January 3rd, 2019

Be it resolved

The above is the title of almost all my new year’s resolution posts. It’s a boilerplate expression from formal debates, despite the fact that I never did debate in school–my life would probably be going better if I did–nor have even seen it practiced. But I like the expression.

Be it resolved that in 2019 I will continue to (aka a list of things that I’m proud of/worked out well in 2018)

• go to ballet class every week and yoga every other week, at least through July…hopefully all year, as well as the gym (almost) every morning
• floss every day
• avoid naps
• cook all the recipes from the Canadian Dairy Farmers’ Calendar
• follow people on Twitter who know things I don’t, especially Indigenous and trans activists (some of the issues I know the least about). Feel free to send recos!
• write cheerfully and freely on this blog about whatever I want whenever I want, as well as finish tidying up the issues created by the great BlueHost migration of 2018
• shut up on social media in January (and maybe February?) in the interests of listening more and better to others when I’m not talking so much myself. This seemed to go well last year. This blog and maybe Instagram will remain the exception(s).

Be it additionally resolved that in 2019 I will (aka a list of things that aren’t currently going so well/I could stand to change)

• write a couple hours (almost) every day. I took it pretty easy in 2018, which I’m fine with, but I don’t think I’d be fine with having another year that was equally low-productivity. I like the book I’m working on, but I keep better track of it when I’m more fully immersed.  In fact, I should also
• write a complete outline of the new book. I’ve never truly done this for any big project, but I’ve never worked this slowly or had such a hard time envisioning the whole forest because I was consumed by leaves and twigs, so I think it’s time. I don’t even think I’ve said the book’s working title to anyone in a year or so. It’s Killing It, by the way. 
• lose enough weight to wear my pink pencil skirt. I know, I should be in a place in my life that I don’t make body-shamey new year’s resolutions now, but I love that skirt.
• go car-free until summer. At that point, if we really miss it, maybe get a new car, but we have to have a chance to miss it first. 
• come to some sort of internal calm about going out to literary events. I am currently somehow both despondent about wanting to go to more events in order to feel more connected to new books and the lit community at large and friends I don’t see often enough in particular  AND overwhelmed by how much I have to do in a week and wanting to go to fewer events. I also get frustrated when I gamble on an event that winds up being boring or poorly organized and I don’t even know anyone there. I don’t know what the resolution looks like, but I need to find it instead of just being annoyed and tired all the time.
• work towards de-gendering my language. Once I started thinking about pronouns and how many people prefer they/them at this point in history, I started feeling weird about how relentlessly gendered my everyday words are. When I say “A woman on the subway laughed at my joke,” what part of the story is illuminated by “woman” instead of “person”? The hardest part of this will definitely be not starting every comment to more than one person with “Guys!”
• Buy a new bra.

That should do it. It’s easy to make this list longer and longer until it is just “become a perfect person,” so I’m going to stop while it’s still (somewhat) reasonable. 

Wishing you all health, happiness, and achievable goals in 2019!

September 16th, 2018

Writing with a day job

When people tell me their dream is to write a book (something about a writer inspires people to announce this). I generally take an interest and ask what part of the process they are in, but I should know better because if someone is using the word dream they mean “not reality,” and inevitably they say they have not made any attempt to write anything and have no plan to do so. Sometimes that’s not the case but I’m gonna generalize here. The worst example of this conversation was an acquaintance who had her whole book mapped out in her mind, but she never wrote it because she’d “always had to make a living.” This was awful because she said it standing in front of our two desks–we had the same job, and after that conversation we both went back to it. But she knew I’d written a book and was working on another–she knew the job wasn’t preventing me from writing, and yet some cognitive dissonance made her say that to me.

Look, I get it–I have had considerable privilege in my life and that has helped me to free up time and brain space and energy to put into writing. What’s more, everyone is different, and even someone with equivalent opportunity might have different processes that require more or different time or energy or brain space, and not be able to make it work with the slivers and bits of time I have, and that’s totally legit.

But here’s the thing–I think if you really want to write a book, if it’s your actual goal and not just something to say, you should try! I mean hard-core, working seriously, assembling all the bits and slivers of time, sacrificing things you like but not quite as much as writing, and then see where you are. And try for a while, until these things become habit because writing is hard–it won’t feel fun, just like starting a new job or exercising for the first time in a while doesn’t feel fun, and then it’s tempting to say it’s the wrong fit and you should stop, but maybe it’s just new? If you do it for whatever a habit-forming while is for you and it is all drudgery and no gentle euphoria when you look at yesterday’s nice paragraph, ok, yeah, maybe it’s the wrong fit, but then that’s one more thing you know about yourself and your writing process. Here’s some suggestions from me and the many many other writers I know who do the 9-5 thing and write. You’ll be able to strike some out right away–some are not suitable for those with caretaking responsibilities, short attention spans, long commutes, etc., etc. But I bet something at least could work for you–at least worth trying?

1. What if you brought your notebook on the subway or bus and wrote on your commute? Or your laptop? Or if you jotted things on your phone in the Notes app on your phone and then transcribed…every evening? One evening a week? If you commute by car, what if you tried dictating your words and then transcribed every evening or one evening a week? What if you tried a text-to-speech app–those are easier than dictation if they work for you, though they don’t work for everyone.
2. What if you ate at your desk and wrote through your lunch hour, either in a notebook or in Google Docs or Dropbox or something else that would allow you to save your work remotely from your work computer? What if you took a walk at lunch and dictated your writing into your phone, or took notes per above?
3. What if you kept a Word doc minimized on your computer all day and jotted down any cool thoughts or lines that came to through the day, then stayed 15 minutes late to try to synthesize them a bit, then sent the doc to yourself?
4. What if you stayed an hour late every day to work on an ongoing writing project at your work desk? What if you came in an hour early?
5. What if you got up an hour early to write before work? Or two hours early? What if you went to bed an hour or two later?
6. What if you just stopped watching TV? Or even everything except that one super good show?
7. What if you just cooked one giant thing one day a week and the other days your writing time was the time while the leftovers were reheating? Or what if you found some convenience food you could live with nutrition/cost/packaging-wise and your writing time would be while those were heating?
8. What if you didn’t go anywhere on vacation but just wrote, and with the money you saved not going anywhere, you could order more takeout and write even more?
9. What if you applied to a writing residency and that was your vacation?
10. What if you went to your parents’ house and asked them to cook your meals and be nice to you, and all the rest of the time you were writing in your childhood bedroom and that was your residency/vacation?
11. What if you gave up a hobby/rec league/book club/volunteer organization and took a writing class instead? Or what if you got together with a writing friend once a week and wrote for two hours and that was your writing class?
12. What if every night before bed, no matter how late and how tired you were, you opened the document where your story lived and just looked at it and saw if there was anything you could do for it before the day has to come to an end. This one is my current modus operandi, and while it isn’t perfect, doing it always makes me feel better than not doing it.
13. What if you knocked your hours down to part-time for while and used the former job days as writing days? This is obviously a bigger sacrifice financially and a more permanent one in many cases, but if it works it can be perfect–you’re already in work-mode on those days, so just work on something else.

I do think it’s worth fighting for more ways of making creative work pay in our society–it is so hard to have a job to support your other job. But it can be done and saying only rich people get to write it is the death of having the good and interesting books that I, for one, want to read. So maybe it’s a personal desire to read the books that get written in-between-times that is making me post this. Please try to find the time–look at your day and find one non-life-sustaining thing that you like less than writing, and get me that book!!

December 11th, 2016

In translation

This site was down for a few days and no one complained outside of my immediate family–not a great sign. So I’m going to work towards a revamp early in 2017 and also try to step up the posting a bit. I’m not sure if that’s akin to offering bigger portions on nicer plates of a food no one is eating, but it’s actually what I want to do, so let’s just see how it goes.

In other, better news, my wonderful agent Samantha Haywood and her co-agent Agata Żabowska have sold Polish rights to my forthcoming novel So Much Love to PRÓSZYŃSKI, and you’ll be able to read the Polish translation in a year or two (I’ll update you). Here’s the deal announcement. I’m so delighted!

If this isn’t immediate enough–or you don’t read Polish–how about a story in French. My short story How to Keep Your Day Job was translated by Miguelina Kroeh from English into French and published online at K1N Litra. If you’d like to read it, it’s here.

I’m feeling quite jazzed–and quite cosmopolitan–about all this!

October 6th, 2016

Stuff going on

It has been so long since I had multiple things going on, writing life-wise, I can’t even remember. Years, probably. But this is good stuff, guys, so it was worth the wait:

—Emily Saso’s fascinating new novel The Weather Inside came out in September, and is blurbed by me (and Bradley Somer). If you click on the book link you can even find me being quoted down near the bottom of the page, calling the novel “heartbreaking and hilarious.” So you should probably buy it!
–my short story “How to Keep Your Day Job” (aka the most successful thing I ever wrote) is being included in Room magazine’s 40th anniversary anthology, which is a lovely honour from a lovely magazine, and a thrill to be included with so many other brilliant women (if you click the link you see a partial list). Maybe you should buy that one too?
–I did a short interview with Danila Botha, author of the For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, which you should buy (there may be a theme here. Anyway, the interview was part of Danila’s tenure as writer in residence at Open Book, and I was thrilled to be included. This also constitutes the first press my book has gotten since its deal announcement back in 2014, and it’s really really really exciting and scary. If you’d like to read the interview, it is posted here.

See, I told you–excitement!

May 24th, 2016

Oh my darlings, will I have to kill you all?

In the fall of 2000, I started working on a big project called “Homing”, which I occasionally (and for years) retitled “All the Pretty Girls.” I gave up on that still-incomplete novel sometime in 2002, came back in 2004 and chucked a bunch and wrote some more. In 2005 I planned to work on it as my MA thesis andrevised some of the old material for my MA application portfolio and some grant applications, and added some new stuff along the way–including a new title, “The Scenarios.” By the time I needed to properly work on the thesis in fall 2006, though, my focus had shifted to short stories, and that is what the thesis project became–poor old *The Scenarios* went on the back burner.

I revised and edited that thesis to create my first book, *Once*, then went on to write another collection of stories before returning to *The Scenarios* at the beginning of 2011. By this point I had realized short stories worked for me as a structure, and I thought perhaps I could finally write this thing by breaking it up into stories–that would allow me to shift point of view, time period, etc., in a less weird way. And it worked because I was able to finish a draft by early in 2014, having acquired yet another title–*So Much Love*–along the way. I retained a few chapters of what I had written previously, some of which was already shaped as stories and some of which had to be sculpted into that shape. Of course, a lot had to be junked, but some of the old stuff–almost as old as the beginning–remained, albeit re-contextualized and somewhat rewritten.

The book was sold the M&S with the caveat that I would work with an editor to make into a true novel, rather than a novel in stories, as well as substantially increase the page count. Under the guidance of the tireless Anita Chong, I’ve done that–a challenging process. The lesson is, if the inherent form of the thing should be a novel, don’t write it as stories! So now, there’s a number of new chapters and all of the old stories have been reworked (a lot) to becoming chapters…and again, a bunch of stuff got tossed. But there is *still* some of the original material in there going all the way back to 2000 (or close–the memories are a little murky). But less and less–my writing at the time was different, the book was different, my goals for the characters were different, and it’s very hard to make old material fit the new mold.

Thus, this piece below, one of the original bits, is getting cut. If you have read a lot of my work, you might recognize Alan, who shows up in every book I’ve ever written–he’s a favourite, for sure. But he doesn’t really belong in *So Much Love* anymore–he had a major story that was taken out, and now this piece, an intro to his character, doesn’t lead anywhere and is confusing. He’s going to end up with 1 or 2 scenes and the occasional oblique reference and that is all. It’s sad, but it’s what the book needs–which is more important than the sentimental affections I retain for what I wrote 15 years ago.

Anyway, I present to you my darling Alan:

I find Alan, my TA, darting across my driveway as I pull in. The low beams catch the trailing edge of his long coat as he jumps up on the retaining wall by the front door to wait. He’s got his Inspector Gadget trenchcoat cinched tight. He is clutching a package to his chest. As I turn off the ignition, I notice ketchup on my right cuff from the fries I had at lunch. I roll up the cuff, and then the other one to match. I think about putting my face down on the tan, stretched plastic of the horn. Then I get out of the car into the chilly darkness.

Leaning against the hot, clicking hood, I wait for Alan to stroll over to me. If I went to him we’d be too close to the door and I’d have to invite him in. He crosses the driveway briskly; I’m sure he doesn’t want us to end up sipping tapwater in my living room any more than I do. I’m sure Gretta wants that even less.

“Professor Altaris. Hi.”

“Hey, Alan. What brings you by?”

He stops about a foot in front of me. “I brought over the marked essays, sir.” The bundle rests in the crooks of his arms, exposing the pale blue insides of his wrists.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

He shrugs, his narrow shoulders dragging up the hem of his coat a few inches around his shins.

“You could’ve given these to me next week, remember?” Nothing. “Or during the day at my office instead of in a dark driveway like this is a drug deal.” Too much alliteration. I yank the package out of his hands. “What’s the median?”

“It’s all in there, sir. But I think it was about sixty-two or sixty-three.”

“Sixty-two. Alan, we talked about this.”

Another shrug. His face is shaped like a light-bulb and completely expressionless. “The short answer will probably bring it up some.”

I start to argue and then stop. I don’t care. They’ll pass or they’ll fail, and if it’s really important to them, I’m sure the students will be happy to let me know. My shoulders curve inwards.

Alan seems ready to depart—not yet moving but relaxing into his new freedom from marking. I don’t want to interfere with that glee. “We’ll talk about this next week, Alan. In my office. Come up after class, ok?”

“Yes, sir.”

March 30th, 2016

Pages Unbound, hanging with students, literal and figurative frosting

In the endless drudgery that is novel-completion, I am very fond of anything that is not novel-completion. Especially things that make me feel writerly without requiring me to, you know, actually write anything. That sort of thing is really the icing on the cake of this whole career choice I’m making…

So getting to talk with a classroom of college students last week about reading and writing (along with my husband Mark Sampson and the wonderful professor (and friend) Nathan Dueck was a joy and delight. So was tagging along with Mark to launch his new poetry book, Weathervane alongside Dorothy Moahoney at the fabled Biblioasis store (it’s a lovely as I’d hoped!)

And so is the prospect of getting to take part in “Burst: New Voices in Canadian Literature” on May 6 as part of the Pages Unbound festival. The wonderful and talented Suzanne Alyssa Andrew and I will be sharing the stage with a bunch of other emerging types, and I’m so excited to meet and hear them. And to read a little myself, too!

Sharing what one has written is the frosting of writing, of course–it has to be, for if you are counting on publishing and ensuring accolades to sustain you emotionally or (heaven help you) financially, you might well starve to death. Writing as well as I possibly can needs to be enough for me because it would be easier to do almost anything else and no one wants to listen to me complain about something I could easily elect not to do. But I like this line: “If someone can talk you out of being a writer, you’re not a writer.” (it’s from this essay by Josh Olson–warnings: snark, swears)

So I write because I’m a writer and if it’s hard it’s my problem because I wanted to tell these stories. Them being written, and available for me to read myself is the sustenence here. But I do really enjoy the icing on the cake, giving the work to others and seeing what they think–so grateful the opportunities to do so that come my way.

Possibly, frosting is on my mind of late, because I was in the States last week (after Windsor it seemed natural to go on to Michigan and see some of the rockstars we know there) and a friend asked me to see if I could find any rainbow-chip frosting. Apparently it used to be available all over North American, then only in the States, and most recently no one could find it anywhere. I googled and found that the frosting had in fact been discontinued and is now coming back. I also found this insane video of a guy who who got 7000 people to sign a petition to bring back the frosting (!!!!) and then, when invited to a party celebrating his success, seemed absolutely terrified.

Anyway, I bought the frosting and my friend was delighted. I bought a tub for myself too and am really looking forward to trying it–can 7000 people be wrong? I can’t find a way to tie this back into the post or the central metaphor, but basically: you take your fun where you can get it.

October 13th, 2015

Confidence on Ego Burn

One of my favourite things these days is getting to do guest blogs for other writers. It’s such a great change from the novel, and really satisfying to get something written, edited, and out into the world *quickly*, which is not the path the novel is on. I did a bit on writers helping writers for Ottawa Poetry a while back, and now this week, a piece on confidence for Emily Saso‘s lovely blog Ego Burn.

Emily’s confidence series is really interesting, both because it’s something we all grapple with and because I’ve never really thought about it from quite this angle. How confident am I? How do I find the will to keep going when I haven’t written anything good in ages and/or no one cares? Is that confidence, or bloody-mindedness or habit or what? In addition to my piece, there’s a fascinating take from Erin Bedford already on the blog and more to come. I’m really looking forward to the whole series.

September 9th, 2015

Ways to help a fellow writer with his/her work

I wrote a little advice-y blog post for rob mcclennan’s Ottawa Poetry blog on Ways to Help a Fellow Writer with His/Her Work. It’s an area I know well, having been giving and receiving criticism from my peers since 1997, and hopefully some of this is helpful. It was fun to write, anyway.

May 11th, 2015

Things That Might Be Wrong with Your Fiction

Guys, I really do try not to be a snark-head, and this post is not intended that way. It’s just that I read a lot of fiction–stories in journals and magazines, big name novels and collections as well as those from unknowns, plus the literally 100s of fiction-contest entries I’ve judged. From this reading, I have categorized in my head a number of foibles authors of fictions often seem to have. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to fix published work and the people who run contests do not let you call up the non-winning entries and let them know where you think they went wrong. Sometimes I use what I have learned in creative writing classes, but since I am not currently teaching, I have no one to share these insights with. I do want to share–and offer some potential solutions. I’ve stayed away from problems I feel like a lot of writing advice thingums cover–like overusing research and having one-note secondary characters–in favour of stuff I haven’t seen covered too much.

Please (please please) do not assume that I am making this list under any kind of impression that I am a flawless writer. Ahahaha. It’s just that other people’s problems are far easier to spot than one’s own. I am actually writing this post as procrastination against my own writing. Yeah, I’m pathetic, but let me help you!

1) What happened: You started your project with the central character and you did a lot of free writing, character sketching, and thinking to explore who this person is. You feel you know what he or she would wear, think, eat, and imagine every second of most days. When you started writing the story or novel, you were able to write quickly and easily because you were so thoroughly in the shoes of your protagonist, but what you ended up with is very long and rambling, because you kept getting stuck spending pages  on how the character feels as s/he, say, walks to the bus stop and realizes the bus is late. All of this minutiae is helpful in learning who this person is and why what happens to him/her matters…and yet people do claim to have been bored while reading.

What went wrong: I ran into this a lot with the young writers I taught in high schools, but you also see it with grownups and even published books. In my humble opinion, what is happening here is mistaking process writing for product writing. Authors often do need to know everything about their characters; readers very rarely do. It can be very useful to free write about your characters’ childhoods in great detail, for example, because that’s going to reverberate through their later lives and a reader will be able to feel it–without there being a word about the actual childhood on the page. It can be very hard, especially for students doing a writing assignment or adults with limited time to believe that they’ve written hundreds or thousands of words for themselves, not for an audience–but that’s often the way we write.

What to do: Sometimes, we just need to write the block of wood, then carve the story sculpture out that. So do it–write about every teacher your character had in grammar school and describe her whole house and all her friends. Then go back through what you’ve written and figure out what the story is about and trim it down so that most of the text is in service of that story. I don’t know your writing process but a random shot: maybe colour coding would help? Running a coloured highlighter down the page beside the text, switching colours when you switch content. Maybe green for dialogue, blue for action, yellow for character introspection. That can help show you schematically where cuts might be needed. You might also need a trusted and literary friend to go through the manuscript and note everything that doesn’t really need to be there.

2) What happened: You wrote a story that circled around a secret–a character’s hidden past, a mysterious crime –without knowing what in fact the secret was. You wanted to experience the mystery along with the characters and when you got to the end you were pleased to come up with a fascinating denouement and the secret has now been revealed to both you and the characters. However, you weren’t able to make the ending 100% line up with what came before–some characters’ actions don’t make sense given what they knew at the time, and other “mysterious” action has no real point at all now. You might have a character who knows the secret truth seemingly lying in interior monologue, or someone acting clearly counter to their own best interests for no real reason.

What went wrong: This is not a failure of writing–writing to find out what the ending is a totally fun thing to do–it’s a failure of editing. Really the first example is, too, but it is much harder to see when you have too much extraneous information–it should be obvious to an author when some information in the book is actually wrong in the face of other info therein. And I feel several really big-deal books were published in the last few years with this sort of thing not yet worked out. I read and read, excited by good writing and an interesting plotline–I was eager to figure out where all the pieces fit and get to the end…and never really figure it out. Apparently no one cares about this sort of thing because I look up the reviews of the books and my issues go unmentioned, but I still think writers should try to fix them.

What do do: Reread your manuscript once you know the ending ad make sure everyone’s actions make sense given what they know and what their goals are even if the reader won’t know these things until the end. You may need to make a chart of who knows what when, and what their goals are, if your plot is particularly complex. Really, this is just an extension of the challenge of writing any long fiction–make sure desires, personality traits, problems, and pleasures play through throughout the book. You can’t make a character who hates ice cream in chapter 3 gobble down a bowl in chapter 7, and you can’t make a character who knows who the murderer is throughout the book have a long internal debate about who might have been the killer.

3) What happened: You based your book or story on real events that happened to you and/or people close to you. Initially you thought that you’d either just tell the story as it happened or, if you got uncomfortable with writing some personal details, lightly fictionalize and make up things to replace what seemed best kept private. It turns out both these strategies are challenging, as more details make you uncomfortable than you thought, plus some people in your life have asked you not to write about them. The fictionalizing isn’t really working out either, as it hard to make things up when you know what really happened–it just feels like lying. So you’re ending up with a lot of holes in your story–big jumps in time and event where you skip over what you don’t want to talk about. You’ve also eliminated a lot of characters at the request of the people who inspired those characters–so it feels like the people who remain in the story live in a sort of social black hole. Yet another problem arises when real events were somewhat convoluted–people showing up even though they weren’t involved, multiple locations for reasons that are irrelevant–and you’re wasting a lot of time trying to explain all this stuff.

What went wrong: A humble guess–you might be too close to the events, emotionally or in time. It’s really useful in a therapeutic sense to write out important or traumatic events in your life when you are close to them, but it’s really hard to do that artistically in a way that a reader can understand and empathize with. It’s tough to walk the line between writing that you have no feeling for and writing that you have so many feelings for that it impedes your process.

What to do: For most writing problems, I would say one solution is to have a wise friend read it over and see what they suggest, but that might not work here if you are very emotionally invested in the work–criticism of plot and characters might come into your brain as criticism of your life and friends/family/self. Waiting is the cure here; eventually you will have some perspective on what is germaine to the story and what you can safely leave out or fictionalize. You need to be able to see what you are writing as something for strangers and work to make it what it needs for them to be affected, involved, empathetic. As long as it’s something you’re writing for yourself, beautiful and important as it may be, it will be hard for others to access. Writing is always a small act of generosity–you are giving a story to your reader. Wait until you have enough emotional strength to be generous to your reader.

***

That’s all the tips I have for now, anyway–I’m sure there’s loads more ways to solve these problems than what I’ve mentioned, and lots of other problems besides these. What are you seeing in stories and novels that you’d like to fix?

May 5th, 2015

The Childhood Bedroom Writing Retreat

I’ve been reading a lot about writing retreats lately. They just seem so lovely and idyllic–you go somewhere really pretty and fun yet somehow isolated and silent, and you get put up in a nice room just for you and given great meals you don’t have to cook or clean up from. You’re surrounded by people who want the same things as you do–solitude and time to work yet also later on stimulating company and challenging conversations and walks and laughs and snacks. You work so hard and so purely with no distractions that you end up with amazing new pages or spot-on revisions, a raft of new people to put in your acknowledgements and a few extra pounds of gourmet food. And a million good pictures from the gorgeous nature hikes you took every day after you finished work but before the social hour began.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to do that? Except I don’t actually have a life I much need to retreat from. I have a pretty nice home office with a door I can close and window with an interesting view. Besides work and writing, I don’t have a lot of demands on my time–well, no, i have tonnes of them but they’re all discretionary. Hanging out with friends, going to shows, watching Buzzfeed videos all take a bite out of my writing time, but I think I would just find other friends at a writing retreat…and somehow find a wireless connection to watch more Buzzfeed videos. My one non-discretionary obligation: I have a job, yes, but it’s pretty flexible–however, since I’m paid hourly every hour I take away from work to write quite literally costs me money. I try not to be nickel-and-dime about this, but I also try not to waste time…or money. Flying elsewhere at my own expense, taking a travel day and then possible time to settle in, just to get a room of my own when I have such a room already…I can’t really justify it.

I am NOT belittling writing retreats, which sound like they genuinely do simultaneously stimulate and soothe people into producing some amazing work–it’s just not in the cards for me right now, though I would like to go someday. And yet, in the meantime, my apartment is pissing me off lately (constant plumbing issues, some other stuff) and if I stay here I have to do my own cooking and laundry. So then I thought of it: where do I know that is pretty and peaceful, I could get a room of my own for free, and someone would make me lovely meals and have stimulating conversations with me? You’ve read the title of this post so you know what answer I came up with…

It went pretty well, actually! Minimal travel time, low cost, and no settle-in/getting-to-know-everyone time since I lived at my “retreat” for nearly two decades and have known the coordinators my entire life. The food was excellent, the weather was lovely, and there were even some birds singing the apple tree outside my window.

The downside is that I’m probably more eager to chat with my family than with strangers, and they of course have a vested interest in chatting with me. As well, unlike at a real retreat, they weren’t hard at work on their own projects, so whenever I went to get a snack or a drink there was the potential of sitting down and having a 20-minute conversation with an eager participant–a temptation I rarely overcame. I’m also just really comfortable in that house and it was a relief not to be constantly hassled by cats whenever I lay down (not that I didn’t miss them, but…) so I took a number of naps!

So I wasn’t as productive as I’d hoped to be but honestly I never am–this was pretty good for me, actually. I highly recommend the Childhood Bedroom Writing Retreat if your folks have a location and a relationship with you that’s amenable to such things. Or I guess you could also put in an application Chez Rosenblum….