The Retreat

The Retreat
Chapter from The Writing Group Book, edited by Lisa Rosenthal, Chicago Review Press, 2003

Ten years ago, when my writers' group met in a newly rented apartment, a place as dark as it was cheap, the idea grabbed hold of us to plan a Writers' Retreat. Mary first suggested the idea, or was it Pagan, whose then-boyfriend's father had a rambling summer house in Maine? "Everyone will begin a novel," I proposed. "And finish it in a weekend," Pagan added. The assignment was so preposterous we could only laugh. "Just page counts," said Lauren. "No self-censoring. Straight from the id."

It turned out to be just the right amount of competition. There was this finish line-writing a novel in a weekend, that no one could reach, and at the same time we would vie with one another in friendly sport to get as far along as was humanely possible.

The stars must've been lined up that August:: the boyfriend's father said Yes, everyone's schedule was accommodating, and that memorable weekend, the sky was clear and sunny. During the two-hour drive from Boston to Maine, talk was plentiful. Money and mothers and dating. Therapists and rejection slips. Gynecology and interior decorating, two subjects that are not as disparate as you might think. "I once knew a man," I mumbled somewhere around Pembroke. "Maybe I could write about him, about that. . ."

When I woke in the morning, I could hear the lapping sea. Salty air breezed through the windows. I padded down to the kitchen and made myself a cup of coffee and reveled in the quiet-so full of possibility, so many pages waiting to be written! It helped that the house was large and rambling and filled with comfortable cushions, faded Indian bedspreads. But here's the crux of why our Writers' Retreat worked so well: we worked in proximity to one another. Writing is a lonely occupation, and sometimes that loneliness can squelch one's fluency as much as any other force. But for that weekend, we'd found just the right amount of solitude and support. I sat at a narrow desk in an upstairs bedroom and wrote longhand in a bound notebook. Lauren sat up in bed, tapping furiously at her laptop. Pagan sat staring at her computer in a downstairs room behind French doors, and Mary sat on a large boulder at the beach, the wind blowing her skirts, writing in an unlined artists' pad. Hearing the tap tap tap of one friend's fingers on her keyboard, seeing another's concentrated stare, just knowing the others were being productive propelled me to do the same.

After all, there was the page count contest. We'd agreed to weigh in that evening, like pigs at the county fair. The page count contest was meant to lower standards and generate material. We were all experts at explicating the word; all writing program workshop graduates with years of fine-tuning our critical capacities, and this weekend was meant to be a departure from that self-conscious looking over one's shoulder stuff. This weekend was meant to be a liberation of our creative powers, an unlocking of stream-of-consciousness, a discovery draft written at breakneck speed.

Late afternoon, as the light began to ebb, we weighed in with our page counts. Seventeen pages. Nineteen pages. Twenty-seven. Thirty-two. More than any of us had written before in a single, solitary day.
The boyfriend and his friends cooked for us: lobster and corn on the cob and spaghetti and salad and beer and wine. We writers did the dishes. Then we sprawled on couches and rugs to listen to what each person had written that day.

Was it the wine or the sea or the sheer euphoria of having spewed out so many words at one sitting? Perhaps it was the camaraderie and the sense that we were all in this together. Or the honing in on one's id rather than ego. Maybe it was the pact that we'd made: to write as much as we could and then read it aloud, no judgments passed.

Here I should digress to say that as a rule we are a not a group that works with Xeroxed manuscripts. Instead, we always, always read aloud. We read aloud to encourage feedback that is spontaneous and responsive; because it strengthens the voice and sharpens the ear and because we believe that writing, ultimately, is a social contract. We read aloud because we'd rather listen to the gut and flow of the piece than micro-manage the word. And because we are too impatient and cheap to wait in line at the copier, staple, and distribute, and too vulnerable to cope with that ominous rustling of paper after a piece is read, that sharply critical sound made worse by polite coughs and a silence that goes on a millisecond too long.

At any rate, that evening, after the lobster and sun, after the silence and salt spray, the readings were accompanied by more than one laughing apology. It's difficult to resort to artifice when you are writing that fast and at the same time it's easier to be honest. That evening, a certain standard was set within the group, standards that have held us in good stead all these many weeks and months and years since the retreat. You can lower your standards and go for broke. You are capable of doing more than you think. If you are willing to fail you can also fly.

Two of us went home after that weekend and lickety-split finished the novels we'd begun. We continue to write fast and read aloud, and by these methods we have cumulatively published 2 novels, 6 memoirs, 4 nonfiction books, one short story collection, fifty magazine articles, five pieces in Best American Essays. We have won an Orange Prize nomination, an NEA grant, two National Magazine Award nominations, an NEA grant, and two grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

We'd like to go on another retreat, but have not yet done so. The house in Maine is no longer available.

-- Karen Propp