Cross-Border: A Montréal Environmental Writers’ Retreat
January 19th-25th, 2026 (7 days, 6 nights); $2450 USD
Bring your significant other: staying in same room, without conference attendance (includes welcome dinner, breakfasts, and spa discount): $500 USD
Click here for day attendance for Québec residents. Click here to ask for European discount.
Environmental Writers in all genres are welcome
Are you feeling exhausted by the onslaught of attacks on the environment and on environmentalists in the United States? Do you crave community and connection with like-minded authors? Take a week to relax in a community of Canadian and US environmental writers, and leave refreshed and inspired to continue our work. This intimate conference (capped at 15 resident participants) is a time to rest, reset, and return ready to continue the essential work we do. It will culminate with a public reading (with book vending) to help us transition smoothly into facing our audiences again.
Do I need to speak French?
No. Canada speaks both English and French, and although French is the first language of Quebec, everyone—-especially in this part of the city, which focuses on visitors—-speaks at least English and French (most, another language as well).
Elements of the Gathering: Conversations and Collaborations; Reading, Writing, and Relaxation
Montréal Conversations
Beginning at the welcome dinner Monday January 19th, and continuing at lunch on Tuesday January 20th: Visions for the Future—-Non-traditional responses to the climate disaster, a conversation with Lise Weil around dreams, an experiment in trusting body intelligence, plant intelligence, animal intelligence. Our guides will be your dreams and material drawn from the Dreams Before Extinction anthology.
Lise Weil is editor of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, an online journal devoted to healing our broken relationship to the earth. She was founder and editor of the US feminist review Trivia: A Journal of Ideas (1982-1991) and co-founder of its online offshoot Trivia: Voices of Feminism, which she edited through 2011 (www.triviavoices.com). Her memoir, In Search of Pure Lust (She Writes Press, U.S., Inanna Press, Canada) was a finalist for an International Book Award. She lives in Montreal and taught in Goddard College’s Graduate Institute, where she helped found a concentration in Embodiment Studies. www.liseweil.com
Wednesday January 21st, lunch discussion: Mapping our Lyric Ecologies with Sarah Wolfson
A conversation with Sarah Wolfson about environmental poetry’s capacity to complicate our sense place. If we consider ecology as encompassing all forms of interconnectedness, new factors worthy of our poetic attention emerge: sound, history, language, work, liminality, access, infrastructure, scale, decay. Which layers of ecological mapping help define our own written voices? Which layers do we overlook in our lyric approaches to place? And how might radical shifts in scale alter our sense of environment? Ecologies can, after all, be as broad as watersheds or as small as a toddler poking at an anthill in a sidewalk crack. Throughout the discussion, we’ll be guided by poet Camille Dungy’s assertion that “environment is a set of circumstances as mundane as the choice of paths we take to get home.” The discussion will also highlight the work of several contemporary Canadian poets writing environment in the broadest sense of that word.
Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, (Green Writers Press, 2019), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in journals across Canada and the U.S. including The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Geist, Arc, and Prairie Fire. Her work has been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. It has also been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and twice named notable a poem in Best Canadian Poetry. She has received support from The Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Sage Hill Writing Retreat. Originally from Vermont, land also known as Ndakinna, she is a longtime resident of Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, where she teaches poetry and creative writing at McGill University. You can find her at: https://www.sarahwolfsonwriter.com/.
Thursday January 22nd lunch discussion: Green to Grey a conversation with Ian Thomas Shaw about calling to environmental action via literary arts (various genres)
Ian Thomas Shaw is a Canadian novelist, who writes both under the unusual pen name Con Cu (owl in Vietnamese) and his own name. The pen name was derived from a nickname given to him by a Vietnamese friend, whose stories about Vietnam and coming as a child to Canada inspired his first novel, Soldier, Lily, Peace and Pearls. Shaw was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. He worked as a diplomat and as an international development worker, living in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. He currently lives in Aylmer, Quebec (just outside of Ottawa). His second novel, Quill of the Dove, is a blend of literary fiction and political thriller set against the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Quill of the Dove was published by Guernica Editions in Spring 2019 and optioned for a TV limited series by Original Pictures in June 2019. The novel was subsequently translated and published by Éditions David (French translation), Dokusou ediciones (Spanish) and Literaturwissenschaft.de (German). Shaw is the founder of Deux Voiliers Publishing, the Prose in the Park Literary Festival and the Ottawa Review of Books. Shaw is also a translator of literary fiction: Choosing Eleonore (from French, Guernica, 2021) and Treize pierres (from English into French, DVP, 2024). Shaw co-edited The Marginal Ride Anthology for DVP in 2019 and the Green to Grey anthology of environmental fiction for Guernica Editions in 2025. His website is www.ianthomasshaw.com.
Additional Discussion, Wednesday Jan 21st, 3pm: “Artivism” is activism through art. Explore together how we do this work, and how our work can overlap and support each other. Introduction of the Montreal poetry map project.
Lis McLoughlin, PhD is the founder and director of NatureCulture® www.nature-culture.net (you are on this website now), a publishing company through which she directs the Writing the Land® Project www.writingtheland.org, which pairs poets with conserved lands, and creates anthologies sold for land conservation. As of 2025, Lis works with over 350 poets and 150 land conservation organizations, mostly in the USA, and has published 16 Writing the Land anthologies and 9 other books about Nature. She works at the intersection of arts, environment, and social justice, and holds annual international in-person retreats for environmental writers. Lis has degrees in Civil Engineering, Education, and Science and Technology Studies. She lives off-grid in Northfield, Massachusetts and part-time in Montréal, Québec.
NatureCulture® Publication
Reading and Vending
Those who wish may read at our culminating public reading January 24th at Hôtel Gault, with the opportunity to vend books via our partner bookstore Librarie Bertrand (a drink and nibblies also included)
Montréal Embodiment Experience
with Anne Bergeron
Montreal, city of water, is co-created with the St. Lawrence, with hidden rivers driven underground, its ancient stones from nearby islands, and the faded outline of the fortified wall form the geometry of place. What creative rivers are moving in us? What is unseen in us that wants to come into the emerging light of the new year? How do we experience ourselves in place?
We will explore our bodies as a conduit to imagining and knowing this place’s unseen histories, experiencing embodiment practices that will help us create connections with this place that we can then use on our own private wanderings. Through breath work, visualization, and mindful attentiveness, we will awaken and tune ourselves to the stories of that arise in us as we respond sensorily to this place.
NB. This workshop is included in the cost of the retreat, is linked to the Montréal mapping project, and includes both embodiment prompts and a research guide.
Anne Bergeron
The Old Port of Montréal
Book included
Montreal Cultural Experience
with Artist Carole Baker
An Old Port restaurant photographed by Cate Woolner
Explore the Cultural attractions of the Old Port
Old Montreal has a lively culture of galleries, cafés, restaurants, bookshops, theaters & church concerts. In addition, there is an Indigenous cultural space and artist co-ops (including a residence).
Outsider artist Carole Baker looks forward to introducing you to some of the artistic offerings of this vibrant neighborhood via a leisurely, casual walk of exploration and discovery.
About Carole Baker
Carole, formerly of Toronto where she worked as a counsellor/psychotherapist for 20 years, retired to Montreal 15 years ago. Her love affair with Quebec and French started when she was 15 when she travelled to Shawinigan from Hamilton where she grew up to be part of a French exchange program. As a trained expressive arts therapist Carole, for nine years, had the privilege, as part of her work, of developing and co-facilitating an expressive arts group for lesbians, bi and trans women titled Outside the Lines. Since retirement, creativity remains a strong focus in Carole’s life. She enjoys a daily stitching practice that often incorporates found objects, including rust and making art with her numerous grandchildren and friends. Imperfection is always encouraged. Through long, wandering alley and neighborhood walks and many guided walks Carole’s time in Montreal has been a joyful time of discovery (including of discarded street objects) that happily never seems to end.
Rue Ste Helene, right in the heart of the port (our starting place—our hotel is the lit doorway on the left)
