A Week With Fellow Writers — Surprising Me With Gifts

I’m just back from the Olympic Valley, high in the Sierra (well, high for me, at 6,214 feet). The occasion was a summer workshop week with fellow writers hosted in the mountains by the Community of Writers.

We writers go to these workshops, beloved manuscripts in hand, hoping to get some helpful feedback from fellow writers.

(Unless you are me, that is. In which case, you are secretly hoping that, instead of helpful feedback, you will be told that your manuscript is off-the-charts lovely and publishable as is. No more work required . . . It never goes that way, of course.)

In general, we writers assume the big insights will come from the daily workshops we attend, in which a dozen or so writers read one another’s manuscripts and take turns talking about what’s working and what’s not working in each piece.

But I’ve noticed that often, with a conference as open-hearted as the one the Community of Writers puts on every year, the helpful insights can come at you out of nowhere. They come as surprises, little gifts from the writing gods via actual people with feet on the ground.

Often these aha moments are thoughts that were sitting there in your psyche all along, waiting to be thought.

Under the Pines With My Fellow Writers

The first of those realizations came for me on the first workshop day. My group was seated around tables — outdoors and covid-cautious — under the pine trees at Palisades Tahoe ski resort.

The manuscripts of the first two writers were up for discussion, and author Jason Roberts was talking about how to use reversals in storytelling. He went on to describe his next book project, Every Living Thing, which takes issue with Carl Linnaeus and the tidy classifications Linnaeus imposed on the plants and animals he studied. The talk turned to gardens.

There’s a reason people have gardens, Jason said. People create gardens in order to find some kind order in their world.

We do? Is that where this itch of mine comes from — the itch to turn my messy, unruly backyard into something beautiful, orderly and companionable?

Might my drive to rearrange the topography of my backyard, to put living things into the soil and watch them spring into action — might all that have something in common with my other preoccupations these days: death, aging, and the general downsizing of my life?

Pretty Flowers? Or Something Edgier?

And what about those off-handed little garden essays I’ve been writing? The ones I’ve been tossing into the blogosphere like confetti. Might they want to be something more complex than just “look at my pretty flowers?”

Of course, they might. Why didn’t I think of that?

The next gift came from my writing group a few days later. The manuscript I had submitted was taken from the blog posts I’ve been writing about my husband’s death seventeen months ago.

My group liked the manuscript OK, but they insisted on talking outside of it. Tell us more about Jon, they kept saying. Tell us more about this marriage.

No Drama Here, Just a Garden Variety Marriage

Really? You want to know about our marriage? It’s just a garden-variety, happy marriage. No drama. No abuse. Just a man and a woman figuring out how to keep each other company over forty-four years. Do you really want to hear about that?

Yes, they did.

Of course, they did. Why didn’t I see that?

And, while sitting at dinner with choreographer Kris O’Shee, whose husband, the novelist Alan Cheuse, died in 2015, I got another eye-opener. Kris talked about the memoir she had written about her life with Alan.

I pressed her with questions. How do you write about a happy marriage. What’s there to say? Where’s the tension in a story like that? Where’s the plot?

Well, we lost them, didn’t we? Kris said.

Yes. We loved them, and then they died. Yes, that’s a story.

Of course, it is. Why didn’t I think of that?

Still, for me, writing about Jon has been a problem all these months. Thinking about Jon in any kind of specific, lucid way has reliably brought me to tears. And so visualizing him enough to write about him has seemed a dark undertaking.

But I’ve also wondered — by refusing to think precise thoughts about Jon, by refusing to let the real, flesh-and-blood Jon enter my mind — am I systematically forgetting him? Am I obliterating the details, the very heart, of the life we had together?

Should I, could I write about Jon now?

A Community of Writers to the Rescue

Days later, the Community of Writers came to my rescue one more time. After dinner, Kris read from her memoir to the crowd gathered in the dark on the patio outside the Palisades Olympic House.

She explained that she had written this book in order to remember her husband. She didn’t want to forget him, so she wrote it all down. And now she held in her hands  an entire book of memories that were hers to keep.

I should try that, I thought. I should try writing down as much of Jon as I can remember. Then I’d have it for myself, and for this thing I am writing.

Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?

Still, I wasn’t sure I was ready to conjure Jon and write it all down.

But Kris meant what she had said. When I asked her to sign my copy of her book, she wrote this in it: “To Barb. Write to remember. Kris.”

She’s right. But not today. Tomorrow maybe.

Read about my garden at “A Case of the Human Condition: I Want to Kill My Snapdragons.”  Find out about a balky indoor plant at “The Dracena Is Dead. Long Live the Dracena.”  Read about Jon at “Widowed: A Love Letter From Jon Arrived This Week.”