Where Serious Creative Writers Gather to Finish Their Novels
Brought to you by award-winning novelist, Joan Dempsey
We host two writing competitions for novelists each year, with cash prizes.
Join more than 2,400 novelists in the Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio, our free, private online community.
We offer the following online master classes for writers, all of which take place inside our free, private Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio.
Give yourself the gift of time to finish your novel!
June 13 – 20, 2026 in Bar Harbor, Maine
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Meet Our Special Guest, Monica Wood
"There is no such thing as wasted writing."
Our guest for dinner one evening at this retreat is Monica Wood, novelist, memoirist, and playwright. Her most recent novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy, has been published in 22 languages in 30 countries and won a 2017 Nautilus Award (Gold) and the New England Society Book Award. She is also the author of When We Were the Kennedys, a New England bestseller, Oprah magazine summer-reading pick, and winner of the May Sarton Memoir Award and the 2016 Maine Literary Award. Her novel Any Bitter Thing was an ABA bestseller and Book Sense Top Ten pick. Her other fiction includes Ernie’s Ark, which has been excerpted on NPR's "Selected Shorts" and selected by several towns and cities as their "One Book, One Community" read; My Only Story, a finalist for the Kate Chopin Award; and Secret Language, her first novel. Her widely anthologized short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and been featured on public radio. Her nonfiction has appeared in Oprah, The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Parade, and many other publications. Her first play, Papermaker, debuted at Portland Stage in an extended run, its bestselling play ever. Her second play, The Half-Light, debuted at Portland Stage in 2019. Monica is a lifelong Mainer and lives in Maine with her husband.
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Meet Our Special Guest, Robin Talbot
"One of Stonecoast’s fundamental values is to foster culturally diverse writers who have a clear understanding of the role writers play in social activism ... We are very proud of our program ... as one of the nation's top five low-residency programs."
Our guest for dinner on Sunday, June 7, is Robin Talbot. Robin is the associate director of Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine where she is also the faculty advisory to the Stonecoast Review. Robin has written two scripts for documentary films: A Call to Action: A Community's Dream, which outlines the struggle for civil rights in Maine; and Starting Over: Understanding and Supporting Refugee and Immigrant Experiences. Robin holds an MA in arts administration and is an expert in the area of writing for social justice.
She has served as a board member for Black Education and Cultural History, the NAACP Excellence in Education (Portland Branch), the University of Southern Maine’s Multicultural Curriculum Sub-committee, Women’s Resource Center Advisory Board, Festival of Arts and Scholarship committee, and People of Color, Voices in Unity Conference.
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Meet Our Special Guest, Susan Conley
"I realized with certainty, half-way through the book, that I was going to have to write my own darn novel, because the novel that I’d wanted to read—the novel I’d bought and was holding in my hand—was not the novel I hoped it would be."
Our guest for dinner on Thursday, September 3, is Susan Conley. Susan is a Mainer and the author of four books including her new novel Elsey Come Home. Her memoir The Foremost Good Fortune, was the first book she published and it was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick, an Entertainment Weekly Memoir to Read, and the winner of the Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her novel Paris Was the Place was a People Magazine Top Pick, a Slate Magazine Summer Read, and an Elle Magazine Readers Prize Selection. Her third book was a whole other animal: a photography collaboration called Stop Here This is the Place, which was a Real Simple Magazine Must Read and also won the Maine Literary Award for Publishing Excellence.
Susan's writing has appeared in other places like The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, The North American Review, The New England Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She's received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She grew up in Maine and loved living in Vermont, California, Boston and China before she moved back to Portland, Maine, where she lives now.
Susan is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine and is the co-founder of the Telling Room, a creative writing lab for kids in Portland.
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Meet Our Special Guest, Lily King
"There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing."
Our guest for dinner on Tuesday, October 20, is Lily King. Lily grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English Literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and Creative Writing at several universities and high schools in this country and abroad.
Lily’s first novel, The Pleasing Hour (1999) won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, The English Teacher, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Her third novel, Father of the Rain (2010), was a New York Times Editors Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year and winner of both the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Maine Fiction Award. It was translated into various languages.
Lily's novel, Euphoria, won the Kirkus Award for Fiction 2014, the New England Book Award for Fiction 2014 and was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014 and the Amazon Best Books of 2014. Reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, Emily Eakin called Euphoria, “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace.” The novel is being translated into numerous languages and a feature film is underway.
Her new novel, Writers and Lovers, is forthcoming in March 2020.
Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and several anthologies.
