Five Take-Aways From My First Writing Retreat
This is the reset I needed.
Hi, it’s me.
On Monday of last week, I returned from six days in the woods on an island. Four of those days were at a writing retreat with poets, song writers, novelists, and memoirists. My heart is full. My soul is calm. My mind is clear.
I attempted to embed my Instagram post about this, but Substack keeps telling me the post doesn’t exist. Substack lies. The post is here if you want to click through and see all ten photos. I’ll put one below with the Instagram caption:
I think I left my body earlier this year. I didn’t notice until this weekend, when I felt present with myself for the first time in months. Thankful for a beautiful first experience on a writing retreat in community with other writers, musicians, and poets. My heart is full, my soul feels calm, and I’m ready to start working on my book again. Thank you, Write Doe Bay!
Have you ever been so wound up that you forgot who you once were?
As you know, we’ve had a year. As the person who did not have cancer but was cancer adjacent, I held myself and our world together with duct tape. (Writing that sentence feels weird, like maybe I shouldn’t complain about not having cancer.) Anyway, a couple of weeks before the retreat, I started falling apart and almost didn’t go.
I arrived on Orcas Island in the middle of a work project that had a non-negotiable deadline two days after I returned. It was also the weekend in between two appointments that would inform us whether or not Bryan still had cancer in his body. And a project I was really excited about participating in rejected me the day before.
There was a lot hanging over me that weekend, and despite being in one of the most beautiful places in the world, I felt like a caged animal. Restless, pacing, opening my book, closing my book, sitting to enjoy the view… for five minutes, then getting up to… what was I going to do? I called Bryan. I panicked about being away for so long. I complained that the retreat was going to be stupid and I shouldn’t have come.
My friend and I got to the island on Wednesday afternoon, and I was a hot mess until the retreat started Thursday at dinner. At that first session, my body started releasing stress, like the slow leak in my back driver’s side tire — only slightly noticeable at first, but over the course of the weekend I felt the year’s stress slowly leaving my body. I didn’t think about work. I forgot about the project rejection. Nobody knew my husband had cancer or what I did for a living. Cell reception was terrible and laptops were discouraged. The space was decorated with creamy, dreamlike swoops of fabric draped from ceiling to corner and down the walls, softening the harsh angles of a bare white room — like a womb, or a hug, or like floating inside the aurora borealis.
Remember the last night of summer church camp when you were a kid? How you bravely answered the alter call with all your friends and that boy you made out with in the bushes earlier that night? How you planted your face to the floor, arms stretched out in front of you, and vowed to never let anyone touch your boobs again until you were married because from now on you were married to Jesus? How you rode that spiritual high back home for approximately three days before you stopped reading your Bible again?
None of this happened at Write Doe Bay, but it was an incredible, grounding, reset weekend, and I didn’t want it to end. And yet, I needed it to end so I could go home and get down to the business of writing my book. 2023 was supposed to be the year I drafted it, but the cancer in Bryan’s body sidetracked my brain, my time, and my ambition. And now, almost to the end of the year, I feel rejuvenated and full of ideas for how to keep moving forward.
Five take-aways from my first writing retreat
I have more to say on this experience, but for now I’ll leave you with a few things I’m working on as I re-enter real life:
Scale back the scope of this newsletter. With a full time job and a family, my writing time is limited to just a few hours a week. Time spent carefully crafting weekly essays might help make me a better writer, but it’s distracting me from writing my book. For the next little while, you’re my accountability partner. I’m going to write a lot about writing, which sounds like a yawner, but I’ll make it up to you by sharing excerpts from my draft. And besides, it’s only temporary.
Get organized. I picked up some tips for organizing my digital files, capturing notes and ideas, and creating the mental and physical space to be creative.
Write scenes. Author Kristi Coulter shared that too much reflection and summary feels like someone explaining the plot of a movie to you versus experiencing the movie yourself. I immediately understood the difference and realized the majority of my writing lives in summary and reflection. I’m excited to stretch myself into creating more scenes as I write my book. I know I can do it. I think I did it well (kind of okay?) when I wrote about watching people fish along the river, meeting a celebrity at Sundance, and getting the lyrics wrong to a Mountain Goats song.
Write without editing. This is a thing I already know, but I still need the reminder to not get paralyzed by endless micro revisions and rabbit holes into research. Thanks to this reminder, last weekend I wrote a chapter draft in four hours. It was just okay, and I forgot to add a whole section that I intended to include, but I sat down and banged out a shitty first draft. I can go back and rewrite it later.
Take small bites. I decided these were all the steps I need to think about until the first draft of my book is written. Sometimes I paralyze myself by thinking too far into the future and not knowing how to respond to the infinite number of possible outcomes I could imagine. So for now, I just want to write a shitty first draft. What comes next will be a new puzzle to solve.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. At the retreat, I got such a high from reading an excerpt of my book draft out loud to a room full of humans who laughed and awwwwww’d at all the right moments. I can’t wait to share some of those moments with you as well.
Until next time,
Jen
Substack Writer Meet-up In Seattle - December 6
I heard about a local Substack meet-up next month, and I’m planning to attend! I’ll be the awkward girl in the corner who writes like she’s everyone’s friend but can’t hold an in-real-life conversation. 🤣
If you’re in the Seattle area, would be cool to connect. For more info and to RSVP, go HERE.
This was lovely. You almost had me interested in spending time with people in person. Gasp!
Your writing got me thinking about how I used to think that living my life was distracting me from honing the craft of writing. Then I read that quote that goes, "Before a writer sits down to right, he must first stand up to live."
I think there's a time where we need things to quiet tf down so we can get the words on the page. But most of being a writer is probably more about transmission, or, the silent transference of experience and knowledge and details and "knowingness" of what's happening all around us. This is probably why being a writer is so damn hard: the real stories can't be wrangled down in a nice, neat, tidy format. Sometimes I imagine stories are like wild literary stallions running invisibly around us all the time, just waiting for someone to listen closely and come along for the ride.
As for your season of being "cancer adjacent," I really felt this. Like you coped into a different version of yourself to get everybody to safer waters. In Buddhist circles, there's a tradition around saying the family is sick, not just the person whose body is fighting a virus or cancer. Because their wellbeing is everyone else's wellbeing too. It's all connected.
That's sort of how I see writing these days. All the muscles of life are interconnected with my writing muscles and my noticing muscles and so on. If I'm engaged with one, the rest get something from it too. Your writing muscles are strong, Jen Zug, my fellow tree-loving Substack friend. Write that book for the rest of us.
Keep writing! Shitty drafts keep you moving forward! Looking forward to reading and hearing more! XOXO