I'm Converted. Writing Retreats Work.

I returned from Alaska to the reality of my impending move to California. There are many, many piles of STUFF to look at, make decisions about, pack tightly in shippable boxes...and I knew that I was going to get no writing done in the noise.

So I escaped, back to Rowe, for 2 and a half days. I brought one pair of pants and my laptop. Senior High Camp was happening, so I stayed mostly incognito. My goal: either finish what feels like a full draft of the novel, or get the manuscript up to 75,000 words. I did both! On the first day! I got more work done on my novel in those two days than in two months prior.

I've always had a little scorn for "Writer's Retreats." The main reason is that I have this impression that they are the selfish, expensive, last-ditch effort on the part of people who want to write, but don't have a daily practice. If there's no commitment to writing, there's not going to be some sudden upsurge of brilliance after three days in a cabin. "REAL" writers shouldn't need them. I didn't even know I was prejudiced until I decided to take some time away from everything to work on the novel, and felt shy and silly. Like I was buying into some myth that going into the woods will fix a block.

Now, I'm totally converted. I have a writing practice, a writing career, a writing life. I don't feel at all shy about calling myself "a writer" when people ask what I do. And like I said, I got more done in those two days than I had in the months prior, which means something special was happening in those days, and I think I know what it was.

There are three parts. Part one was that I successfully cut down on my distractions. I couldn't get online on my laptop for the most part, so when I sat down to work, it was only to work. I was alone for hours at a time with no cell phone and no piles of mail. Totally obvious. But somehow I thought I was a pillar of discipline and had never truly considered how distractable I am.

Part two was that I had an incredible amount of social support, built into my being there. I told everyone the reason I was visiting was to write, so when friends at Rowe took breaks from running camp they would ask me how my writing was going. I was getting checked on every few hours, totally unexpectedly, by people I care a great deal about, and that was surprisingly motivating. Because there is such a high value placed on creativity in that community, the air was filled with stories of the brilliance of the camp, and I think creativity works by osmosis, if you're deliberately permeable. Their great work helped me do great work. The legend of the lonely writer, who works best shut in a tower, just doesn't apply here. I'd prefer to be at a picnic table outside, with people all around doing projects, planning games, and occasionally patting my shoulders. At every mealtime someone I hadn't seen yet would come up and hug me. I had a perfect balance of silence and company.

Part three was a slightly more complicated abstract process of making my book feel more real by taking it somewhere new. I've worked on it mostly in Boston. I've done some writing in Los Angeles, where the novel is set. I've done some work on the cruise ship in Alaska. Each time I take the manuscript to a new setting, and try to re-enter the world of my characters, I have to ground their world even more carefully. I'm noticing new things in my own environment, and that leads me to think about new details of my fictional environment. Writing from Rowe, an isolated rural place, somehow turned the volume up on my reflections about being in an urban environment. I thought differently about the Los Angeles in my novel, being so far from it. I noticed how hard it is to eat alone all the time when you're in a city, as I ate family style in camp. I remembered a lot of noises I wasn't hearing--the distant horns and unfamiliar voices outside my old Hollywood apartment were replaced by thunderstorms outside Rowe's Farmhouse. I thought about how many pairs of shoes my characters needed to wear, because I was wearing the same ones for three days.

The grand sense of relief and the thrill of accomplishment hit me on Tuesday night, when a group of friends, some excitingly new and some with dear history, met me in the "smoker's tent." I'd brought a tin of fancy bourbon vanilla cigars for the occasion, and we had a hilarious fifteen minutes puffing away together in celebration. It was one of the more touching, silly, and fulfilling mini-parties I've ever attended. I felt surrounded by support and wished that everyone I know would both (1) start and finish big creative projects and (2) have a crew of chums like mine to help them along. Earlier in the day, I'd gone adventuring with two of them, to an enchanted swimming spot called Tannery Falls. We scrambled down a long set of wood plank stairs and muddy trail to a secret, shaded waterfall that looked about five stories high. The water was freezing. We got in! It was glorious! I ceremoniously dunked myself and proclaimed a new phase beginning. Then we cruised back to camp in time for dinner, wide awake and happy. I even got work done after that.

Now I sink back into revision, into the transition of moving back to California, into preparations for Burning Man, into the next, the next, the next.

Dolly's House and Doll Houses!

Ketchikan is 3,656 miles from where I am.

I’m sitting at the Diesel Café in Somerville with a group of writer friends. We have built a little wall of laptops and iced coffees. It is nearly impossible to me that just a few days ago I was walking the creaking plank-streets of Ketchikan, Alaska, paying $4.00 to visit Dolly’s House.

Dolly was a business woman. She owned a number of properties, and spent her summers in Ketchikan, running a brothel. Eventually she got tired of managing the girls, fired them all, and made all her money herself. She had sex for money until it was illegal, and then for many years after. She offered short pulls of whiskey from a hidden bar under her stairs during Prohibition. When she died, she stipulated that her house become a museum. There’s a ton more to the story, of course.

Susan and I had a brief, uncanny visit inside her landmark home. I’m fascinated by the stories of women in the sex industry from the turn of the century into the 50s—if that fact wasn’t already evidenced by earlier posts! Dolly’s house was especially bizarre because except for a few little pieces of evidence (a shower curtain with appliqué made from old condoms, for example) it seems like any regular time capsule from sixty years ago. She had a nice stove. She made her own clothes. She had some mass-produced art on her walls. I had to ask the girl at the cash register if one of the rooms upstairs had originally been a “working” bedroom since the “personal” bedroom seemed too stuffed with private paraphernalia to function as a place to receive gentlemen callers. In fact, she told me, the “sitting room” was designated as such when Dolly quit seeing clients in there. In her seventies. So, at 72, she threw in the towel and started writing her letters, reading her novels, and keeping her exotic birds in the room where she’d made $75-100 a day on her back for all her adult life. I wonder what she did with the bed that used to be in there. In that sitting room, pictures of a nicely-dressed lady and her various doggie “children” sit next to shelves of books, collector’s dolls, and postcards sent to friends.

I like all the kitsch, but I loved especially the objects of daily life: dishes, old medicine bottles, gloves and hats, letterhead, coffee pots. I love that for a time, prostitution was legal in Alaska, and Dolly was citizen of respect and notoriety, who did a great deal for the town of Ketchikan. I’m sure she was called many things in her life. I’m sure some people thought it was narcissistic and preposterous that she would want her home to become a museum. But her desire to be seen, and especially to be seen as a woman with many interests and skills (She raised animals! She sewed amazing dresses! She ran a bar!) indicates an almost utopian vision for later generations’ ability to see sex work with an unperturbed clarity we’ve never attained in our country. Or maybe she believed that people would always think she was “bad,” and she set up the museum just to cause mischief. After all, the small street behind her house, from which clients could come and go through the back door, is officially called the “Married Man’s Trail.” Indeed.

In Victoria BC I forgot my camera. I am so grateful for the internet, so that you might view the madness that is Miniature World. The virtual tour is almost as perplexing/wonderful as the real thing. Susan and I were the last guests through the exhibit, and were told we needed "45 minutes to an hour" to fully appreciate everything, even though we only had 25 until they closed. We did it all in 20, and let me tell you, there were moments of true horror peering into the Civil War exhibit. Why make miniature death? WHY? But even the doll houses, or the Dickens, or the Fantasy displays were more creepy than cute. My cuteness sensor finally went off at Circus World, one of the largest miniatures (not an oxymoron, look at the website) with what seemed like thousands upon thousands of tiny people, tiny animals, tiny rides in the tiny midway, tiny popcorn and tiny balloons and tiny cars and tiny picnics. Tiny elephants with tiny riders wearing REALLY tiny rhinestone slippers. It was Susan's favorite as well, which leads me to believe it must have been the only actually cute thing in the place--since we two are among the few people I know who are truly, deeply, in our core, emotionally affected by cuteness.

We then stumbled onto Luminara Victoria, a festival of lights that happens in the lovely Beacon Hill Park. Glowing costumes, reflective sculpture made from old CDs, ballet dancers lit with purple floods, and a bridge over a lily pond lit with two-inch jars, covered in colored paper and each with a tea light inside, wired in winding pattern across the railing. It was magical.

One of my favorite little rituals from the cruise: Almost every morning on the Westerdam, Susan and I would order breakfast in our room. She would fill out the form before we went to sleep ("Eggs?" "Scrambled." "Me too!" "Toast?") and then when the steward's quiet knock broke our earplugged slumber in the morning, I would sit by the window and pass her dish after dish. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we watched the mountains and the water out the window. Sometimes we facetiously complained about things that couldn't possibly matter considering how incredible our lives are, just for variety. I miss doing this. I miss the intimacy of it, and am still in awe and grateful for every second.

We spent two more enchanted days in Seattle at my new favorite hotel, the Alexis, taking long walks and having Seattle adventures with Phil, new friend from the cruise. One reason to love the Alexis: a free glass of wine in a bar called the Library, where you can paint postcards to send home.

I realize I've devolved into reportage instead of interpretation at this point. Sometimes I get scared I'll lose the details--especially since my journaling got quite sketchy towards the end of the trip with so much running around. I promise I'm thinking, still, about what it all means...

Eat, Sleep, Zip!

We’re back on the high seas after a day floating through Glacier Bay, a day docked in Juneau, a morning and afternoon in Sitka. Things have changed. I heard a glacier crack and groan.


I watched the “calving” of the glacier, which is when a piece as big as a house suddenly breaks off and slides into the water. It was spectacular, and our little human being response was hilarious: we squealed and clapped as if an illusionist had just performed a particularly impressive sleight of hand. We have no other programmed response to drama. I’m sure it seemed perfectly natural to applaud the glacier to many of those present, but to me it was endearingly absurd. Applause is for performers. Although I’m not sure exactly what the appropriate response would have been—stunned silence? Anyway I felt overwhelmed. Then I looked down into the water, and saw three seagulls perched on pieces of floating ice, riding the waves. Somehow this is what actually made me cry.

In fact I’ve been moved to tears quite a few times on the trip now, mostly in aesthetic response to the devastatingly beautiful immensity of the world here, which is common and cliché enough that I’ll not spend too much time on it. Here are a few pictures.

In Juneau Susan and I donned our warmest gear and took a hair-raising boat ride from the dock across the water to a muddy beach. We climbed into a MOG and were trundled up the side of a mountain to a plywood shack where friendly, funny guides strapped us into multiple harnesses. We did one practice zip, then were up in the rainforest canopy. I began the day in a state of exhilarated terror. On the first platform I had to hug the tree. I could barely look down. By the end, I was scooting to the edge, peering over, sticking my feet into the airspace off the platform. I zipped with no hands. I screamed and hollered and kicked my feet, raised my knees to go faster, watched the rainforest whizzing by, and felt free, free, free. And strong. It was a particular ecstasy, the cold damp air on my face, the uncanny views, the hyper-reality of the forest floor SO damn far away. Even the suspension bridges thrilled me.

Susan would zip away, calling “Bye bye!” and then we would giggle uncontrollably on the next platform, minutes later, with a new story of how we’d felt, what we’d seen. The last and longest zipline was the only one to take us out of the forested area, over the beach, and suddenly I saw the mountains, the water, and the future seemed expansive and perfect, with simply no reason to have fear about anything. I would do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve had a few other experiences of exposure therapy that worked, but this one was by far the most pronounced, because instead of the simple eradication of fear, my terror was replaced with elation and delight. I loved what I had dreaded. Only certain drugs have had a similar effect on me. Our guides wore T-shirts that said “Eat, Sleep, Zip” and we’ve decided this is the new way to remind ourselves to open up to this profound shifting from resistance to ecstatic acceptance.

This has convinced me to expand an experiment I’ve been doing since Italy. On that trip, I realized that many of the foods I thought I didn’t like were simply prepared badly in my past experience. Or, I based my projected dislike from past experiences with “similar” foods. Once this method was proven faulty over and over again by the superlative tastes I experienced (especially with things like snails, octopus, kidneys), I realized the only answer was to act as if I have no idea what I dislike. Now, I try everything, intending to like it all. I especially have to eat things that seem distasteful to me at first, and I am under particular mandate of mindfulness there. The expansion of this experiment, as inspired by the zipline, is to let go of all the little pieces of identity that are attached to my dislikes. It’s just not interesting to hang on to “I don’t like roller coasters,” or “I don’t like staying up all night” or “I don’t like fighting." More importantly, it's limiting. And since I'm spearheading Project Limitless for my life, it's time to only dislike things on principle, not from force of habit.

I ate fresh salmon fish & chips and an Alaska Brewing Co. summer ale at a dock restaurant in Juneau with Susan and her long-time friend Kathryn before tromping back onto the Westerdam. As the ship pulled away, we sat in our wicker deck chairs, under plaid blankets, on our verandah, sipping Earl Grey and nibbling shortbread and dark chocolate. We traded the binoculars to watch salmon leaping six inches out of the water, check out incredible cabin-homes on the shoreline, and spot mountain streams we’ve dubbed “rivulets!” that cascade from the very peaks all the way into the sea. We felt like society ladies from 1920 “taking a cure.” We were living a fantasy.

It seemed insane to stay up late enough to see Leslie (without whom neither of us would be on the ship) sing in a karaoke competition. We went to the show in our pajamas, drank cocktails and screamed and gasped with laughter at the endearing, bizarre performers and the three shockingly clever judges. (One of them was the ship’s comedian, Julie Barr, who has purple hair and made a joke about being a “fluffer” in front of 200 silver-haired cruise passengers! Priceless!) My favorite part of the show was that the judges showed total irreverence for the cruising industry. They made fun of people who go on cruises. They made fun of themselves for working on a ship. They made fun of the invented culture, they made fun of how expensive everything is. It was a relief to see it, operating just below the surface of the official story everyone tells in the daytime. I knew it was there, but I didn’t know the passengers ever got to be privy. I wonder if the entire industry would collapse if that awareness of the Game we’re playing here became part of the regular language?

In Sitka today I watched a Tlingkit dance performance. I got mesmerized by a dancer-grandmother who wore a perfectly calm baby in a front-facing carrier. The baby held her arms out when everyone else did, and calmly replaced her pacifier whenever it fell out. She made no sound for the entire half-hour that the grandmother was dancing. I walked through the Russian Bishop’s House and drew a sketch of a brass samovar I’d like to have in my house. I’m overwhelmed by details and consequences and history and beauty and we’re just pushing along in the water, mountains out the window changing every few minutes, Susan curled up in her king-size bed in her turquoise satin pajamas, me nestled in a thick red sweater, on the way to Ketchikan.