The Way of St. Catherine of Bologna: A Writer’s Retreat
A 7-day contemplative retreat in Bologna for women who write, or who know they must, and who are ready to go deeper into that knowledge.
7 Days/6 Nights
Curated Historic Lodging
Daily Contemplative Practice
8-12 Participants
You write because you have to.
Not because it’s strategic or productive or good for your platform. Not because someone told you that you should. Because something in you insists on it, has always insisted on it, even when you’ve tried to ignore it or outrun it or convince yourself it doesn’t matter.
That insistence is a vocation. Vocation, as any honest writer will tell you, is not always comfortable. It asks things of you. It goes quiet at the worst moments. It demands that you keep showing up even when the source feels distant or unreliable or silent. It gives you no guarantee that what you’re reaching toward will come, only the certainty that you have to keep reaching.
This retreat holds all of that honestly. It also holds good wine, long dinners, laughter that arrives unexpectedly, and the particular ease that comes from being in a room full of women who are serious about the same things you are and don’t need to explain themselves. Reverence and levity are not opposites. In Bologna, they are practically the same thing.
This retreat is for women who know that feeling. Whether you’re working on something specific or circling something you haven’t yet named, whether you’ve been writing for decades or have only just admitted to yourself that this is what you do, you are welcome here.
What This Week Holds
Bologna is one of Europe’s oldest university cities, a place where learning, debate, and the written word have been sacred for nearly a thousand years. We use the city as our first teacher.
The week moves between two kinds of time: structured writing sessions in the morning, held in a quiet and dedicated space with enough guidance to begin and enough silence to go somewhere real, and contemplative time in the afternoon, walking the porticos, visiting sacred and artistic sites, sitting with the work of women who wrote before us and left something of themselves in the stone and paint and manuscript pages of this place.
Our guiding figure, St. Catherine of Bologna, understood writing as a form of reaching toward something that couldn’t always be named and didn’t always answer. A Franciscan abbess, visionary mystic, painter, and writer, she illuminated her own manuscripts and wrote The Seven Spiritual Weapons, one of the great mystical texts of the 15th century. She wrote through divine silence, not just divine consolation. Her work and her life give us a framework not for how to write but for why, and for what to do when the why goes quiet.
Evening circles gather the group to share what’s arising, what’s moving, what’s resisting. Some evenings will be quiet and reflective.
Others will end with wine on a terrace and the kind of conversation that keeps going long after it should have stopped. Both are part of the work.
For the woman who is still writing toward something.
If you’re claiming your voice after years of speaking in other people’s languages, this week is designed to help you hear your own.
If you have a book or essay or body of work in you that hasn’t quite found its way out yet, this retreat is built for that particular urgency.
If writing feels like the most essential thing you do and also the hardest to protect, you’ll find other women here who know exactly what that costs.
If you’re navigating a season where the work feels necessary but the words feel distant, this retreat offers both structure and spaciousness for that tension.
Meet Your Guide
I’m Heather. I’ve been facilitating contemplative and organizational work across Europe and North America for twenty years, but writing is the vocation I’ve carried longest. I write because I have to, even when I’m questioning the source of that compulsion, even when the divine feels distant or unreliable or silent.
I understand writing as spiritual practice, not in a soft or precious way but in the hard-edged sense of showing up to something that asks more than you sometimes want to give. I also know how to make a room laugh, how to hold something sacred without making it heavy, and how to find the moment when what’s needed is not more reflection but a glass of Chianti and an honest conversation about what we’re all actually doing here. I bring all of that.
This retreat is held under the patronage of St. Catherine of Bologna, who is buried incorrupt in the Corpus Domini chapel where she has been venerated for five and a half centuries. She is the patron saint of Bologna, a woman who understood the image and the word as inseparable practices. The retreat isn’t named after her by accident. It’s held in her city, in her tradition, for women who write the way she did: because they must.
The Logistics
What’s included: 7 days and 6 nights in a curated villa or retreat center in Bologna, all meals, site visits, writing materials, and daily guided facilitation. Flights, personal expenses, and travel insurance are not included.
I am currently hand-selecting a location that honors the spirit of this retreat: a place of historic character, quiet beauty, and enough distance from the city center for genuine contemplative rhythm. Full details will be in the 2027 Retreat Prospectus.
Because this is an intimate, high-proximity experience designed for women writers specifically, participants complete a brief introductory conversation to ensure this container is the right fit for your current season and your relationship to the work. Investment details are shared in the prospectus.