Patricia Harrelson

Making A Writing Retreat

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} catch(err) {}Since it is not always possible to secure a wonderful retreat at some place like Norcroft or Soapstone (one place I’ve been, the other I’ve applied to), I often make my own writing retreats. That means securing a place of seclusion to write for at least 3 days and preferably 5-10. I’ve rented cabins, stayed in hotel rooms, and housesat for friends in order to secure the necessary seclusion.

This past week, I rented a cabin in the High Sierra for 5 days to work on the Right Sisters. I packed food, my lap top, a few sweatshirts for cooler nights and left home for the cabin. This retreat did not turn out to be the Walden adventure I envisioned when planning it, i.e quiet all but wind in the pines, musky scent of hot decaying forest earth, simple living in a sparsely furnished Forest Service cabin.

Instead I faced

 

• a generator that ran 24 hours a day blocking the noises of nature (necessary for electricity);
• the pungent odor of a skunk wafting intermittently through the cabin floor from an abandoned nest under the cabin;
• a floor so slanted that my computer tilted on the little kitchen table where I sat to work;
• a noisy critter that visited every night biting into anything edible that I left out (see banana picture) and waking me 4-5 times a night with his raucous presence.

 

 

The good news is that despite the sensual assaults and strange discomforts, I got tons of work done. Perhaps it is true that a little suffering is good for the work.

Still I recommend a little more investigation regarding the space you choose to stay when making your own writing retreat! Anyone have suggestions for us writers looking to retreat?

Cindy broke her toe in June and her ankle in July. Not surprisingly, she was down in the dumps by August, having worn strange foot devices all summer that prevented driving, swimming, or even walking very well. On a particularly bad day, I asked her if there was something we could do to make her feel a little better.

“I want to re-arrange my office,” she said.

Well that seemed pretty easy. I could help her move the furniture around, but then she added that she wanted to do a deep cleaning. Well OK, but I was working out of the house a lot, so she would have to do small things and then I could help with the bigger tasks when I got home.

She dove in with gusto and soon the living room was filling with piles of stuff as she cleared off book cases and started dusting and vacuuming. Then when I came home last Wednesday after working all day at the college followed by 2 hours with my writers group, she greeted me with, “I want to paint my office.”

I was tired; I was cranky; I did not meet her excitement with anything like enthusiasm, but after a good night’s sleep I rallied. By that time, she had enlisted Becky to help, but she nevertheless accepted my belated offer to assist.
We emptied the office of furniture, all but the desk, and spent the weekend painting. By Monday night, we were moving furniture on location and hooking up the electronics. The room looks great and Cindy is the happiest I’ve seen her since she was throwing money on me in our state room on the trip to Alaska.

Here are some pictures of her sunny, deeply cleaned, reorganized, freshly painted office:

The book launch for Between Two Women was one year ago this past weekend. It was a fabulous party and wonderfully validating. And it was my first promotional event!

In the year since, I can’t say I’ve been a highly successful book promoter, but I’ve learned a lot, and it is quite clear that book sales rise in direct proportion to book promotion. That’s a fairly obvious conclusion, and it points to the fact that promotional efforts have to be given full attention and lots of time and effort. My attention has been sporadic. Like my exercise program this year, there have been bursts of enthusiastic effort followed by thinking and not doing.

In my more energetic moments, I’ve found some excellent resources, including the following books:

• The Frugal Book Promoter by Carolyn Howard Johnson
• Plug Your Book: Online Marketing for Authors by Steve Weber
• Speak and Grow Rich by Dottie Walters & Lilly Walters
•  Sell Your Book on Amazon by Brent Sampson

My absolute favorite, however, is Freocious Promotion for Timid Authors by Hope Clark and Gwynne Spencer.  I like this book because these women understand that book promotion feels like a chore and it’s scary. To that end that offer practical, easy to implement and inexpensive practices.

Whenever I start feeling down in the dumps about what a lousy promoter I am, I grab this book, read a few pages, and suddenly I’m re-invigorated. I start scribbling notes about things I can do immediately to get my promotional efforts back in motion.

Then I set the book down and get to work!

Make sure you get Ferocious when you start thinking about book promotion.

Take 4 kids, ages 9, 7, 6 and 4. Add one more 4 year old plus her 20 something dad and go to the Water Park. You will play HARD for 7 hours! Here are the pictures to prove it.

The photographer for most of these pictures was Cindy who was in a cast and couldn’t make her way up to the BIG slides where we slid down flumes and vortexes, so there are no pictures of that madcap fun, but I think these pictures show what a blast we had. You can click on the pictures to make them bigger and see whose who. The person in aqua who is underwater is Gianna. And the body underwater behind me and Nell in the inner tube is Huckle. We all spent a lot time underwater!

The buckeye have turned rusty and crackling. Poison oak is turning too. The meadow grass is platinum blond with dark green tufts of tarweed starting to poke through. Blood red dragonflies skim over the surface of the waving grass. Today on my walk, I saw a squirrel hefting a huge pine cone up the trunk of a leaning tree.

Summer has more than a month left, but these are signs of the approaching fall. The parents of school age children are getting ready for a new semester. Some public schools start tomorrow though my grandkids won’t crack their books until after Labor Day. With the start of school, I’ll begin participating in homeschool and teaching a computer access class at the college. Julia and I are hoping for a late fall launch for The Right Sisters. My freelance assignments are piling up. So much to do as fall pushes it’s way into summer.

My Boddhisattva work sits as a backdrop to what I see and what I do. We’ve been doing a six-week study on the inevitability of death. The meditations are fierce, tender, and sublime. Every morning I sit for a half hour with the certainty of death. I get up from my cushion, feeling the closeness of death breathing quietly behind me. I try to stay present to what is worthy of my attention; what I’m willing to live and die for.

I cannot know what tomorrow will bring; I only know that nothing stays the same.

When I was pregnant with my third child, I read that each time a new child enters a family, a number of new relationships are formed, that number being relative to the number of people already in the family. In other words, in our family of 4, when we added 1, we would then have 4 new relationships. That’s a whole lot of dynamics going on!!

When you add a new member to a writers group, the same thing happens. Suddenly there are a number of new relationship. Group process theory suggests that when a new member is added, the group has to re-form and norm all over again. My writers group had first hand experience with this phenomena last spring when we invited some new members.

New folks came to several different meetings. Not all of the original members were present at each of these meetings, and we had differing ideas about how to handle our visitors participation the first time they came. Some of the newcomers said they would be back and then didn’t come nor did they let us know when or if they would be coming.

Suffice it to say that the experience was very disruptive to our process. So this summer we dedicated a portion of one meeting to discussing how we wanted to manage new members. We decided to have open enrollment once a year, and we drafted the following guidelines to help the process:

 

• Because group dynamics change each time someone joins, we will only add new members once a year in September. The size of the group will determine if we have room for new members. Our group size will not exceed 8 members.
• We will not extend an invitation to a prospective member without running the person’s name by the entire group.
• When inviting a new member, we explain our practice of only bringing new people in once a year in September.
• Prospective new members will be invited to the first meeting in September. We will send them this protocol ahead of time. They will observe rather than participate in the meeting.
• We will set aside time at the end of the meeting for prospective members to describe the focus of their work and ask questions.
• If after visiting the group, a prospective member is interested in joining, she should send an email to the entire group declaring her commitment to participate. The email initiates her enrollment, and we will expect her to begin regular attendance beginning the second meeting in September. If we are working with a schedule for submissions, we will notify her regarding her place in the schedule.
• We assume that we will have already given thought to those invited to join and that we will not be refusing admission. However, if after a person joins, we discover an unsuspected incompatibility, we will find a means to tactfully and kindly dismiss the person. We recognize the awkwardness and discomfort of such a decision and will therefore be thoughtful about invitations to participate and decisions to dismiss

 

 

What do you think of these guidelines? Do you think it’s overkill to be so specific? Do you have a group in which writers come and go and everything works fine. Let me know how you handle membership in your writers group.

When I arrived at Raleigh’s at 6am on Sunday, August’s bike was upturned in the center of the living room and my son and grandson were were working on the chain that had broken the night before. They were surrounded by laughing family, 3 dogs, and a cat. Michael was on the couch drinking coffee with his new puppy Stella in his lap. Candice was cooing to the puppy, and Jenny was sitting nearby with her cup of coffee. Libby was whining from her kennel, eager to be part of the happy scene in the living room where deaf ole Blue had free rein. It was early morning in a Harrelson household, and I happily joined the fray, enjoying the familiarity of my family who rise early, excited about the new day.

Once the chain was repaired, all the activity moved outside, so Raleigh and the boys could hook up the bike rack to Cindy’s truck and load up. August, Cody, and I were going to the John Fisher Downhill Bicycle race at Miami Creek OVH Park in Oakhurst. The 2-hour drive was “sweet,” to use the boy’s lingo. The ride was also filled with a vocabulary I didn’t know– bike stuff, like hardtail, forks, and rhythm patterns. I was a happy driver. Their non-stop conversation served as a backdrop to the beauty of the foothills outside of Coulterville. which sported a plant I don’t remember seeing before: beautiful yellow flowers on a low-lying bush, obviously something that opens in the early morning hours and closes up later in the heat of the day.

This day was blooming into quite a fine time. We were among the first to arrive at the Kamook staging area. The boys were anxious to practice the course, which they did again and again and again, with me picking them up at the bottom and shutting them back to the top. Eventually the race shuttle arrived, and I took a breather. After about 12 runs each, they stopped to eat and drink before the race actually started.

There were two timed runs. I situated myself to take videos (which I’m going to try to post later). I cheered with other parents at the bottom of the first leg of the first run. For the second run, I hiked down the course and sat in a manzanita grove taking videos at a section that had several jumps. My video camera is new and my skills are limited, but I got short clips of both boys as well as everyone else because I never knew when they were coming. Riders start at one minute intervals.

It was a terrific day. My grandsons know how to play hard and they are refreshingly polite as well as generous and witty . . . not every grandma gets to hear tasteful jokes from her 14 and 15 year old grandsons. I feel blessed to be in the company of these smart, congenial young men.

Pictured below:
The scene in Raleigh’s driveway at 6am;
August suiting up for his practice runs;
The boys after the first timed race, coming to get water & food;
Cody with his medal for first place in the hardtail category,

I recently spent 3 days working with Ellen Bass at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Dorianne Laux says that Bass creates “poetry that goes straight to the heart.” Her books, Mules of Love and The Human Line, are smart, intimate, and insightful. Ellen Bass is also a marvelous teacher. She guided 15 aspiring poets over the course of three days, goading us to take risks and make discoveries.

Here a few tidbits gleaned from the notes I took during Ellen’s workshop:

 

• If writing something scares you, you need to write about it anyway because unwritten poems sit in the chute and everything else you try to write has to squeeze its way around. Write the poem (or the essay or story) without thinking about who will see it. Write everything; Don’t publish everything.
• Take risks in language as well as in content. Write metaphors that are weird. Fresh metaphors keep the reader off balance. Avoid clichés and over-used metaphors. Writers need to learn to tolerate a high level of “not workingness” in the process of stretching the metaphor muscle.  Gertrude Stein said that we are living in a period of late language; every day it has been around a little longer. For this reason, writers have to reach a long way to find freshness.
• Read brave poems/essays; keep one by your computer to read when you get scared.
• Discovery means the writer takes the reader to something not already known. Endings need be both surprising and inevitable. Endings are hard to come by. Writers need to be receptive and/or they need to hunt for their ending. If the ending is a surprise to the writer, it will be a surprise to the reader. Robert Frost says, “No surprise for the writer; no surprise for the reader.”
• Stay open to associations. In early drafts, allow the story to veer off. When you feel like you are loosing control, keep writing. See how far you can get from the subject without breaking the tension. Allow things to come in from left field.
• Ask questions: Why are you writing this story now? What is your agency in the story? Your complicity? What has never been said before about this thing you are considering?
• Disturb the story as you know it. Tell it anew from another character’s viewpoint. Look for ways to shake up the story: This is what I didn’t say! This is what I meant to say!

 

 

Ellen Bass gave me much to think about. However, I believe my work will develop if I simply remember to take risks and seek discovery!

During our vacation to Alaska, I was acutely conscious of my attachment to the earth and things that grow: trees, grasses, shrubs, moss. Yes, I love the earth, but then there is the water.

Ahh, the water!

Being near water nourishes my spirit. The sound of a stream gurgling or a river thrashing or meandering is a musical offering. A long stretch of lake water is a feast to my eyes: smooth or undulating, rippling or sparkling in a play of light.

Add the pleasure of good company and the opportunity to slip into the molten green liquid of a reservoir, and the only response is a long SIGH!

And dessert. Rushing across the surface of a lake in a high powered boat, wind in my face, clouds pirouetting above foothills.

SIGH! SIGH!

Last week I spent four days writing in a motel room. The opportunity for deeply focused work is certainly a luxury I can’t afford very often, either in terms of time or money. But I’m committed to finding ways to retreat so that I can write.

A retreat needs to be a minimum of 3 days and preferably a week. My longest retreat was a month, and I’ve also enjoyed 10 day and 2 week long retreats.  Focused writing allows me to delve into the core of my subject matter.

There were times last week when I looked up from the computer screen and did not know where I was. I wrote from 6:30am until 10pm each day, stopping for brief respites called for by my shoulders and bottom. I’d circle the small flower garden at the center of the motel or walk toward the beach in the damp fog with the voices of my characters still conversing in my head. Almost without knowing, I’d turned back toward Room 125, unable to stay away long.

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I believe a retreat supports my relationship to the writing process. When I was teaching, I talked to my students about 3 stages in the process: creating, composing, and revision.

Creating is the messiest stage. My mind leaps here and there, thinking about my subject while bathing, driving, clearing dishes, and in the fertile place between wakefulness and sleep. I scribble notes and freewrite; I read about the topic and suddenly see relevance everywhere. But the creation remains a jumbled mess.

Composing is the hardest part for me–taking the mess to the page, crafting a shape and making meaning. This is the part of the process that is best served by a retreat.  For me, composing anything worthwhile requires an extended period of time, ideally several days. Usually, I can only muster a stretch of several hours.

Revision is my favorite part. I love playing with the piece that has arrived on the page. Suddenly it is obvious where big changes and additions are needed. Tinkering with the smaller stuff like word choice and detail is pure delight. Revision is something I can do in small snatches of time, a half hour in the morning before work or sitting with a hard copy of the piece in a waiting room or during a boring meeting.

My relationship to the process never wavers. I recognize that I need to retreat to compose, something that is not necessarily easy to accomplish and so always feels like a gift.  

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