On March 23, 2017, a group of fifteen writers set out for a lodge in the heart of the Manchac Marshes. It was a free two-day writing retreat among perfect strangers in a place only accessible by boat, forty minutes from the nearest road. There must be a self-selecting type of person willing to undergo the intensity of that kind of psychological experience, and the conversations around the huge cypress dining room table were lively, to say the least.

There was really good food and a writing program designed by New Orleans author Kate Kokontis, who leaned on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower for the theme of change that spanned the coastal and the personal. "All that you touch / You change. / All that you change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / Is change. / God is Change."

The result is this beautiful zine designed by retreat participant Soleil Garneau.

Special thanks to Turtle Cove Environmental Research Station, which hosted this retreat, as well as the Platforms Fund, whose grant made it possible.

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