Dynamite That Heals:
A Writing Retreat with Amherst Writers & Artists
By Marian Calabro
In recent years my artistic writing side was driven into hiding by a demoralizing experience with the wrong agent, the implosion of a writing group that in happier years had helped me birth two books, and the sheer fatigue of breadwinning. I sublimated my creative urge into playing piano in a bar band, which has its charms.
But the writing muse, or whoever, kept calling. I finally answered by doing a four-day writing retreat with Pat Schneider, cofounder of Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) and the author of Writing Alone and With Others (Oxford University Press).
On the drive to Massachusetts I felt great anticipation, because Schneider's books are among the few on writing I've found enormously helpful. I also felt trepidation. I love my primary work of corporate writing, but had it left me unfit for an intense artistic immersion? I figured it might take a stick of dynamite to excavate my creativity, a prospect I both craved and feared.
As it turned out, regaining my voice took only some imaginative exercises that started a flow - coupled with a safe environment for digging deep. These factors sound simple but are very hard to come by. They are the soul of the AWA method. Over and over, as I sat in Schneider's Amherst living room and wrote and read with nine other participants this February, I was astonished to see how deep we went in spontaneous first drafts. I also found it absorbing and humbling to interact with wonderful writers who don't write for a living. (Our group included a hospital chaplain, a prison social worker, and a pilot.)
The opening exercise set the tone. We each wrote and then read a seven-minute autobiography that contained one lie. The group had three guesses to identify it. Clever! Schneider says: "It gets everyone reading, responding, and laughing. But there is a subtle and more important teaching: It demonstrates that listeners can't tell whether the reader's story is autobiography or fiction unless the writer volunteers that information."
Treating all writing as fiction, not life story, is an essential AWA practice. Also essential at retreats is to respond only by saying what you remember, what surprised you, what made you care. Revision has its place, but not at the vulnerable newborn stage, when "constructive criticism" tears down as often as it builds. (AWA saves the revision part for weekly workshops.) This is not Pollyannaish or dishonest. In Schneider's words: "There is great danger in revising if you don't know what is strongest and best in your own work." I can vouch that these practices protect the writer's privacy and create a vital cocoon of creativity.
Write it first, fix it later. AWA's retreats are about writing, not fixing. Mine brought forth a torrent of writing, some of which I'm now fixing. It proved to be the gentle, healing dynamite I craved.
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