are a few candid snapshots we took.

All in all, Creekside Arts was a wonderful place to shelter from the outside world, to gather new ideas and energies, and to come back to ongoing projects with renewed vigor. I highly recommend a stay there, either through an artist retreat or their residency program.

For more information about the artist opportunities provided by Creekside Arts check out their website.