Forest Cabins, Garden Sheds, and Other Niches: Spaces of Retreat and the Potentiality of Writing

Call for Papers

Forest Cabins, Garden Sheds, and Other Niches: Spaces of Retreat and the Potentiality of Writing

Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany, July 14th and 15th 2026

Writing practices have long been associated with withdrawal and retreat, often into nature. From Henry David Thoreau’s cabin in the woods to Virginia Woolf’s garden shed in Sussex, spaces of retreat appear central to creative practice. They promise time, focus, and a calmer environment removed from everyday distractions, raising the question of what constitutes an “ideal” space for writing and creative work.

This conference seeks to examine secluded, marginal, and sometimes remote spaces of retreat more closely, with a particular focus on writing as practice. What forms of writing emerge in such settings? How are writers shaped by spaces of withdrawal? Which strategies accompany retreat-based writing practices, for example, walking and writing or a particular attunement to surroundings?

In In the Dream House (2019), Carmen Maria Machado reflects on writing parts of her memoir during a residency at Yaddo in New York. Her experiences of retreat are marked by encounters with animals that emphasize both closeness to nature and exposure to it: wildfires and the unsettling screams of a fox complicate the ideal of the writing retreat. Retreats themselves also become the subject of fiction, as in Machado’s eerie short story “The Resident” (2018), where memories of girlhood resurface at a lakeside artists’ residency.

Other literary texts imagine retreat in more ambivalent and radical ways. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s A Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), withdrawal takes the form of a medically induced, one-year period of sleep. In Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021), the cabin emerges as a space of kinship and care. The African American protagonist Vern is taught to read by an Indigenous family, finding a home in which a life beyond dominant social norms becomes imaginable.

Following the 2025 conference “The Cabin in the Woods and Other Utopian Confinements: Hopes and Horrors of Living in Small Houses in Remote Areas,” this year’s conference places creative practice and writing at the center of its exploration of spaces of retreat, including cabins, garden sheds, and other hut-like environments.

We are particularly interested in approaches that connect writing retreats to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, asking how natural surroundings, the presence of animals and plants, and broader ecological conditions shape writing practices in withdrawn spaces. One point of reference is the work of French-Canadian author Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba, who explores writing in a cabin from an ecofeminist perspective.

In addition to cabins and garden sheds, we also invite contributions on other forms of niches, including less conventional spaces of withdrawal, such as academic writing retreats.

We welcome contributions from literary studies, cultural studies, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, posthumanism, gender studies, and related fields.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

·       The potentiality of writing and creative practice

·       Retreat as a space of withdrawal or resistance

·       Ecocritical perspectives on writing retreats

·       Ecofeminist and posthumanist approaches to retreat

·       Entanglements with the more-than-human world in times of withdrawal

·       Blurred boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in literary representations of retreats

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a 200-word proposal along with a brief bio by March 26th to kirsten.v.hagen@romanistik.uni-giessen.de and carolin.jesussek@uni-giessen.de. 

The conference is jointly organized by the chair of French and Spanish Literature and Culture at the University of Giessen and the IPP (International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies”) at Justus Liebig University Giessen.