Patricia founded Patchwork Farm Retreat in western Massachusetts 30 years ago, has led writing retreats there since 1992, and internationally since 1996. She celebrates our relationship to the earth as sacred, to writing as a way of finding what is deepest within us, and to teaching writing as a participatory, supportive endeavor. She is excited at the promise these retreats hold for all of us.
The writing process is based on the method developed by Amherst Writers & Artists, of which Patricia is an affiliate and national trainer of workshop leaders. This method provides beginning and experienced writers with a supportive, encouraging context in which to write.
Patricia has spent much of her life as an advocate: for women, for civil rights, for peace, for a healthy environment, for small farms and rural communities, for the arts. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, she moved north years ago with her children. She is a business owner and trail walker, and has been director of several organizations, including women's centers, community economic development corporations, district congressional offices, and served as an elected county commissioner for four years. In 1985, when she joined Pat Schneider's Amherst Writers & Artists writing workshop, she finally found the courage to write for others to read.
Patricia holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College, and completed her undergraduate degree at Smith College, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1970. She is a n affiliate of Amherst Writers & Artists, and a member of the Berkshire Writers Room, the Texas Writers League and the American Poetry Society. Her poetry, fiction and feature articles have appeared in a variety of journals & anthologies, The Los Angeles Times, Hampshire Life, and The Boston Sunday Globe. Her poems have most recently appeared in The Berkshire Review, Upstreet, Sanctuary: Magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and Crossing Paths: An Anthology of Poems by Women, Mad River Press.Her work has been featured in the Berkshire Review, which nominated her poem, "Two Hundred Wings" for a Pushcart Prize." She was supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to perform her work as a benefit for the Miniature Theatre of Chester. Her book of poems, A Kind of Yellow, won Writer's Digest's International competition for self-published books of poetry andis available at the Patchwork Press Shop.
Patricia is responsible for the writing program at all retreats.
Click here to read "How I Came To Lead Writing Workshops and Changed My Life"
In Patricia's writing circles, beginning and experienced writers find a supportive, encouraging context from which to write from their deepest selves. Participants write in response to exercises Patricia offers; they are invited to read their work aloud. Group members affirm what they like and what stays with them.
In all of her retreats and workshops, Patricia encourages the use of certain guidelines in responding to new writing. New writing which has not been edited is like a new baby: it’s vulnerable and easily damaged by negative judgements. To maintain a safe, confidential, sacred space in which to write:
We honor the writer by listening carefully
We treat everything as fiction
We refer to the narrator/speaker, not to the author, as the voice of the piece
We remember this is not a therapy group
We are free to do what we want and are free to accept or reject the exercises that are offered
We are invited to read respond only with what we like, what stays with us, what moves us—not with how to make it stronger
We stick to the writing, avoiding our own anecdotes and asides
We hold everything in the circle in confidence
Using this gentle but rigorous approach, Patricia offers one and two day weekend retreats at Patchwork Farm, week long retreats internationally, 4-day retreats in Texas & the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and a year-long manuscript critique program.
For more information or to register for a Patchwork Farm event, please email Patricia... and tell us how you heard about Patchwork Farm!
Our Team
Charles MacInerney
Charles is registered with the Yoga Alliance at the 500 hour level (the highest registration currently available), and is the co-founder and serves on the faculty of the Living Yoga Teacher Training Program. He is also the co-founder of Texas Yoga, and helps organize and presents at the Annual Texas Yoga Retreat.
He is a guest writer for Yoga Journal's "Ask Our Expert" column, and has been interviewed for articles in Yoga Journal four times, on yoga retreats, creativity, heart disease, and Yoga for overweight students. One of Charles' essays (written on retreat with Patricia) appeared as the lead essay in a National Chess magazine in India. He has numerous essays published in regional publications through out the US, and on the internet.
Charles MacInerney has studied Yoga and Meditation since 1971. He teaches classes on Yoga, Meditation, Posture, Visualization, Breathing, Balance, Creativity, Concentration and biofeedback for a variety of businesses, corporations and institutions. He has worked with over 12,000 students in Austin, where he lives.
Charles has led over 50 retreats since 1992, including 15 international retreats. For more information please visit his web-sites at www.yogateacher.com& www.expandingparadigms.com.
Jacqueline is a writer and a therapist.She writes short stories, novels, and essays and has been published in Peregrine, Berkshire Review, Kaleidoscope, Earth's Daughters, Anseo, and Hampshire Life. Jacqueline is fiction editor of the on-line Patchwork Journal and is editor of an anthology of Women Writing From Prison. She is the author of Truth, a novel based on the life of Sojourner Truth published by Free Press of Simon and Schuster. Her second novel, Lost and Found was published in April 2007 by Avon Books.
Besides her work as a writer and therapist, the practice of yoga has been a sustaining and inspiring part of Jacqueline's life for nearly 20 years. She has taught Yoga at Patricia's writing retreats in the British Isles since 2001. Jacqueline teaches a restorative style of yoga based on Hatha and Anusara Yoga that is accessible to beginners as well as those who want more challenging poses. Writers can start and end their day by revitalizing, relaxing, and strengthening the body, mind, and spirit.
DM Gordon
Diana holds the M.M., Phi Beta Kappa, from Boston University. She started the Writer-In-Residence program at Forbes Library In Northampton MA, establishing and leading writing workshops and a weekly forum on contemporary poetry. Her prize winning poems and short stories have appeared in a variety of journals. Providing freelance editorial services for poetry and prose, she is also the senior poetry editor for Patchwork Journal. She has led workshops for Word Street, the Great River Arts Institute, and is currently on the faculty of Writers In Progress. She was recently chosen as a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant finalist.
This is Diana's second year as part of the leadership team in our international retreats; she offers workshops on the craft of writing and works with individual writers on their manuscripts.
Celia Jeffries
Celia has led AWA certified workshops for over six years. She has an extensive background in education and publishing and is currently an MFA candidate at Lesley University. Her work has appeared in newspapers and magazines, in the anthology Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper and most recently, in Westview: the Journal of Western Oklahoma.
Celia served as managing editor of the most recent issue of Patchwork Journal and is pleased to join the leadership team of Patchwork Farm Retreats. She offers workshops in the craft of writing for participants in our international retreats, as well as working with individual writers on their manuscripts.
David Clemson
A gifted writer and painter, born and raised in England, David Clemson has Masters Degrees in Research and Statistics, and in Writing Studies. David began his creative writing life at Patchwork's first retreat in Scotland in 2000, but over the years he has writen more than 100 mathematics textbooks for youngsters, their teacher and parents, the newest of which will be published later this year.
He currently leads a writing group in Wiltshire, England and has produced a collection of the group's work to be published this Spring. A journalist published widely in the U.K., including in the Guardian, he has appeared in Television and radio, is a published poet and is completing his first novel and a collection of stories for a memoir. David will lead a craft of writting workshop during our Wales retreat in 2007, and consult with individual writers on their manuscripts.
Dave Schellinger
Retired, Dave now travels, usually with camera in hand, in continual hope of capturing something of the essence of places visited – that "kernel of personality" through which they speak; the mystery of time and place they embody. His career as a geophysicist – where the goal was to obtain ever clearer pictures of earth's subsurface structure and composition, "earth's image" as it were – witnessed continued progress in the art of gathering, processing, and interpreting these earth-soundings. There was a metaphorical side to all this, as with all human activity; Imagining Earth is the book he imagines writing someday, to capture the sense of it.
Dave will lead other digital photographers in our retreat on “walkabouts” to capture some of the unique beauty that is Lake Atitlan and the surrounding communities. This is his sixth international retreat with us.
"There are many things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go on your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished " -- Annie Dillard "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
The Farm
picture by Chris Fraser
Patchwork Farm Retreat is on 103 acres of wooded mountainside just 20 minutes from downtown Northampton in western Massachusetts. The forest of red oak, sugar maple, beech, ash, white, yellow and black birch, white pine and hemlock trees is laced by several miles of beautiful walking trails.
picture by Chris Fraser
High in the center of the land, looking southeast to the Holyoke Range and the Pioneer Valley, sits the little Cottage where we hold creative writing retreats and where we eat delicious meals. The cottage is occasionally available to rent, fully furnished.
Recent visitors to the cottage include a gyre of seagulls, two pileated woodpeckers, a 3-legged doe, ruffed grouse in the sumac, coyotes on the compost pile, a momma Moose with baby, and a one-eared Black Bear known locally as "Lefty". Chickadees, tufted titmice, nuthatch and goldfinch regularly clean out the birdfeeder; and juncoes, bluejays, wild turkeys and squirrels - gray, red and flying - vie for what's left on the ground.
Downhill from the cottage is the Lower Woods cabin, available to those seeking a peaceful, simple and lovely place to work, dream and meditate.
Prayer by Michael Leunig
We give thanks for places of simplicity and peace. May we find such places in ourselves. We give thanks for places of refuge and beauty. May we find such places in ourselves. We give thanks for places of acceptance and belonging. May we find such places in ourselves. May we begin to mend the outer world. According to the truth of our inner life.
From A Common Prayer, Collins Dove (Harper Collins Australia Pty. Ltd.) 1990.
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