My DIY writing retreat

To write about ghosts, sometimes you need to be among them.

I spent the whole of last week writing about ghosts, and being among them.

It happened like this: after a year of fits and starts with my own creative writing projects, after saying I was going to “go away to write” one too many times, I finally committed to going to my parents’ farm for a week. Well, sort of. I had a nudge. M. finally said, go — you need to go and do it. It was his urging that finally made me submit the PTO notice, put the dates on our shared calendar, and write out a plan for my own DIY writing retreat.

And while that quieted the nagging voices in my own head that I’m so needed everywhere, that the world can’t go on without me (newsflash: it very much can), the chorus shifted its nagging to another area: what if my writing retreat was a failure? Even though I was working toward defining “success” at the outset, I was still caught up in a paralytic fear loop that somehow I’d fail. That somehow, I was an imposter after all, and who was I, really, to even take time to do this thing called art? How dare I.

Once I extracted myself from the failure loop, I focused on building the plan. I looked through my journals over the last year, adding sticky notes to the pages that were worth exploring, ideas worth writing into. I made a list of all the partially-started pieces that I wanted to work on, whether that meant expanding, fact-checking, and rewriting. “Work,” as it pertains to a writing project, doesn’t look much like other types of work. It requires a certain amount of silence, a significant chunk of time, the ability to eliminate distractions and normal responsibilities. It can look like doing a whole lot of nothing, actually. So I made a list of what work meant, for the sake of my art and this retreat:

• Reading books for pleasure, and reading books for inspiration. I brought Elle Nash’s Deliver Me and Melissa Broder’s Death Valley for a bit of wild escapism and complicated female protagonists. I brought Jill Christman’s Darkroom: A Family Exposure, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Erica Trabold’s Five Plots for inspiration. I brought Shimmering Images by Lisa Dale Norton, and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology edited by Jessica Hendry Nelson and Sean Prentiss, for craft.

• Thinking about the work.

• Reviewing my iPhone Notes app and old journals (I brought several), noting what stuck out.

• Printing and reading a hard copy of my existing unfinished work, and marking it up with edits and notes.

• Expanding that work by writing new words or jotting down other memories that came to the surface while I was thinking about it.

---

I hoped that by choosing the farm for this retreat, while convenient, would serve a greater purpose. After all, it’s where a lot of my work takes place. Even if a scene or experience doesn’t happen there, I almost always experience a homing call to it. I am tugged home.

I also hoped that it would help me settle into a liminal space between past and present, allowing me to operate somewhere separate from, yet existing in both. Writing time travel, if you will: a way to exist outside the constraints of time and timelines. The ability to move fluidly among all.

In a recent Brevity craft piece, Jean Iverson writes:

“Less attention is given to the surprising benefits of writing in the same location in which our stories take place. In other words, we can summon mysterious forces that shift our writing by simply placing ourselves in a certain location.”

---

The first full day there, I set up my workspace. I decided I’d work at the simple wooden desk in the spare bedroom, the desk I used all throughout grad school, where I wrote my thesis. I stacked my journals and notebooks (each with a different purpose). I laid out my preferred writing utensils: Blackwing pencils, which I love for editing, and black Pilot G2 pens (Bold), which I love writing in my journal with because it feels so smooth and pleasurable. I put my stack of craft and inspirational books on the other corner. I plugged in my laptop. In black Sharpie, I wrote words and phrases on yellow sticky notes and posted them above the desk:

ROOTING

EXPANSION

PACING

SHOW YOUR HUMANITY

BUT HOW DID IT FEEL?

I poked around and found some talismans: a perfectly-spiraled, creamy white shell that felt good in my hand, and two hunks of jasper rock shot through with veins of quartz that A. and I had gotten from Iron Hill in Delaware ages ago.

This may all sound very particular, but I prefer the word intentional. It felt special, ritualistic, and being in a unified mindset while going about a task with such care made it feel magical.

---

I watched the leaves turn on the trees, from green to yellow, from orange to red. I stood outside as the wind picked up, whipping the branches into some restless choreography, the leaves fluttering to the ground in masses. It was the kind of beauty that seizes your chest. I could have watched it all day.

I took naps before writing. I took breaks, usually in the middle of a 3 or 4-hour writing block, to eat a meal or snack. I took day trips with my parents, exploring Amish Country and indulging in baked goods. I reconnected with a writer friend and an encouraging English teacher I had in high school (I’m lucky to have several great English teachers who supported my love for reading and writing, especially at that age).

---

Toward the end of my week-long retreat, I felt buoyant. I was energized by the work that goes into writing: researching, note-taking, writing new words, revising, editing.

I still felt a flutter of anxiety in my stomach every time I sat down at the desk.

I still felt a self-imposed pressure to write new words every day.

But the more I did it, the easier it felt to show up.