Dreaming Ourselves Dark and Deep Writing Retreat: Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth
Dreaming Ourselves Dark and Deep Writing Retreats
Inaugural 2026 Spring Retreat Series: What We Carry
Theme: EMBODIMENT
Critical Text: Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth By Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
Guest Lecturer: Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
Presented in partnership with The Black Woman Project
Dreaming Ourselves Dark and Deep retreats are half-day immersive gatherings that provide cultural grounding, extended creative time, and collective restoration. Guided by Black women authors, scholars, and cultural workers, each retreat uses a selected text as a framework for deeper engagement with self, story, and cultural memory.
We begin by settling into the space through intention setting, mood creation, and collective grounding. This is followed by a guest speaker who offers literary insight, shared readings, topic expertise, and writing prompts. Participants then move into extended periods of independent writing, supported by moments for guided dialogue and process-based engagement.
Throughout the experience, participants engage writing as a tool for reflection, expression, and cultural preservation, producing work such as poems, personal narratives, and intergenerational storytelling artifacts that honor lived experience and lineage. This layered approach offers intellectual engagement, contemplative space, communal support, and creative development.
The retreat closes with optional sharing and a somatic practice, allowing the work to be integrated in the body and carried forward beyond the page.
A box lunch will be provided, along with coffee, tea, and additional beverages to support you throughout the day.
Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton is an award-winning literary artist, director, performer, and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, TX. She authored Newsworthy (Bloomsday Literary, 2019) and Black Chameleon (Henry Holt & Co., 2023), which won the Carr P. Collins award for Best Nonfiction through the Texas Institute of Letters (2024). Mouton has contributed to Glamour, Texas Monthly, and ESPN's Andscape. A former Resident Artist with The Kennedy Center, Rice University, and the Houston Museum of African American Culture, her recent upcoming works include a children's book (Hush Hush Hurricane, Kokila) and an multi-site immersive art installation, The Call Me Mother Experience, dedicated amplifying the Black Maternal Health issue.