Writing Alone, Writing Together: Lessons from Self-Styled Retreats

By Samuel Autman

A year into my first adjunct teaching position, I was in my early 40s and had completed an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. I hadn’t published much since defecting from daily journalism seven years prior, but hoped my newspaper background and new advanced degree might make me a strong candidate for tenure track positions in journalism, creative writing, or hybrid jobs. Job applications were yielding nothing, however. I needed publications and fast.

A poet friend who had convinced me I could make the career leap came to my rescue. While away for summer break, he offered his house in Bloomington, Indiana, as a solo writing retreat. I bit. Things had reached a creative inflection point.

Without the internet as a distraction, all summer long I meditated, read, and worked on an essay about the microaggressions I experienced as the first black reporter for a newspaper in Salt Lake City in the early 1990s. At summer’s end, I placed the piece in a large yellow envelope, included the $5 submission fee and dropped it in the mail.

Five months later “A Dash of Pepper in the Snow“ was an award winner in the Tara L. Masih Intercultural Essay Competition sponsored by the Soul-Making Literary Contest. I was flown to San Francisco and read an excerpt at the main library that spring. Two years later the piece was included in The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, my first anthologized essay. Locking myself away in that house and focusing on a single project had worked.

Over the next fifteen years, I returned to the strategy of isolating myself for a dedicated period of time in places such as Toronto, Salt Lake City, Lima, Mexico City and Buenos Aires with specific projects. After getting tenure in a rural Midwestern college, travel retreats also became a way to survive creatively. Going to another location tells my brain to get down to business. The change in environment makes the material feel fresher. An exterior physical alteration facilitates an inner artistic one.

I’ve been fortunate enough to attend fabulous workshops at such places as Tin House in Portland, Kimbilio Fiction in Taos, and the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, to name a few, though prestigious residencies purely for writing such as the MacDowell colony or Yaddo residency keep eluding me.

In the summer of 2017, I was one of seven Disquiet International alumni who participated in an inaugural weeklong writing retreat on the island of São Miguel. Located in the Azores, an archipelago in the mid-Atlantic considered to be a part of Portugal, the green pastures, live volcanoes, and miles of blue hydrangeas resembled Tahiti or Hawaii. Seven alums and former faculty gathered for a week—no workshops, just dedicated writing.

As individuals we were on our own, free to write anywhere: by the hotel pool, at a coffee shop in town, or a spot in the José do Canto Botanical Garden. With such a small cohort, the blend of writing time and short excursions was perfect and inspired me a year and a half later to gather a group of writer friends in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula for our own version called The House of Ink and Paper.

On my social media feed, it looks like I’m a world traveler with an endless budget. I am not. I’m just a distracted professor who uses fall, winter, spring, and summer academic breaks to find places that speak to me and for writing binges. For a modest budget, anyone can find an affordable rental in the US, Canada, or Latin America and blend writing with traveling. Here are a few things I’ve learned.

• Location Matters. Pick landscapes, be they beaches, mountains, campgrounds, or urban centers, that inspire you.  It’s a good idea to visit places you’re familiar with so you’re not distracted by touristy things.
• Creature comforts. Research the neighborhoods for coffee shops, restaurants, and if it’s a rental, you want to make sure it has a comfortable bed, strong wi-fi, and easy access to grocery stores.  
• Follow a Routine Mixing the days with scheduled writing and short walking excursions can keep your body from getting stiff. If you write for several hours in the morning, walk to lunch and find a park bench for reading in the afternoon or early evening, it’s easy to fall into a regimen.
• Benchmarks Are Key. In such times alone, specific plans like Jami Attenberg’s 1,000 words a day keep one on track. Focusing on a specific project or projects also helps.
• Companions Matter. It’s better to meet up with like-minded writer friends who are similarly focused. Family and friends who aren’t focused on writing and revision might not understand and tempt you away from the tasks at hand. 
• Manageable Size. If you include writer friends, no more than a total of four people is probably best. We had too many people on our trip to the Yucatan. A cohort decided the location we picked didn’t work and our group split, creating a fracture.
• Take Duplicates. If you’re going to be out of the United States for an extended amount of time, take a backup pair of cheap sunglasses, a backup laptop or power converters. More than once while in Mexico, I’ve had computers break. It’s smart to work backed up in the cloud or Google Docs. Having a ChromeBook or another device can be your salvation.

I understand that this is not a practical strategy for everyone. I’m single, with no dependents and have stretches of weeks and months off. I am convinced one can do quite a bit in four weeks, or even four days. It’s more about the intense focus than being in exotic destinations, and it is a worthwhile alternative to waiting for prestigious artist residencies that have a limited number of slots.
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Samuel Autman teaches creative writing at DePauw University. His essays have appeared in It Came From the Closet, The Best of Brevity, The Chalk Circle, The Kept Secret, The St. Louis Anthology, Sweeter Voices Still, Ninth Letter, The Common Reader, the Washington Post, Under the Gum Tree, Bellevue Literary Review, The Linden Review, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place and Nature, Memoir Magazine and Brevity.