Storyknife Writers Retreat

Overlooking Cook Inlet and the heart-stopping grandeur of the Aleutian Mountain Range, Storyknife Writers Retreat, a literary nonprofit located in Homer, Alaska, hosts residencies for women from Alaska, across the United States, and internationally. Our mission is to give women writers the time and space to explore their craft without distraction. Storyknife provides women with a community to support their efforts, lifting their voices. Storyknife provides six to eight women each month with an opportunity to write in their own private cabins, joining together each evening for dinner prepared by the onsite chef. During these community dinners, the women form the relationships that support their writing when they return to their daily lives. Storyknife seeks to elevate the voices of women from historically excluded communities, especially Alaska Native and Indigenous women writers.

Storyknife Writers Retreat supports the work of 42-52 women writers each year. Funds raised through Pick.Click.Give allow Storyknife to support women writers from historically excluded communities, especially Alaska Native and Indigenous women. A month spent at Storyknife can provide a woman writer with not only the space to pursue her story, her vision, but also the confidence that her voice and her story matter.

Poet Anne O’Regan said, “My time at Storyknife was magical, mystical, and practical. To live for a time in community with other writers among such deep silence and astonishing beauty was good for both my writing and my soul. It gave me the rare gift of time and space to write, live, and reflect unfettered with the normal tasks of daily life. Thank you, Storyknife.”

Novelist Gwen Florio said, “Storyknife gives a writer something nearly impossible to come by in our clamoring, fast-paced world: stillness. My time there is the highlight of my writing life.”

Novelist Stephanie Cotsrillo’s said that during her residency “I read deeply, finishing six novels and wrote daily, scaffolding a structure and methodology that turned twenty pages of my next novel into more than one-hundred and thirty. How rare to receive this level of respect. How transformative for an artist.”

Storyknife depends on people who share the vision that women writers deserve the time and space to devote to their work, and that women’s stories and can transform the world.