The Brouzils Seminars and Workshops began in conjunction with a Midwestern American university as a series of small, unique, highly goal-driven, limited-term residency and mentorship programs. Serious participants who wished to work in collaboration with accomplished professionals in a pleasant setting well away from the familiar surroundings of everyday life found the seminars useful. Every workshop, seminar and mentorship was organized around a specific goal, usually one leading to publication.

That focus has not changed, but the structure of the program has — for both pedagogical and practical reasons.

Pedagogically, experience and practice demonstrate the superiority of tutorial instruction over seminars. One-on-one consultation is simply more focused and more efficient than group consultation. Work can be shared in other, more useful ways.

At the same time, the global health emergency requires attention to obvious threats to health. Among these is close proximity to others in enclosed spaces — very much the definition of a creative writing seminar. We now offer tutorials using a distance-learning model. No travel is necessary.

This program is well-suited for you if you already have a British or American degree, and your coursework left you with little sense of how publishing works, or if you’ve sat through enough read-and-discuss seminars to last the rest of your life, but now you need to find the next step forward to publication. Or perhaps you have a manuscript in progress – but you aren’t certain what you’re going to do with it when you’re done, especially since the publishing industry is in the kind of chaos unseen since Aldus Manutius. Maybe the method of presenting your work needs attention before you can move it up a level, or maybe you’re discovering that finding a reputable literary agent is the stuff of dreams. We want your writing to work for you, and for your calling – and for your career.

The focus at Brouzils is project completion. Since its inception, Brouzils has offered graduate and undergraduate academic credits through its American affiliate for work completed here. Beginning in 2015, we transitioned away from this model. There are already enough writing programs for student writers. Our emphasis now and in the future will be on helping and supporting active writers and furthering literary projects that we believe can be brought forward and launched in practical, directed ways to best insure ultimate success. Already-completed projects will be shaped and refined to make them more appealing to agents, publishers and readers, but our commitment will be to new work and new projects and to new ways of thinking about literature and literary platforms. Alternative approaches to publication will be explored and analyzed on a project-by-project basis. No matter where you are starting, by the time you leave the Brouzils tutorial, you will have taken the next step forward.

So, beginning in 2015, we no longer accept applications for our traditional graduate and undergraduate writing seminars. We will only continue our practice of offering individual mentorships and fellowships for those who wish to complete works-in-progress with professional guidance. The popular, ongoing memoir-writing project for those with a private tale to tell will also continue. And of course there are our individual retreats for practically anyone with an unmet creative ambition.

The biggest change in 2015 was the launch of the Brouzils Publishing Program and, in 2020, the Guided Reading Tutorials.

Publishing: In response to the changing environment for writers and for publishing, and in response to queries from past and potential participants, we created a tutorial designed to help participants create published books. It’s a very different way to run a writers’ program, but we think participants will be happy with what we’ve put together. For more details, see this page.

Reading literature: If your interest is in the study of literature generally, contact us for information about our comprehensive tutorial and guided reading program covering literature from Gilgamesh to post-war literature in twice-weekly sessions.

Academic credit is possible for both programs.

Continuing: Online participation in some of the Seminars’ most popular goal-driven programs. Click here for details.

The distinguishing characteristic of all Brouzils programs is the goal-oriented nature of the sessions. The programs are all designed to provide participants with the opportunity to complete one or more critical and necessary steps leading to the publication or production of their work.

While the Brouzils faculty all understand, appreciate and wish to encourage mastery of the technical elements of writing in all genres, the underlying assumption is that our participants all will want a finished treatment, a completed book proposal, a revised manuscript or some other important and essential component of work newly conceived or already in-progress. We believe serious writers write to be published and our mission is to help them reach that goal.

The ideal participant is a serious but perhaps unpublished writer, possibly a post-MFA student who has been given a degree – but who has also been left without useful professional tools necessary for success as a literary artist. The Brouzils programs are intentionally small and the “sharing and caring” features of many writing programs are not important here. Our focus is on real-life progress toward a narrow, well-defined goal. Many participants return often, creating the sense of an unobtrusive community.

Location: Les Brouzils is in the heart of the Vendéen bocage.  Additional workshop courses meet in the early 19th century former seminary building in a nearby village. In addition to those rooms provided as part of the seminar and workshop fees, there is wide range of comfortable, attractive alternative accommodations available in the immediate area.

By rural train, the village is about 30 minutes from Nantes and about an hour from the beautiful beaches of the Vendéen coast. TGV trains connect Nantes with Paris and the outside world.

To be advised of changes and additions, please contact us by email: info @ brouzils.org.