2027 Programme Offer: On the Fringe

Our ten land-based writing retreats exploring the extraordinary lives that exist everywhere, often just beyond the reach of our attention.

On the Fringe begins with: 

The extraordinary can be found in any life, if we know how to listen for it. 

The person selling vegetables, repairing a roof, raising five children, driving a bus, or sitting beside you at the pub may contain as much strangeness, beauty, contradiction, history, tragedy, comedy, and imaginative possibility as the explorer, the revolutionary, the celebrity, or the person whose name has already entered history. The artist’s responsibility is to have the ears to hear it and the craft to make others listen.

No life is ordinary when you learn how to listen.

Across the retreats, you’ll explore how writers listen for and represent these lives: how place shapes memory, how work becomes knowledge, and how migration, inheritance, loss, landscape, humour, ritual, and chance accumulate within a single human life. We’re particularly interested in stories that remain on the fringe of literary and public attention—not because the lives themselves are marginal or unremarkable, but because few have stopped long enough to listen.

You’ll consider both sides of that artistic encounter: how to listen attentively to the people around you, and how to transform what you hear and observe into literature without flattening, sentimentalising, or exploiting the lives entrusted to you.

Each retreat combines creative practice, community encounter, and environmental stewardship through The Story Burn’s model of creative reciprocity. You’ll take part in the life of the place: interviewing community members around the week’s theme, listening to local stories, sharing your own work at public story and open-mic nights if you wish, and having the opportunity to put something tangible back into the landscape.

You don’t come to Scotland to simply to take inspiration home. You come to listen, to make, to share—and to leave something growing behind you.

Your week will include workshops, writing sessions, interviews with community members, one-to-one meetings with a published tutor, and a dedicated wild-writing day (weather permitting), culminating in optional practical ecological restoration such as native planting and rewilding alongside local environmental initiatives.

Just as important is the community that forms around the work. Shared meals and informal gatherings bring you into conversation with writers and the wider authorial community, while encounters with editors and other literary practitioners can help you think about where your work might go next and how to carry it forward beyond the retreat.

And the work need not end when the retreat does. You’ll have the opportunity to submit writing you bring with you, develop during the week, or begin here for consideration in The Story Burn’s publications—creating a possible path from encounter, to writing, to a wider readership.

On the Fringe asks you to look where attention does not usually linger, to have ears to hear what is there, and to find the craft that reveals the extraordinary life that may have been in plain sight all along.

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