Rainforest Writers Retreat 2026
In late February I attended the Rainforest Writers Retreat, hosted at the Rainforest Resort Village at Lake Quinault on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. It was four-ish days with a cabin to myself, focused on resting, thinking, and writing, and especially after how intense the first six weeks of 2026 ended up being for me, it was much-needed and well-timed.
Plenty of other writers attended the retreat, and I met zero of them, and I feel a little bit bad about that! But what I needed most from this trip was isolation, not connection, and I leaned hard into that. I wouldn’t want to stay in that mode forever—in fact, I found the retreat about one day too long for my comfort, as I started to miss home—but it was what I needed right now.
My goal was to focus on getting a single long-form work off the ground. When I registered a few months ago, I meant to pick an idea and do some initial research and outlining beforehand, so I could spend the retreat focused on drafting, but with all the publishing work that came up at the beginning of the year, that just didn’t happen. I arrived at my cabin on Wednesday afternoon with absolutely no clue what project I was going to be working on... and started from there.
I worried that I needed to make this time somehow “worth it”, like if I didn’t hit a high enough word count or some other arbitrary metric then it would be “wasted” and make it less likely that I’d get to try something like this again in the future. That anxiety was unhelpful, and it took intense, conscious effort to remind myself—as Brianne also kept reminding me—that it’s okay if all I end up doing is resting, or thinking, or reading, or whatever, because whatever I end up doing will have been what I needed.
To wit, I spent most of Thursday exhausted and useless. You know that feeling after you’ve been working so hard for so long and you finally stop and your body just sort of... shuts down? Yeah: I napped a lot. I felt frustrated about that—“I should be writing!”—but I kept telling myself, this is what you need right now.
The slow Thursday paid off with a burst of renewed energy and focus on Friday. I picked a concept and worked out most of an outline, and I spent Saturday refining it and plugging holes and tying in loose ends. The book I actually write will, of course, deviate from this as my plans come into contact with reality and characters develop their own ideas of where the story should go and all that, but I’m a planner by nature and this is my foundation and starting point: nothing happens without it, and now I have it.
I’d like to do some more short fiction this year as well, if I can, but this long-form project—details to come later!—is my primary writing focus for 2026, and if I make it to publication, it will be fair to say my debut was born on the shores of Lake Quinault.
