November does not flatter Vermont. Its bleak days, bare trees and gray skies do not generate images likely to lure tourists.
And yet, when Waterbury’s Bridgeside Books scheduled a reading retreat smack-dab in the middle of the month, people across the country clambered to get in. Attendance was capped at 35. Reservations, which could only be made by calling the retreat site, Sterling Ridge Resort in Jeffersonville, opened at 1 p.m. on a Monday.
Meagan Bennett took time off from work to book slots for herself and a friend. Nicole Studer called 40 times in 60 minutes. Sterling Ridge has a single phone line. Sales and marketing manager Kirstin Salg took the first call, hung up and found 30 voicemails waiting. The retreat sold out in two hours.
The weekend-long event featured talks by New York Times best-selling rom-com author Katherine Center and Vermont’s own Katy Farber, a genre-flexible Middlesex writer who has published nonfiction, a picture book, a middle-grade novel and, in September, her debut adult novel, The Board.
“I love an agenda that includes hours of private reading time.”
Katherine Alix-Gaudreau
The retreat, not including lodging, cost $450 for breakfast, lunch, three books, a gift bag and all programming, which is spare by design: a Friday-night opening reception, the author talks, book trivia, a book swap — and nothing else.
“I love an agenda that includes hours of private reading time,” said Katherine Alix-Gaudreau, a theater director from Belfast, Maine.
So do hundreds of others. The Sterling Ridge retreat was one of two that Bridgeside Books held that weekend, bringing the store’s total to seven. Mixing readers, authors, books and cozy inns, the bookseller has learned, produces a winning attraction. Indeed, the prevalence of reading retreats popping up around the globe has prompted Condé Nast Traveler to name them “the must-try wellness break of 2025.”
The Sterling Ridge retreat guests, all women, came from New England, New York and as far as Ohio, Illinois and Florida. They are people who set lofty reading goals, join multiple book clubs and have three books going at a time: a physical book for home, a Kindle read for their lunch hour and an audiobook for the car. Best friends came for a girls’ weekend and siblings for a sisters’ getaway.
Many others came solo and instantly made friends. To break the ice, all they had to do was ask, “What are you reading?”
Billed as adult summer camp for bookworms, the experience felt a little like freshman orientation in college, when students get grouped by shared interests, said 30-year-old Nicole Maroney-Noce of Morrisville. Others felt like they’d been dropped into a Hallmark movie.
A fortuitous early snowfall set the scene: Log cabins and two ponds dot Sterling Ridge’s wooded hillside. Knotty pine planks line the walls and ceiling in the welcome center, where a hint of cinnamon hangs in the air and a mammoth elk head on the wall. A sign on the check-in desk advised guests that it was hunting season and they should wear brightly colored clothing when walking in the woods. For those without, “We have blaze orange bandanas and vests for you to use.”
Some retreat guests came to see a favorite author, others to curl up in a cabin and read. Bennett, firmly in the first camp, arrived from Washingtonville, N.Y., with 10 of Center’s books in tow for the author to sign. The covers depict couples and flowers rendered in the palette of Tropical Skittles. Titles include What You Wish For, The Bodyguard, The Love Haters, Hello Stranger and Things You Save in a Fire.
“She is the queen of comfort reads,” said Bennett, a 52-year-old nanny and owner of a pet-sitting business. Center’s characters are ordinary people and her books are packed with emotion, Bennett added, “but real-life emotion, not like, Oh, this would never happen in real life. She’s very real and down-to-earth — and funny.”
Bridgeside Books teased its TikTok followers the day it announced that Center was coming. A camera panned along a bookshelf, “and one of Katherine Center’s books was either sticking out a little bit, or they moved it a little bit — without saying it was going to be her,” Bennett recalled. “And I just went crazy, crazy, crazy.”
Bridgeside owner Katya d’Angelo developed the retreat format with store manager Jenna Danyew. “We just felt people were craving a deeper experience with authors and their books,” d’Angelo said.
They initially considered a one-night event where locals would gather and read, “like a digital detox,” d’Angelo said. But that didn’t seem enough, and they settled on a weekend that typically pairs a nationally known author with one from Vermont. Their first retreat, in April 2024, featured central Vermont resident and New York Times best-selling fantasy author Katherine Arden and Stowe novelist Catherine Drake.
Since then, Riley Sager, Jo Piazza, Sarah Beth Durst and Vermont’s Sarah Strohmeyer have appeared. Colorado fantasy, sci-fi and romance writer Rebecca Thorne saw posts about the retreats on Instagram and commented favorably — so the store invited her to attend.
Thorne headlined a retreat at Waterbury’s Old Stagecoach Inn on that same mid-November weekend. Danyew and d’Angelo plan to host six or seven retreats next year, when visiting authors will include horror writers Paul Tremblay and Clay McLeod Chapman, novelist and Bustle magazine deputy editor Hannah Orenstein, Stowe romance writer Amber Roberts, and Vermont forester Ethan Tapper.
Danyew admits to having had her own starstruck moments around retreat authors. “Even just the fact that they say yes to our emails is always very exciting,” she said. Bridgeside is too small to attract many of them for a traditional bookstore appearance, she said, but the retreat offers an enticing package. Authors use the weekend to read, vacation or work.
“Jo Piazza was on a deadline when she was here,” Danyew said at Sterling Ridge. “She had her laptop right outside and was writing her book while we all sat in here reading her previous book.”
Farber did the same. An assistant professor of education at Saint Michael’s College, she is working on a new thriller and used her time away from daily demands to write, talk to her agent and discuss the plot with trusted advisers. “I’m sitting there in that lovely cabin, just on the couch, brainstorming with them on Zoom,” she said.
That Saturday afternoon, as readers finished a hearty lunch of soup and crusty bread, Center told them about the arc of her career: how she wrote her first novel when she was in sixth grade and how, despite majoring in English and creative writing and winning the Vassar College fiction prize, it took her 20 years to get anything published. “And I was trying the whole time,” she said.
Now, despite her bestsellers and books turned into movies — 2020’s The Lost Husband stars Leslie Bibb and Josh Duhamel — she still can’t read negative reviews. “I’m easily discouraged. I am, like, one dirty look in the grocery store away from flinging myself on the ground,” she said, sounding as down-to-earth and funny as her characters.
In Center’s first novel, the unpublished one from middle school that she has ordered to be burned upon her death, the members of English pop band Duran Duran are driving through her suburban Houston neighborhood when their stretch limo gets a flat tire and they knock on her door in search of a phone. “And somehow,” Center told the women at the retreat, “in this one astonishing and magical afternoon, all five of them fell in love with me.”
Fiction is powerful, Center said. Writing that story gave her hope when she was an awkward 12-year-old wearing braces, headgear and a mullet. “I was so mean to myself at that age,” she said. “What genius to invent some fictional versions of world-famous rockers who could say all the kind and encouraging things to me that I refused to say to myself.”
Her books today, though more sophisticated, are not all that different, she said: “I’m just trying to lift us all up.”
Farber spoke at breakfast on Sunday morning. Her genre hopping irritates book marketers who like authors to stay in their lane, she said, but she feels compelled to follow her ideas.
A former public school teacher, she has written nonfiction about teacher burnout and its antidote; Real Talk for New Teachers: Tools for Building a Sustainable Career, coauthored by Penny Bishop, came out in June. Seeing dead salamanders on the road during her runs prompted her picture book, Salamander Sky. The #MeToo movement sparked her forthcoming young-adult novel, What If It Wasn’t My Fault.
Farber writes, she told her audience, to fix the problems she sees in the world. She dipped her pen into a new genre for The Board. Producing a thriller was a challenge, she said, but the central setting, a small-town New England school, was very familiar. To write the opening scene in which her protagonist attends a tense school board meeting, she simply channeled her own experience. “Of course, nobody was as awful” as they are in the book, she said. “And nobody was murdering anybody.”
Farber signed copies of The Board for retreat guests, who then perused the book-swap table and quickly disappeared to pack their bags and depart. Stormy weather was moving in.
Bridgeside Books deliberately schedules its retreats during off-peak travel seasons — late fall and early spring — to boost Vermont businesses. “It’s a really nice bump for us,” Sterling Ridge’s Kirstin Salg said. Besides filling rooms that would otherwise remain empty, book lovers eat in area restaurants and take day trips. Some even extend their stay.
While these less-appealing months are called “shoulder seasons” in the hospitality industry, locals don’t mince words. Vermonters call them “stick season” and “mud season,” and with good reason. It rained all weekend during this year’s April retreat at Sterling Ridge. Co-owner Barb Salg apologized to guests, but those who come for book retreats are not typical tourists, she realized.
“They don’t ever get upset when the weather is bad,” she said, “because it gives them an excuse to stay in their cabin to read.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Fully Booked | Bridgeside Books’ popular retreats bring authors and avid readers to Vermont inns”
This article appears in The Reading Issue 2025.
