18. A Writer's Retreat

A move forward to retreat.

My mother is a writer. She’s a complicated person and it would not be truthful to say I have always wanted to be like her. It would also be disingenuous to suggest that her being a writer didn’t influence me. In general, I think being a “writer” as an identity is very weird. It’s treated fetishistically on the internet in particular, though even before electricity existed plenty of writers wrote long screeds about how important writing is. I think it’s mostly because any creative act requires vulnerability, which on balance needs some ego feeding. Writing is a bit more unique than some other creative acts because not all of them involve lots of words and describing of the self. The medium encourages writers to talk about how important writing is! An actor or dancer or singer has to show how important what they do is through doing it well. A writer can just write a paragraph about it. 

Yesterday, my mother started to tell me a story that went this way and that with circular connections even though she began with the premise it had a point. As she started to describe the plot of “The Night of the Iguana,” I demanded to know what that point was. We argued a bit about how she’s always going on long monologues for no reason, treating me like a sack of dumb potatoes with a shirt on, when she yelled, “I JUST LOVE WORDS.”

I’m ashamed to say I know what she means though I hope to maintain enough mental clarity to shut up once in a while as I age. I do love words. I love conversation, I love sharing my opinion, chatting, telling stories about things that have happened, repeating them over and over, and asking questions about other people’s stories. As a kid, I also loved to read, but my attention span has been worn down so badly by my dopamine-fueled phone addiction that it takes a lot to start a book. Once I do, though, it’s easy to stay up all night until I finish, then dream disturbing dreams about the protagonist. 

Is this a virtue? No. I think it’s neutral or even sinister. There was a viral TikTok a few years ago about hotness, but also how most people’s main hobby is consuming media, like books, shows, movies, music, video games. I have thought about that a lot. My friend Patrick and I were talking about that topic more or less and how many conversations go: “I saw/read/heard this thing. Did you see/read/here this thing? Here’s what the thing was like and what I thought about the thing.” Even original conversations are a rehash of what we’re offered as cultural consumers. 

I know a lot of people feel a way about criticizing that, because they’re very connected emotionally and psychologically to whatever their media consumption habit is. Often, people say a particular song or character makes them feel “seen” or “not so lonely.” I do think that’s important and I think there are works of art that have influenced me as much as or more than a person ever has. But I’m considering more how I use stories or media to fill in gaps of connection instead of trying to fill them with actual community or developing myself as a human outside of what I consume. Especially because the availability of new media is increasingly controlled by a smaller and smaller group of conglomerates with a stranglehold on what’s produced. And even if they produce it, they can delete it, and you can’t own it, but you can pay to lease it month-to-month. Art is becoming stupider and tinier and harder to access, which means going out into the world again and finding some real life to think about.

Wow. That was a really long preamble to blog about going to a writer’s retreat and possibly totally irrelevant to the story. I just wanted to share some more of the words that I love to say that there are many limitations to writing as a liberating or meaningful act.

And yet, I am unlikely to stop because I have a compulsion to talk that is apparently genetic. Writing is just talking without having to stop to listen, which is why my mom and I enjoy it so much.

The writer’s retreat I went to was great, first of all, and all ennui encompassed in this post is entirely my spiritual disease and not the place, group, or activities. It’s run by my friend Ali and I highly recommend her next one whenever it happens, for the beginning, intermediate, and advanced writer. Pretty much everyone I met there was friendly, fun, and open, to a degree I found hard to handle at times because of my normal solitary life. I’m not an introvert, but during our first raucous group dinner I got up, walked away, and stood alone in an open field for ten minutes before returning to the table. 

I am obliged to mention what an enormous privilege it was to go and will add that part of the reason it took so long for me to go on a writer’s retreat is having the money and then having the comfort with spending that money. And I do hope to always have both, if possible, and to never take either for granted, whether I go on another retreat or not.

We were on an island in Greece, a place I’ve always wanted to visit, and I was really thrilled when Ali announced that’s where Write and Flow would be in 2023. It’s funny, Greece actually was exactly as I imagined, like I had been there just from seeing pictures. The white houses, dusty roads, blue water. The food was fantastic, the sun hot, the bugs minimal. We had daily yoga classes, workshops, group sharing. I cried on the last day, which was embarrassing for me. I did barely any writing. There was too much else to do, though I did see many other people finding the time to work on their creative projects while I wandered dreamily by, heading to the beach or for a nap on the couch. A lot of the reasons I wanted to go had nothing to do with writing, so I didn’t really mind. I wanted to be with friends, travel someplace I’ve never been, and I wanted to live in the identity of being a writer in a way I usually do not, for all of the reasons I laid out above. 

“I’m a writer, I’m on a writing retreat, we are writers, we write. Writer, writer.”

As a word, it is a matter of fact—I get paid to write, I am a writer. I write compulsively, I am a writer. For things to mean more than fact, they need a bit of ceremony. What is ceremony but space and attention and superstitious behaviours? And I think that accurately describes a writer’s retreat. Throughout our ten days at the seaside yoga centre, ceremony imbued the identity with more meaning than I generally find in it, buoyed by all the lovely other people partaking in the same practices around it. A retreat with other people is distracting in some ways, but you are combining your power to create more importance in the moment. 

If you don’t make something important, who will? We decide what’s important to who we are and give it our time an attention. A TV show, a creative act, a friend. A retreat is just a condensed version of a lifetime of pointing at the thing and telling yourself, “That. That is what I am.”

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• This post does not do any justice to the actual experience because it’s mostly brain farts about identity, but this is a link to Okreblue, if you just want to stay in a beautiful place in Greece.

• And this is Ali’s Write and Flow website, but even more immediately, sign up for her newsletter, Little Things, which is great for writers.

• She is also starting her second year in a row leading people in doing The Artist’s Way, starting January 29. It was a big hit last year and some of the folks at my retreat did it and loved it so much, so I am planning to join if I don’t turn into dust before then. More info here.

• AND she also does workshops which I have taken that are so helpful—an incredibly generous and talented leader who gives a lot of herself to other creatives.

• I am curious about what other ceremonies people partake in that bring them focus. That’s very general, but still? What are you up to??