Last week nine Kino students and two chaperons
made their way to the Chiricahua Mountains for the annual writer’s retreat. Vanessa has been giving high school students interested in creative writing the opportunity to go on a four-day-long retreat for three years now, and they were a feature of Chris’s and Felice’s creative writing classes before that.
The retreats takes place in Paradise, in the Davis’ two cabins nestled into the Chiricahuas mountains. These cabins are available for all kinds of Kino field trips. They have all the amenities of home complete with beds, kitchens, and bathrooms) but their isolated location allows students to be only steps away from nature.
During the trip, students had the opportunity to write, go on hikes, and bond with their fellow classmates. Students were responsible for all the food preparation and cleaning.
They did an excellent job of working together to make these events go as smoothly as ever.
Each day there was a morning and evening meeting to discuss goals, participate in writing activities, and have writing critiques. During the day, students would be at their leisure to write, read, or walk around the property. A small library was available for students to read during the trip, and several heated games of Scrabble were played. As is traditional, we took a trip to South Fork for a short hike leading to a freezing pool of water, where the brave of heart could jump in (the record is 14 jumps)!
The students are what makes these trips a success, and this year the students did not disappoint. Everyone pitched in, behaved maturely and responsibly, and utilized their time there wisely. Our only complaint was that we couldn’t stay another day!
Vanessa described just a little of the writing done during the retreat: One of the morning exercises was to draw the name of another person out of a hat and then write a journal entry from that person’s point of view. Caroline drew Ian J’ name and revealed that he was really a robot in disguise. Zoe, inspired by the trip to the Paradise graveyard, wrote a story about the life of a couple buried there. Ian D wrote a science fiction story, and Griffin continued to work on a long short story that has grown out of a character profile excercise the class did earlier in the year. 
