Women and Power
Dear friends and fellow readers,
I’m thrilled to announce To the Lighthouse’s first retreat for readers:
WOMEN AND POWER: A Retreat for Engaged Readers
Thursday - Sunday, August 24 - 27, 2023
Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove CA
The heart of the retreat is a series of conversations with major authors writing and thinking about women and power.
Meet Ava Homa, journalist, activist, and award-winning author of the novel Daughters of Smoke and Fire. In different settings across North America and Europe – including in the United Nations, Geneva – Homa has delivered speeches on Kurdish women's triumphs and struggles, human rights in Iran, writing as resistance, unveiling through voice, the Iranian women's movement, and many other topics. Joining in person, she will discuss her novel and the recent demonstrations for women’s freedom in Iran.
Meet Rebecca Donner, the author of the instant New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which chronicles the last ten years in the life of Mildred Harnack, the only American in the leadership of the German resistance during WWII. The book won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the 2022 PEN /Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, among many others, and was selected as a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 and a Best Book of 2021 by many outlets. Joining virtually, she will discuss Harnack’s remarkable life and work.
Discuss Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own. This treatise on women and creativity is as essential today as it was when Woolf wrote it. To the Lighthouse founder Jennifer Carson will guide the group through the book, highlighting key passages and ideas. The presentation will provide a container that deepens the group’s engagement with the book and its ideas on women’s creative potential and allows us to apply its insights to our own lives.
The retreat will be held at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, designed by Julia Morgan, the famed Arts & Crafts architect and the first female architect to be licensed in the state of California.
A readers’ retreat must include time and space to read! Conversation and community time are balanced with afternoons free to relax, read, and stroll the Monterey Bay’s spectacular coastline. The conference grounds are located along a protected marine reserve, with miles of walking trails, in one of the most inspiring places on the West Coast. All meals are included (except one dinner), so you can fully give yourself to the retreat experience.
I hope you’ll join us to discuss and celebrate the lives of powerful women, to inspire and be inspired, in an exquisitely nourishing setting.
As always, please reach out with questions or requests. I love hearing from you!
Yours in all things literary,
Jennifer