Wednesday

and some thoughts in late October

I spent a portion of this month on Cape Cod, where I was leading two back-to-back weeklong writing retreats. I had invited intimate groups of seven participants for each week; they traveled from Hawaii and Texas and Idaho and California and Pennsylvania and Florida, all staying together at a sweetly elegant Inn. My instruction was provided by way of morning craft talks, inspirational prompts, and specifically supportive feedback when the writers gathered to read aloud to the group each afternoon. We practiced a shared commitment to honoring silent space for listening inward, and generosity in our listening to each other. Each week was filled with glorious individuality alongside a palpable sense of community and interconnectedness.

For more than 20 years, I’ve refined this retreat structure, offering it in places as diverse as a hunting lodge in Montana, an Inn on Martha’s Vineyard, and a Quaker retreat centre in Southern France. Having learned from many teachers myself over many decades, and in recognition that even “helpful suggestions” can interfere with the composing process when work is newly raw and unfiltered, I choose to encourage generative writing with positive-only feedback rather than to critique work in stages of revision. Consistently, my intention is to give serious writers the opportunity to spend several quiet hours a day alone and then to sit with a group of attentive listeners who are helping them tune into what is already working. Regardless of form — whether memoir or poetry or fiction — the results are profoundly moving, gratifying, and transformative. We witness each other’s breakthroughs and epiphanies, ranging from subtle to ecstatic, often something nearly impossible to name. And what I have come to believe, more and more, is that the sanctuary of safety to explore is intertwined with the medicine of feeling heard.

Ironically enough, people don’t necessarily trust this focus on supportive feedback. I have encountered this skepticism among many of the writers who show up for an initial visit to my generative writing sessions known as “First Words.” They worry that we are being polite rather than honest, that we are ignoring the need for improvement by way of corrections. While I appreciate these concerns, I also assure writers that there is always a time and place for constructive criticism during the revising stage. There are countless workshops and classes dedicated to critique; there are people you can hire as developmental editors and beta-readers and copy editors. But first, there is the discovery of creating, as freely and courageously as possible, in order to find out what it is you really want to say.

I’m not the one who dubbed my home in Berkeley “the Magic Living Room.” (It even works on Zoom! Aka, the virtual magic living room!) I’ve come to understand that the magic is portable and reproducible, in all kinds of borrowed places around the world. It comes, at least in part, from getting quiet and listening deeply and leaning toward each other with curiosity and generosity. For the people who keep coming back, the writers who have seen and heard and felt the magic, I can promise you, in all humility, that it’s real.