Abigail Hancher, a 2015 Waynesburg University alumna, recently received a week-long stay at the Unruly Writing Retreat in Farmville, Virginia.
So many retreats and residencies are not made for writers with young families, so it felt very serendipitous to stumble across this opportunity when I was beginning my first serious writing project since getting married and having children."
The retreat is a residency tailored to exhausted writers with children. It aims to serve writers, specifically busy mothers and caregivers, who are unable to participate in the traditional long writing retreats of the world.
“So many retreats and residencies are not made for writers with young families, so it felt very serendipitous to stumble across this opportunity when I was beginning my first serious writing project since getting married and having children,” Hancher said.
A mother of two, Hancher regularly struggles to find the time or mental energy to devote to writing. This retreat will allow her, as well as other mothers, the opportunity to work on writing projects in an uninterrupted mental and physical space.
“Parenting is an unrelenting, full-time job, particularly for mothers who are the primary caregiver,” Hancher said. “Motherhood was a very difficult transition for me because I felt so divorced from the person I had been prior to having kids, and part of that identity was who I was as a writer. I have been trying to find some new version of the old me, and this new writing project and this retreat feel like a step in the right direction.”
Hancher graduated from Waynesburg in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, and in 2017, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Eastern Washington University.
She is currently an adjunct faculty member for the University’s Department of English and Foreign Languages with published flash fiction in “Vestal Review” and “The Citron Review.”
To learn more about the University’s English program, visit waynesburg.edu/english.
