ESSAY: Retreat
I had no idea if my book was good or horrible, so I didn’t know what, if anything, needed untangling.
I was 30 when I finally did the thing I’d wanted to do since I’d first learned to read: I’d written a book. Or, as I’d soon learn after some hasty Googling, I’d written a manuscript. Turning it into a book, one that I could hold, one that my parents could guilt their friends into pre-ordering, still required several steps. I pored over dozens of blogs on perfecting query letters and researching agents before realizing I was getting ahead of myself. It had a beginning, middle, and an end, but beyond that I had no idea what, if anything, my manuscript was. I needed feedback. Most importantly, I needed someone to tell me if I was wasting my time.
The internet said there were conferences and symposiums nearby, along with something called Pitch Fest, a name that inspired so much anxiety that I shut my laptop and took a walk. The best option appeared to be something called a writer’s retreat. “Retreat” was a word I knew well: I was teaching at a Catholic high school and was contractually obligated to chaperone an annual retreat, which meant every fall I decamped to a convent in Pennsylvania’s coal country to help students find Christ in the mundane. The catechismal aspect unnerved me, but I loved sneaking out of my regularly-scheduled life for a week. After bed checks, the other teachers and I would sit around, cracking jokes about the administration and commiserating about the everyday indignities of our jobs. When I returned to work I always felt lighter, like my factory settings had been restored, and I thought a writer’s retreat might offer the same, creatively speaking—I’d hide away in some unassuming locale, take a few deep breaths, and bullshit with some peers. At the end of it, maybe I’d even figure out how to turn my manuscript into an actual book.
I found a retreat at a college a few hours away and was thrilled when I was accepted two months later. I figured that was a good sign—it meant my writing sample had been strong enough to get me in. I didn’t realize then that everyone who’d paid the application fee had received the same news.
I met the other members of the Advanced Novel workshop at the Welcome Happy Hour. There were five of us, plus Paul, our instructor, who also happened to be the Retreat Director. He wore a scarf, despite the July heat, and called famous writers by their first names: he’d studied under Frank (Conroy), corresponded with Ray (Carver), and traded agents with Jenny (Egan).
Three of the novelists were new to the retreat, like me. They spoke about their projects hesitantly, trying to distill years of work into one-sentence summaries, but they still sounded sophisticated, like they’d thought deeply about their work and process. The medical researcher from North Carolina wrote what she called “WASP Gothic”; the young mom from West Virginia was working on a YA series about the afterlife; the middle-aged woman from Delaware, another teacher, had written a Prohibition-era queer romance. I wanted to hear more—to ask if they, too, ever stared at their .docs in abject horror, or felt both idiotic and pompous calling themselves “writers”—but we didn’t have the opportunity. Sandy, the silver-haired, purple-lipsticked mystery writer, was intent on detailing the retreat’s history to us neophytes. We learned she’d been attending since its inaugural, several decades earlier, and had become its principal donor five years ago. Paul smiled when she said this. “And we’re very grateful.”
That night I walked back to the freshman dorm, my home for the week. I showered in flip-flops and listened as two older guys shaved over the tiny sinks, talking about their works-in-progress. Both were political thrillers about presidents gone missing. “What’re the chances?” one of them said.
The next morning I went for a run while it was still quiet. There was a mile-long concrete loop around the Arts buildings, so I ran it a few times, listening to my trainers scratching the path and the birds gossiping in the trees.
Running has long been one of the most important parts of my creative process; I can feel the knots in my brain untangle and, when I’m really in the thick of a project, can see the thing start to reveal itself. But that morning my mind was blank. I had no idea if my book was good or horrible, so I didn’t know what, if anything, needed untangling. I reminded myself that this was why I came to the retreat: it would help me figure out what needed figuring out.
The only other person on the loop was a hulking man with noise cancelling headphones jogging in the opposite direction. I gave him a nod as I passed. It was the look of recognition that all runners give each other—the quick, respectful acknowledgement of someone else trudging through the misery—but he just stared back at me, eyes squinting, lungs heaving.
The first day of the workshop didn’t include workshopping. Paul wanted to walk us through his theory of novel writing before we dug into each other’s manuscripts. He talked about point-of-view and getting unstuck, referencing stories and writers unfamiliar to me. I carefully jotted down their names, making a reading list for some unspecified later date.
Occasionally, Sandy globbed onto Paul’s points with insights from her time self-publishing books about Maxine Denkins, Private Eye. “When I’ve got writer’s block, I’ll go on Facebook and ask my fans for input,” she said. “They told me they wanted more about Maxine’s wild side, so that’s how my Mad Max series got started.”
“Mad Max,” Paul said. “Like the movies?”
Sandy folded her hands. “I’m not familiar.”
In the afternoon, I attended a talk on “Food as Motivation.” The presenter was one of Paul’s colleagues, another man in his mid-50s at another mid-level MFA program who’d published a handful of books with poorly-designed covers. For some reason, he wore a baseball cap with the brim curled up towards the sky. “Everybody wants food,” he began, and then handed out a packet of stories Xerox’d from ‘90s literary magazines, instructing us to take turns reading them out loud. The talk ended 30 minutes ahead of schedule.
I’d volunteered to workshop first, mostly out of impatience: I wanted as much of the week—in this foreign setting, away from my normal life—to improve my manuscript. At the end of the first day, Paul asked for a “brave soul,” and I raised my hand. I taught high school, so I already spent most of my life being judged, I told them.
But the morning of the workshop, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I hit the concrete loop for another run to clear my mind, but it didn’t work. What if I’d handed them an unadulterated piece of shit? What if, while I was out jogging, my fellow Advanced Novelists were in their dorm rooms, sneering as they slathered my pathetic 20 pages with red ink?
The hulking man in headphones was back on the path. When I passed him this time, he kept his head down. I still gave him the nod, but once again got nothing in return.
The general feedback in the workshop was: this is fine. I took notes while they discussed the voice (working), the plot (wanting), and the themes (ambiguous at best, problematic at worst). They were fair, and I was grateful for feedback, though I was surprised at how clinical it all felt. Was this what I’d been looking for? I didn’t know, so I dutifully jotted down the suggestions and hoped it’d make sense later on.
As my time was winding down, Sandy finally spoke up, offering something about the quality of my opening before pausing. “I’m trying to think of the best way to phrase this,” she said. “Maybe it’s this: I wish you’d get out of your characters’ way.”
I wanted to ask what she meant, but that wasn’t allowed. Before we’d started, Paul told us silence was an essential part of the process.
Paul said we needed to attend the seminar on “Scoring An Agent.” If we were serious about publishing, he explained, then we had to learn how our queries were being read. “I certainly don’t know what the market wants,” he went on. His agent rarely returned his emails. Apparently, she only had time for her oh-so-impressive Pulitzer-winning client. We all nodded like we could relate.
At the seminar, Paul played MC. He and the Agent were old friends, he told the room, though the Agent was so good, such a big deal, that the only way to get him to leave New York was to woo him down to the retreat with a fat stipend and the promise of an open bar. Everyone laughed, Paul said the Agent’s name, and then the hulking guy from the concrete loop walked to the podium.
The Agent didn’t have remarks prepared but, unlike the other lecturers, it was clear he loved talking. He bemoaned the hundreds of shitty submissions he read every week. He laughed about writers who believed they were above audiences. He explained he was only interested in books that had a shot at adaptation, something that was obvious from the opening. “If you don’t make me care in the first sentence, I’m throwing your book in the trash,” he said.
He was, in the simplest terms, a dick, but I still found him to be charismatic. It was oddly comforting to hear someone explain the industry so definitively. If you did this, you’d sell your book. If you did this, you wouldn’t. As he spoke, the vague world of publishing suddenly came into focus: I needed to make the hulking Agent care.
Sandy’s workshop was the last of the week. “It’s my most personal work, so I think I’ve been scared of it,” she explained. It was a multi-generational, polyphonic account of her family’s history in the Sonoran Desert, something she claimed was a far cry from her regular series. “Mad Max fans won’t be happy,” she said, “but the muse was begging for this one.”
The excerpt was told from the perspective of Frog, a 14-year-old misfit who’d recently discovered weed and “Moby Dick,” the nickname he’d bestowed on his penis. Every time he got high, he’d start jerking off, something Sandy described in granular detail, devoting entire paragraphs to the way he angled his wrist and cupped his balls. She’d handed us 20 pages; 12 of them were dedicated to masturbation. I loved it, frankly: reading it alone in the dorm was the hardest I’d laughed in a long time, though I knew that wasn’t the intention.
Our discussion started with the positive stuff. What an interesting setting! What a beautiful opener! No one mentioned the jerking, but surely they’d seen it in the same light I had. Everything else about the novel was grounded, realistic, even boring, but then this red-eyed teenager was walking around at all hours, dick-in-hand, stroking himself to death. Had everybody missed that?
As the lone guy in the workshop, I knew I couldn’t be the one to bring it up. How would that look? Did I want to be the freak show who simply needed an accurate representation of his brethren? “The interiority is excellent, but have you considered how dehydrated Frog might get cranking down like this?”
I decided to focus on Frog’s drug use, which was described less like a 14-year-old getting into weed and more like a 20-something spiraling on meth. “I’m not sure about the neck scratching he does while high,” I said. “That’s not typical of someone who’s stoned.” I didn’t mention that in the next sentence Frog stuck his hand down his pants to find “a rock solid Moby Dick.”
A few heads nodded in the group. Sandy shook hers. “This is based on my cousin. He was addicted to pot. I witnessed it firsthand.”
“I don’t think you can be addicted to weed,” I said.
She snickered. “Tell that to my cousin Frog. I’d give you his number, but he’s dead.”
Paul quickly cut in, reminding the group of the terms we’d agreed upon at the start of the week. Sandy mimed a zipper closing across her purple lips. I remained quiet for the rest of the session, too, but it was mostly out of respect for the semen-depleted deceased.
The retreat’s final event was Cocktail Hour in the college’s faculty lounge. Paul sat at a table with the other instructors, talking and laughing like friends at summer camp. Sandy was off in the corner with a gaggle of gray-haired women, swirling a glass of wine and, I assumed, plotting my demise.
I grabbed a beer and found the remaining Advanced Novelists. We talked about how we were going to fix our manuscripts when we got home, but no one sounded convincing. It felt like the end of a losing season. We were talking about strength and conditioning, but really we were thinking about sitting on a couch.
The medical researcher from North Carolina mentioned she was headed to an unsanctioned, attendee-organized open mic after Cocktail Hour concluded. “Just us writers,” she said. “Just an opportunity to hear each other out.” I liked the way she said that—we weren’t “students,” or “workshoppers,” or “attendees.” We were just “writers,” the word we all desperately wanted to believe fit.
A big laugh erupted at the instructor table. Paul grinned and took a long pull from his martini. It was not a bad racket, I thought. Paul might’ve felt locked out of the literary world, but at least he’d found a way to fund his summer vacations.
The hulking Agent rose from the table and went to the bar. I spotted an opportunity. If I could speak with him, he’d tell me if I was wasting my time. He wouldn’t dance around the truth, worried about hurting my feelings. He would let me know if my book was worth pursuing.
I ditched my beer and followed him to the bar, jumping in line behind him. I remembered the dead look in his eyes from our morning runs and tried to tell myself that this was just one more instance of our paths crossing.
“Kept seeing you this week,” I said.
He turned around, disappointed to find me there. “That’s usually how these things work.”
“I was the other guy running,” I said. “In the mornings.”
“I know.”
I laughed to fill the silence. “I really liked your talk, too. I like that you kind of, you know, cut through the bullshit.”
He forced a smile and nodded. The drink line was three deep. He was trapped, cornered by the worst kind of amateur—the putz who thought they were a pro. “What kind of punctuation are you?” he asked. I laughed again, but he didn’t. It was apparently an earnest question. “You’re familiar with punctuation, right?”
Maybe this was a test, I thought. Maybe this was some kind-of high-concept grammatical reference, something from Proust or Flaubert or some other essential writer I’d never read.
“For example, I’m a period,” he said. “Cliché, I know. But I am what I am.”
I paused for a beat, thinking. “I guess I’m an em-dash,” I said. I thought it was wise—writerly, nuanced, sophisticated. I hoped he would laugh in appreciation and then ask me what I was working on, how he could be of assistance.
But he just shook his head. “You’re not an em-dash,” he said. “You’re a semi-colon.”
I laughed. “You’re right; I’m all about independent clauses.” This felt like a good sign. We were riffing, maybe. We were relating.
“That’s not funny,” he said. “You’re a semi-colon.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I know,” he said, his eyes squinting in pity. “And that’s what makes you a semi-colon.”
The unsanctioned open mic was in the common area of the dorm. There were twenty of us scattered around the room, drinking from a 30-pack someone had grabbed from the nearest gas station. Despite the drinks and the location, no one would’ve confused this for a college party—there were a handful of retirees in the group and everyone sipped cautiously from their beers—but I was still reminded of that open, ignorant excitement that came with a new school year. We were all waiting for something to happen.
The first reader was a woman from Advanced Memoir. She was working on an essay collection about caring for her mom during chemo. This particular excerpt hadn’t been workshopped that week, she explained, so it was still rough. “Be nice,” she said with a smile.
We didn’t see the diagnosis, or the appointments, or the grim, withered face of her mother. We saw a pool. After putting her mom to bed, she was responsible for cleaning the massive thing. No matter how attentive she’d been the night before, the next day there was more pollen and dead leaves. It started as a chore but slowly became a meditation—every night, she’d zone out for an hour gliding a long, aluminum skimmer across the surface of the water.
The room was silent. We were all listening closely, not because we were hoping to find an opening for our feedback, but because we needed to know where her story was headed. For the first time all week, I wasn’t thinking about workshopping, or querying, or agents. I was thinking about the work itself, of the writer gently combing the neon blue pool. I was thinking how lucky we were to be standing in her version of the world, staring down at the cold, chlorinated water and finding exactly what we needed.
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Did you meet the colon? Does the colon know they're a colon?
Funny and sad, goddamn.