Can writing retreats and parenthood mix? My one-year-old had his doubts. Two other poets (themselves also mothers of small, impressionable, powerful children between the ages of one and three) and I decided to find out this weekend. We rented a farmhouse a ferry’s ride away and spent two nights and their days with just our words. We woke up early, thanks to the roosters and the military training our children had given us. During the day we barely spoke. We holed up in our writing spaces in the house or out in the field. At meals our conversation swung easily between formal verse and weaning. After dinner we did generative exercises together by a fire. Between us we came away with 21 new poems, plus some revisions. Did I mention there were cows?
It was one of the best writing experiences of my life. Before I had my son, I’d done a few official writing residencies, but after he was born I knew that monthlong departures were off the table for at least the first few years. My writing time now is my son’s naptime, plus one morning a week at a coffeeshop. I’m not complaining. I know I have it good compared to a lot of writing mothers.
For most of us, even an innocent question about how our writing’s going tends to make us prickle, because it’s so different than it was. Even when we do manage to carve out time to write, the blocks we find are rarely roomy enough for us to really sink in, to experiment, to follow an idea for more than a few turns, and the expectation of interruption makes it hard to drop into the time we do have. For a lot of us, the poems are shorter, because they have to be, not because we have less to say.
Before this weekend, though, I hadn’t noticed the benefits of this crammed-in approach to writing. The efficiency we’ve learned as parents seemed to lend a level of discipline to our weekend retreat. There was none of the dawdling over newspapers, Scrabble games, or kitchen chatter of real residencies. I also realized this weekend that there’s a different sort of weight to my words now. Because I know I won’t be able to take as long as I used to tinkering with a revision, I have to trust my words in a way that I didn’t before.
Aside from the poems themselves, the weekend was exhilarating because it let us lift the cloth that usually separates our two selves, mother and writer. We spoke freely. To be both at once (granted, the kids were gone..) relieved much of the tension and self-doubt I feel shuttling between the two.
The kids all seemed to do fine without us for two nights, and vice versa. We spent about $200 apiece all told, which wasn’t cheap, but man am I glad for it. On the ferry ride home we talked about making it an annual event, and also tried to think of how we could swing a daylong version here in town. The water was wide, the sun was out.