Reflections on a self-organized student writing retreat on the Toronto Islands
By: Allison Bishop (4th year SOPR student), Nealob Kakar (4th year SOPR student), Naty Tremblay (5th year SOPR student), Amanda Buchnea (5th year SOPR student), and Moni Sadri-Gerrior (4th year doctoral student in the Community Psychology Program at Laurier)
Date: October 2, 2025
Did you ever go to summer camp as a kid? The days and hours bleed together. It’s a blur of arts and crafts, bike rides, swimming, long dinners outdoors, and campfire singalongs under the stars. Everything is sticky and covered in sand. Your ribs hurt from laughing too hard. Together, you create your own little world, and it can be magical.
This past summer, Allison Bishop, Nealob Kakar, Naty Tremblay and Amanda Buchnea (all upper-year SOPR students) and Moni Sadri-Gerroir (PhD candidate at Wilfrid Laurier University) self-organized a week-long writing retreat on the Toronto Islands. We stayed at the Gibraltar Center for the Arts, an artist retreat and residency based in a former school near Gibraltar Point. We arrived at the center on Monday afternoon and took the ferry from downtown Toronto to Hanlon Point, where we were picked up by a vintage school bus. The building is covered in paintings, sculptures, and all kinds of artistic oddities.
We shared a communal kitchen with other artists and writers who were staying at the center. We enjoyed a shared yard with a fire pit and twinkling lights. The facility backs directly onto a beautiful and quiet sandy beach. A nightly swim before bed became an important ritual we soon cherished (though we did learn to hang out towels or risk encounters with fire ants!).
We had individual dorm rooms and shared a funky space with a large bay window called Shadowland. This was our home base for seven days, and we soon began calling ourselves The Shadowland Collective. Each day we would each wander into Shadowland on our own time. Sometimes we would get in some exercise, or a morning swim. Sometimes we needed some extra sleep, and sometimes we shared a communal breakfast.
Once we were all gathered together, we started our day. We loosely structured our writing time based on writing retreats organized by the University of Guelph Library staff, like the Dissertation Writing Retreats. We set weekly and daily goals and posted them on a bulletin board (we earned fun stickers for every goal we accomplished). We did a round of intention setting, sharing our goals out loud before starting work our individual projects. We used the Pomodoro method, working in timed 25-minute blocks with five-minute breaks. After every 4 writing blocks, we would get a longer break.
After a good day of work, it was time to play! We made meals together, though Moni did much of the cooking (thank you, Moni!), went on bike rides, explored the many beaches across the Toronto Islands (with a particular fondness for our home base of Gibraltar Point!), and had some amazing sing-alongs. We made new friends with other residents at the retreat center and deepened our friendships with one another. On our last day, Nealob, Amanda, and Allison made a zine documenting our favourite memories of our time as The Shadowland Collective.
The week was a perfect blend of fun and focus, with a good dose of sunshine. It was an important reminder that a grueling writing schedule does not necessarily yield better results. The retreat format made the “work” time feel less arduous knowing that rest, movement, joy, and connection were abundant in the process. We hope that sharing this story might inspire other students to create similar experiences. A PhD doesn’t have to be lonely, competitive, and isolated. We hope you can create deep and lasting friendships, with plenty of memories to cherish along the way.
