The Writing Retreat

The Writing Retreat is the 2023 debut novel of writer Julia Bartz. The novel’s protagonist, Alex, scores an unlikely invitation to a writing retreat at Blackbriar, the allegedly haunted estate of best-selling author Roza Vallo. Roza happens to be Alex’s favorite writer. The only downside to accepting Roza’s invitation is that Alex’s ex-best friend, Wren, will also be attending the retreat. So will Alex’s stubborn writer’s block, which has persisted since she and Wren fell out. As the retreat begins, Alex realizes that the stakes are much higher than she initially thought: Roza pits the writers against one another, promising to help publish and promote the winner. Just as everyone at the retreat is not who they claim to be, all is not as it seems at Blackbriar, the site of an unsolved murder-suicide. Alex and the other visiting writers—Wren, Poppy, Keira, and Taylor—have unwittingly stumbled into a scenario that could easily have sprung from one of Roza’s horror novels. Their ensuing dilemmas provide Bartz with complex psychological terrain for exploring the interplay between the process of writing, the powers of storytelling, the pretenses behind creative appropriation, the nuances of sexuality, and artists’ hunger for recognition.