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.
Published 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.
Elements of the Gathering: Conversations and Collaborations; Reading, Writing, and Relaxation
Included in the cost of the retreat:
Montréal Embodiment Experience
with Anne Bergeron
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.
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
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.
Wednesday January 21 lunch discussion: “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
