Dearests,
As I write this, I’m sitting in my kitchen with my Morning Seeding & Tending buddies on Zoom, waiting for my black bean/tofu burgers to finish baking, admiring the remaining peonies I cut from my garden this morning, and savoring the annual June Writing It Up in the Garden reading party, which took place last night in Little Blue and Zoom. I’m overwhelmed, this morning, with gratitude for the people who have come into my life in order to dedicate a weekly (or daily) time for their writing. The depth, beauty and variety of pieces I got to hear last night moved me, inspired me and encouraged me once again about the power sparked by the union of creativity and intentionality.
I got a wallop of this power last week while I was away at a novel retreat in Burlington VT. I have a particular love/hate relationship with going on retreat. On the one hand, when I’m home, everything distracts me (must make my OWN tofu burgers! Ooo! The peonies are about to fade, better cut them quick so I can enjoy that very last bloom! Hmmmm, shall I meditate, or talk to my seventeen-year-old whose days in my kitchen are numbered?) On the other hand, I crave, as my friend Dar says, endless bolts of the fabric we know as time and space in order to write. And to do all the things writers need to do in order to write: meander, muddle, stare into space, putter, unplug from interruptions, spend an hour researching a topic germane to the thing we’re writing, we often need to wall ourselves off from the very people and places we most love.
But when I arrived in Burlington for the novel retreat I’d signed up for months ago, everything seemed wrong, awful. First of all, I couldn’t eat the food, so I had to scramble to get what I needed. My single dorm room was on the ground floor, a fishbowl for passersby, that had an overhang above its sole window, which made my room very dark. There was no desk lamp as promised in our orientation email. The bed’s three-inch tall mattress was made of vinyl. I missed my family. I convinced myself that I was not really a writer after all.
”I made a mistake!” I cried to my husband that night on FaceTime. “I wish I were home watching Dear Edward with you! I wish I were going to Lila’s ultimate frisbee banquet. I wish I were watching Johnny’s baseball game.”
Plus it was the week of the fires in Canada, and all of us had sore throats, scratchy eyes and a general feeling of doom about how we’ve wrecked our planet.
The writing went terribly the next morning. I had so much I’d wanted to do that I didn’t know where to start, and I was running around (on and off the page) like a chicken with no head. Wait! Maybe I need a cup of tea. Now I need to pee. Time to go for a walk, maybe if I do I can think through this plot problem. Let me just make sure the Kickstarter pledges are in. Oh, yikes, make a list of donors, send then thank you cards…
Then, Tuesday afternoon, something clicked. I had applied bum glue, and forced myself to sit with the manuscript long enough for it to gain a critical mass in the space in my brain where the creative force engages. The writing began to tell me what to do. I fell into it, got lost in my story again, found the good sentences, chucked the bad, and soon it was fully alive. I got to read some pages at a participant reading and also had the first page of my novel critiqued positively.
My fears about my physical comforts were also allayed. Trader Joe’s was only a mile away, plus there was a full kitchen at Champlain College, only a few feet from my room. I got a lamp at Target for $8. The bed turned out to be fine, and I actually slept unusually well while I was there. The shared bathroom happened to be right across the hall from me. Best of all, I could pack up my meals and join my fellow writers in the cafeteria.
The most commonplace conversations with other writers can be deeply gratifying. There’s a shared understanding, a compassion for each other, because writing is SO DAMN HARD! I knew a couple of the writers from my grad school program, and quickly made new friends. Most of the time at this retreat was simply spent writing—we could all partake as we pleased in any group activities. By the time I had to leave, I had fallen in love with my tiny room. There’s something to be said about getting away in part because one has so few possessions. Just the bare essentials. I told Tom when I got back, “It’s like my version of camping.”
I’ve been so busy since mid-April with the Kickstarter for my band’s new album that my writing life had been on a slow simmer. When I was in grad school, I knew I needed to schedule in three-four hours of writing a day. Lately, I’ve been telling myself that I will fit it in when I can. What this means of course is that I don’t write as much. Going on retreat reminded me, to quote Alan Jacobs, "my only real task-management tool is a calendar.” While I was there, I remembered how helpful it is to use a timer. Scheduling these daily chunks of time to write, sticking to a quota (for me the absolute sweet spot is four hours, spread out over a day) allowed me to get quite a bit of work done, on both the forest and the trees, so to speak, of my novel.
I came home with a clear understanding that I need to weave a present-day story into and through the previously written story about my characters’ growing-up years. Using basic story structure (h/t Save the Cat, h/t Allison K. Williams’ Seven Drafts), I began to craft a shorter outline for a period of one week, during which the three siblings in my novel (Peter, Rhodie and Zhsanna Becket) who have wanted to be a legendary family band since they were children come to a crossroads in their formation. They need each other to achieve their dreams, but they can’t agree on the most basic elements of their band-to-be. When Peter pushes his new crush, Liv First, to be their manager, and Rhodie insists they invite Peter’s arch nemesis Jack Slade into the band, the siblings reach a breaking point. Zhsanna enlists the help of Mose Healey, a drummer who grew up on the streets of Pimmit, and the three siblings embark on a journey into the past and future to figure out whether or not they can heal their longstanding wounds the others have caused in order to win the annual Pimmit Run.
My black bean tofu burgers are done. I’ve procrastinated too long on this newsletter, trying to get it perfect, but maybe good enough is better. I hope you will join me on one of the two retreats I’m offering this summer: the Adirondack one is now available as a Virtual Option ($250 instead of $350), though I still have room for one more writer in-person.
Also, never too late to join Morning Seeding & Tending! We will be meeting every weekday from 10-11am EDT throughout the summer. All you need to do to join is subscribe to this newsletter for $20/month. What a deal!
Finally, if you are anywhere near Northampton, MA on Sunday June 18, come on over to Bombyx in Florence for an outdoor (evening if it rains) early evening show with Kalliope Jones (Amelia’s band) opening for The Nields! It’s our album release party for Circle of Days, our 21st album! Also, as it’s Father’s Day, and several of the bands’ fathers will be present, expect some special guests to join us onstage.
Happy summer, happy writing!
Nerissa
Things I Am Reading and Watching
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell, Body Work by Melissa Febos, Dear Edward (watching the Apple + series, and I have the novel by Ann Napolitano by my bedside), Atomic Habits by James Clear, Anam Cara by John O’Donohue.
Recently finished: French Braid by Anne Tyler, Ted Lasso third season, The Sopranos (well, most of it. I had to take breaks.)
Queued up: The Arsonists’ City, Hala Alyan (thanks to Laura Hirshfield!)