Booking and membership terms.
Short, and in plain English. If anything here is unclear, ask before you book — [email protected].
The Residency at Lakemore
Everything from here to the membership section below is about a seat at the Residency.
What you are buying
A seat at The Residency at Lakemore, 14–18 January 2027, at Lakemore Resort near Traverse City, Michigan. The price of your room covers the teaching, the filming, the photography, the one-to-one sessions, a year of The School, the Guild’s $99 tier, your accommodation, every meal, and the activities. Travel to and from Traverse City is not included.
Paying
You can pay in full, or pay a deposit today and the balance in equal monthly payments. If you choose the payment plan, the exact amounts and dates are shown before you pay and repeated on your receipt. The final payment is always on or before 15 December 2026.
The remaining payments are invoiced by email, one a month. We do not store your card and nothing is charged to it automatically — you pay each invoice when it arrives, or clear the balance early if you prefer. You are never billed beyond the price of your room.
Your seat is held from the moment your deposit succeeds. If an invoice goes unpaid past its due date we will contact you; a seat whose payments stop can be released.
Cancellation and refunds
Payments are non-refundable. We commit to the house, the food and the team on the strength of the seats that are booked, months before anyone arrives, and those costs do not come back to us if someone cannot come.
If you cancel, you forfeit what you have paid, and any remaining scheduled payments stop — we will not continue to charge you for a seat you are not using.
We strongly recommend travel insurance. It is inexpensive relative to the cost of the week, and it is the thing that protects you against illness, family emergencies and travel disruption. Please buy it when you book, not later.
If we cancel the Residency, you are refunded in full. Every payment you have made comes back to you. That is true whatever the reason.
Seats are transferable to another person with our agreement — write to us and we will sort it out.
What we ask of you
That you turn up, work, and treat the other hosts and the venue with respect. We reserve the right to ask someone to leave for behaviour that harms other guests or the property; no refund is given in that situation.
Changes to the programme
The itinerary is real and we intend to run it as published. Weather, illness and travel being what they are in a Michigan January, individual sessions or activities may be substituted for something of equivalent value. The artifacts you leave with are the promise — those do not change.
Photography
We film and photograph during the week, both for your own artifacts and for our marketing. Tell us if you would rather not appear in anything we publish, and we will keep you out of it.
Guild membership
The Community and The School are monthly subscriptions. This part covers those.
What you are buying
The Community is $19 a month or $190 a year. The School is $99 a month, $279 a quarter, or $990 a year. What each tier includes is set out on the Guild page, and it is what you get on the day you join — nothing is drip-fed.
A membership is access to the Hall and its library. It is not a guarantee that your retreat or trip will sell. Nobody can promise that, and we would rather say so here than imply otherwise.
Paying, and how it renews
Membership renews automatically at the end of each period — monthly, quarterly or annually, whichever you chose — until you cancel it. The price you see at checkout is the price you pay each period.
Cancellation and refunds
Membership payments are non-refundable. That includes part-months, and it includes quarterly and annual payments where you leave partway through the term. We are plain about it for the same reason we are plain about the Residency: everything your tier includes is open to you from the first day, so there is no version of this where you have paid for something you were not given.
You can cancel at any time, and when you do, you are not charged again. There is no notice period, no minimum term, and nobody to talk to first — you do it yourself in the Hall.
The one exception is an annual renewal you did not want. If your annual membership renews and you tell us within 30 days of that charge, we refund it. Write to [email protected] and say so — you do not have to explain yourself and we will not ask you to sit through a call about it.
We do this because a year is long enough to forget you are subscribed, and charging someone $190 or $990 for a year they did not mean to buy is not a business we want to run.
If you think you have been charged in error, write to [email protected] and we will look at it properly. A billing mistake is not the same thing as a refund request, and we will treat it differently.
The founding rate
The founding rate is $9 a month for The Community and $49 a month for The School, on the monthly plan, for as long as you stay a member. It is open to new members until 31 October 2026. It is tied to the membership, not to you — so if you cancel and come back later, you rejoin at whatever the price is on that day. That is the whole reason it is worth something.
Both
Your details
We use your details to run the Residency and the Guild, and to talk to you about them. Payments are processed by Stripe — we never see or store your card number. We do not sell your details to anyone.
Who you are contracting with
The Residency at Lakemore and the Guild are both run by The Hosting Guild. Questions, and anything that needs a human: [email protected].
Last updated 11 August 2026.