Join us for Bookbinding and Magic Making Workshops this Fall
Join me and Deborah Stein at Highlights in Penna 23 - 26 October 2025
In-Person Workshop - Applications close today, Friday, April 25th at Midnight!
We invite you to apply to join us, Deborah J. Stein and me, Margaux Kent in October at the wondrous Highlights Foundation in Pennsylvania. Highlights in a beautiful retreat center with cabins, local food prepared three times a day, trails to explore, and cozy cabins. We’ll delight in book binding and picture finding, story walking and thing gathering. We will fill our pockets with woodland wonders and our minds with the chatter of the forest and the lodge. In the mornings after breakfast, we'll enjoy outside workshops and bring our findings back into the studio where we will make books and fill pages with idea jiggling group adventures. We’ll wander through three inspiring days of perusing new processes and filling pages with all manner of the unexpected, tangling and detangling the magic of the season and the land and maybe a little of ourselves.
Today is the final day to apply!
When: 23 - 26 October 2025
Where: Highlights Foundation 392 Boyds Mills Rd, Milanville, PA 18443
Who: Workshop lodges 12 and is open to any and all creative humans!
Price includes accommodations, all meals, Peg and Awl goodie bag, and shared art supplies.
Single rooms are $1600 and Double rooms are $1440 per person.
Applications are open now through April 25th
If selected, you will be notified by May 1st!
We shall spend our time:
- Making a variety of books and journals
- Filling our pages with messes and magic
- Playing with watercolor and ink, pencil and dip-pen
- Tetrapak printing and making watercolors by hand
- Poking images to make words and words to make pictures
- Playing games and making stories
- And hiking, stargazing, collecting, eating, and making art together in the beautiful misty rabbit and bird-filled hills of the Highlights Foundation in Pennsylvania
Here is what Deb wrote about it on her Substack:
Margaux Kent and I announced a new workshop—a retreat really with workshops, at the Highlights Foundation in the highlands of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania in mid-October.
After many attempts at naming the workshop/retreat:
Bookbinding and Story Gathering?
Well is it about stories really?
Bookbinding and Picture Finding?
Sounds weird, everyone agreed, like what does that even mean?
Bookbinding and Magic Making?
Yeah! Sounds right!
Because the gist of the three days we have planned is to stay true to what each of us loves and does best: Margaux’s passion and skill for book and journal making, pencil and ink, drawing new life into discarded bits which very few others see. The ways she fills page after page of her always present and expanding, never not on her person, under her arm, in her bags or on her busy beautiful desk journals, containers for records, sketches, scribbles, and all manner of thinkings, of looking outs and looking ins, gatherings and makings.
Jumbled with my soft spot for inviting in the process of doing and making and finding new ways to see the world slightly anew, to compose pictures that create conversations with its subjects and perhaps other humans too in puddles of water and color and finding ways of re-languaging this spit of world I inhabit, reminding others our collective heads are literally in clouds anyway so we may as well find our own singular vision to make fun and meaning and new language on the page.
We’ll take our combined love of beginnings and new processes, the stories of objects and the messy eccentricities of the natural world as place of wonder. We’ll trade what we take for memories with tenderness and care and imagination with twelve humans who wish to learn and do the same with us in the peaceful forest setting of Highlights.
About Highlights
The campus is located in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and features a 5,200-square-foot gathering and dining space (The Barn), 21 cabins, a lodge, and several other outbuildings. It was built by and for people who believe in the power of story for kids, and is sustainably cared for by the family of the founders of Highlights for Children.