Welcome to Elephant Rock

Join Our Beautiful, Bustling & Alive Space for Writers & All People Who Do Language!

About Us

Elephant Rock, founded in 2012, offers  writing workshops & classes as well as retreats that celebrate the rigorous craft of writing while also embracing the unknown. Writing should be a discovery, a profound unearthing, a grand surprise, not a recitation. Our offerings  encourage writers to "peer over the edge of doubt" in the tradition of the Romantic poet John Keats, who developed the intriguing theory of "Negative Capability"—i.e., the capacity to perceive unlimited possibility. Extraordinary writing exercises dissolve unseen barriers. Prompts and constraints in the style of the French surrealists and the renowned Oulipo ("workshop of potential literature") lead to hidden truths. A devoted and meticulous  study of craft scaffolds every Elephant Rock experience. Through the Elephant Rock method, you will breathe life into your writing and rediscover your fierce original voice. All are welcome. Beginners will find a safe haven and experienced writers will be challenged to push through blocks. Read love letters here, and check out current and upcoming offerings here

Founder and director Jeannine Ouellette is the author of the memoirThe Part That Burns, a 2021 Kirkus Best 100 Indie Book and finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women's Literature, with starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Her work appears widely in literary journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, Masters Review, North American Review, and more. She teaches writing at the University of Minnesota and through the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Elephant Rock, She is working on her first novel.

Why Join Us?

At Elephant Rock, we don’t deny that art is difficult and can break our hearts—indeed, art will break our hearts if we are doing it right. So we celebrate and embrace that truth. Because we need art now more than ever. We need our hearts broken. We need, as Kafka says, art to the be axe that “breaks open the frozen sea inside us.” Perhaps most of all, we need creative writing, because creative writers are guardians not only of deep truth, but of language itself, and the ability of language to retain enough meaning to tell truth in the first place. This is the role of the writer. And this is the light in which I take Kafka’s full quote: “But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves … A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”

But you need not desire to make a book in order to thrive here. We celebrate the Word in all its forms, including through simply following Mary Oliver’s wise, ever-timely advice to pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. Although we aren't religious, we do love the way poet and teacher Paul Matthews writes about the “writing circle” in his strange and wise craft book, Sing Me the Creation:

“Maybe when we meet there seems to be nothing at all between us; yet if you give me your word I can reply with the next, collaborative, responding to questions asked, needs recognized, testing each other’s immediate joys and fears in the writing. That is how I started my work as a poet-teacher—with nothing, almost, with simple acts of human language—till gradually I became aware that through a word or a sentence shared in writing we could move into the presence of a communion greater than anything I had intended. At such moments it was no longer a classroom with me, as teacher, at the center. It became a “circle of truth, poetry, and love” in which we were all servants of the Word … that is beyond any skill or genius that we might have in language.”

Through this seemingly quiet but actually radical practice, in the strength and light of community, we can—just as Margaret Mead said—change ourselves, each other, and our world. We’re doing it already, one word at a time.

Please join us!

Thank You!

You make everything we do possible. If art is life, and life is all of us, each and every one, then what else is there? We're so grateful to be in it together with you, and we will always be brimming with gratitude for your presence in this space, past, present and future.