CONCERTS, WORKSHOPS & RETREATS
Concerts With Heart
Carrie is an Emmy-winning artist who has performed concerts in a wide variety of musical venues, colleges, conferences, spiritual communities, and retreats. She performs in intimate solo and duo settings as well as with her full band. In a time when we are getting daily messages of division, Carrie creates concert and workshop experiences around connecting themes for conferences, presenter groups and spiritual communities. She creates evenings that combine storytelling, humor, poetry and her award winning songwriting and performance. Audiences leave Carrie’s concerts feeling connected, encouraged and reminded of what is resilient and beautiful in the human spirit.
String Quartet and Choral Performance - With Beautiful Arrangements by Gary Walters
Carrie is now offering full string quartet performances with Gary Walters and The Gathering of Spirits String Quartet. You can learn more about this show on the string quartet page HERE. Carrie has also performed with community and church choral groups. We can provide sheet music arrangements for full choir and women’s choir configurations.
Immersive Experiences - Concert, Day Retreats, Conference Events or Church Services
Carrie is offering weekend-long immersive experiences specifically tailored to a community theme. She will perform a weekend concert, facilitate a 1-3 hour workshop and add music or perform with the choir during a Sunday service or conference event. For more information, contact Jim Chaffee at The Jim Chaffee Management Group.
Workshops, Retreats and Presentations
With OnLine Options
Carrie Newcomer presents several in-person and online experiences for community connection and personal growth. These sessions range from 90-minute mini-retreats to multi-day experiences.
Carrie has facilitated workshop and retreat events in educational conference settings, as well as spiritual community, social service and arts organization settings. She can facilitate large group seminars or small group workshops and retreats, exploring topics of creativity, spirituality, art and activism, hope, change and resilience. She creates space for individuals and small groups to reflect, engage in meaningful exercises and dialog, and to do the important inner work that supports our outer walk in the world. Carrie also offers creative writing and songwriting workshops that focus on using creative writing or songwriting as a tool for fuller and more present living.
Current Workshops & Retreats
Telling Our Story In Song: A Community Experience
Day Workshop (90 minutes - 2 hours)
In this fast-paced and engaging workshop, Carrie will invite participants to explore a topic creatively through the use of song. She will lead the group through the process of choosing a topic, creating the language, moving the language into music form, and by the end of the workshop have a finished song the group can sing together. This workshop requires absolutely no musical experience. This experience is a fun and exciting way to understand and embody new ideas and material. In a conference setting, this experience is a wonderful way to creatively move the theme of the conference from head to heart, embodying the stories and ideas being discussed during the conference. This is a fast-paced, guaranteed-to-make-you-smile experience, presented in a safe and welcoming atmosphere.
Note: Carrie will create a very simple MP3 version and a lyric/chord sheet of the song after the experience and send to group leader for distributing to participants.
This workshop can be a stand alone experience. When it is combined with one of Carrie’s other retreats, it creates a full head & heart experience. The time needed for a combined experience is a minimum of 3 hours.
The Beautiful Not Yet: Sustainable HOpe
Day Retreat (90 minutes - 2 hours)
Living into a sustainable hope is getting a bead on a true north and then walking toward it, living into love is a daily practice, our work for a better, kinder world is an orientation not a destination.
“Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two.” ~Parker J. Palmer.
This day retreat led by singer songwriter, Carrie Newcomer, will explore maintaining hope and our ability to envision during times of individual and community challenge. Carrie will use music, poetry, reflective writing, and reflection to explore the personal stories and practices that affirm that hope is sustained through individual and community action. Participants will consider the things that have helped them maintain hope in the past as well as ponder if those things are still available to us, and if so, how we access them. Participants will also explore how we might hold our individual and community challenges with creative and life-giving tension, knowing that our work for the better world is not just a destination, but a daily orientation.
Possible Addition: Telling Our Story In Song: A Community Experience - See description below (Together a 3 hour retreat)
What We Need Is Here: Lifelines, Lakes & The Living Possibility Within Us & Between Us
Day Retreat (90 minutes - 2 hours)
Join Quaker Songwriter/Poet/Author, Carrie Newcomer, as she invites us into the inner work that supports and deepens our outer walk in the world. In times that feel increasingly divisive and fractured, what helps us stay grounded, resilient and cultivates our threads of connection? Using music, poetry, story and reflection, Carrie will lead participants through a series of experiences designed to affirm who we are, who we are becoming and the power of daily human-size actions to create positive change.
Possible Addition: Telling Our Story In Song: A Community Experience - See description below (Together a 3 hour retreat)
A Map of the Journey in Process: Conversations At The Growing Edge
Day Retreat (90 minutes - 2 hours)
“Stories tell us of what we already knew and forgot and remind us of what we haven’t yet imagined.” – Anne L. Watson
This workshop is designed to be a warm, welcoming and creative exploration of our personal and collective journeys. Using music, visual art, poetry and openhearted conversation, Carrie will honor the story of our history, reflect upon our current inner and outer experience, and envision our hopes for the future as we lean into our next growing edges. Carrie invites and welcomes anyone with or without previous experience in writing, songwriting or creative expression to exploring new ways of envisioning our own stories through a new creative and compassionate lens.
Possible Addition: Telling Our Story In Song: A Community Experience - See description below (Together a 3 hour retreat)
The Extraordinary Ordinary: Writing As The Practice of Presence
Day Retreat (90 minutes - 2 hours)
In this workshop, Carrie leads participants through exercises that encourage paying attention to the small details and experiencing delight in small moments. Carrie will use small and large group conversation, music and poetry. This workshop welcomes those interested in songwriting, prose or poetry, or journaling as a reflective tool. All experience levels are welcome to explore.
The Extraordinary Ordinary: Songwriting & The Small Moment With Carrie Newcomer
Day Retreat (90 minutes - 2 hours)
Carrie will lead songwriters through exercises and practices that focus on songwriting with attention to the small moment and detail. This workshop is designed for those wanting to expand or deepen their songwriting practice with a nationally recognized performing songwriter and recording artist.
Workshop & Retreat Short Biography
Carrie Newcomer has internationally facilitated retreats, on the topics of songwriting, creative writing, spirituality and personal growth, art and activism in educational settings, spiritual communities and conferences, community and arts organizations. She co-hosts The Growing Edge Podcast and has led The Growing Edge Retreats with author Parker J. Palmer.
She is a Grammy acknowledged songwriter and Emmy award winning performer and poet. She has 19 nationally released albums and three books of poetry. She has been called "a prairie mystic" by The Boston Globe and someone who "asks all the right questions" by The Rolling Stone. She has appeared on On Being, PBS Religion and Ethics, and recently received The Shalem Institute's Contemplative Voices Award.
The Growing Edge Podcast
With Hosts Carrie Newcomer & Parker J. Palmer
Produced by Allison Quantz
You’re invited to join us for our monthly podcast! Our episodes will feature conversations between Parker and Carrie, focused on our Question of the Month and other Growing Edge topics. Occasionally, we’ll invite some wise and wonderful friends of ours to share their insights on the topic we’re exploring.
You can listen at NewcomerPalmer.com or subscribe to our show via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or SoundCloud and get the latest episode every week.
The Growing Edge - With Carrie Newcomer & Parker J. Palmer
The Growing Edge is a creative collaboration with Carrie Newcomer and beloved Author Parker J. Palmer. The Growing Edge exploring the growing edges of our lives, personally, vocationally and politically. Through online conversations, The Growing Edge Podcast, spoken word & music events, webinars and face-to-face retreats Parker and Carrie invite others to join them in considering where life is calling us next.
To learn more about The Growing Edge visit the website at www.newcomerpalmer.com.
“The collaboration began in 2004, when Carrie asked Parker to write liner notes for her album, Betty’s Diner. Palmer’s books, especially Let Your Life Speak, had become important companions on Newcomer’s spiritual journey, and Parker had found great inspiration in Carrie’s music and journey as an artist. As the two began sharing their creative struggles, they found a deep spiritual and artistic resonance, forging the kind of friendship that comes from a shared vocation. They wrote a song-and-spoken-word stage show called Healing the Heart of Democracy: A Gathering of Spirits for the Common Good, combining the titles of one of Parker’s books and one of Carrie’s signature songs. Next came What We Need Is Here: Hope, Hard Times & the Human Possibility—words suggesting a core belief that animates both: “It’s possible to live ‘in the light’ as long as we do not try to blink the darkness.” Their new project is The Growing Edge, which offers an online and in-person gift of sanctuary for listening to and following one’s true self.” —Meggen Watt Petersen, Spirituality & Health
Two Songbooks
Solo and Choral Arrangements by Gary Walters - With Bonus Easy Guitar Arrangements by Carrie Newcomer
Songbook contains guitar, piano, and choral arrangements of Newcomer’s most popular songs.
Impossible, Until It’s Not Songbook,
Sanctuary Songbook
Songs include:
A Long Way Up
A Small Flashlight
Cedar Rapids 10 AM
I Give Myself To This
I Will Sing A New Song
Impossible, Until It’s Not
Marmalade Sky
Like Molly Brown
Stones In The River
The Beautiful Not Yet
The Handing Over Time
The Work Of Our Hands
Throwing Rocks At The Moon
![Sanctuary Book Mockup NEW[1].png](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b43db8385ede12b439e0183/1631654275351-I3R64FTF6V78M6R1MVXJ/Sanctuary+Book+Mockup+NEW%5B1%5D.png)
Sanctuary
Solo and Choral Arrangements with Guitar Chords by Gary Walters
Songs include:
A Light in the Window
Bare to the Bone
Betty’s Diner
Geodes
Holy As The Day Is Spent
I Believe
If Not Now
Lean In Toward The Light
Room at the Table
Sanctuary
Silver
The Clean Edge of Change
The Gathering of Spirits
You Can Do This Hard Thing
For More About Gary Walters Music, CDs & Concerts Visit
Betty’s Diner the Musical
Music and Lyrics © 2005 –2017 Carrie Newcomer; Book © 2009–2017 Carrie Newcomer and Richard K. Thomas Music Direction and Orchestrations © 2013–2017 Gary Walters.
Betty’s Diner, has been a family business for three generations. The diner has become something of an institution in a small college town in Southern Indiana near Indianapolis. The regulars and refugees of Betty’s Diner are a humorous and somewhat gritty collection of regular customers that create the fabric of a deep community.
Check out our full Betty’s Diner: The Musical Page with Downloadable PDF for more information! Click here. For more information about bringing Betty’s Diner to your community contact bettysdinerthemusical@pobox.com
Booking
For booking inquiries, please contact our agent, Jim Chaffee at Chaffee Management Group jchaffee@chaffeemanagement.com
“To my mind - a writer’s mind - Carrie Newcomer is much more than a musician. She’s a poet, storyteller, snake-charmer, good neighbor, friend and lover, minister of the wide-eyed gospel of hope and grace.”