One of the things I’ve gradually come to accept about myself is that I have absolutely no idea when to stop adding details. Whenever I tell a story, another one quietly slips in behind it. Someone reminds me of somebody else, a place brings back another place, and before I know it what was supposed to be a short account has acquired a dog, a plate of ravioli, three generations of my family and a detour into Bruce Springsteen.
A more disciplined writer would probably cross half of it out with a red pen. I never do.
Partly because, you know, ADHD, but also because I suspect that this tendency has something to do with being brought up in an Italian-Polish family, where there’s always another chair to squeeze round the table and another serving of whatever because, well, you never know who might turn up, so who is going to eat all that food anyway?
My friend, family therapist Massimo Giuliani, once explained Bruce Springsteen’s famously generous concerts in exactly those terms. The endless encores, the feeling that the evening is never quite over, the sense that there’s always one more song to give. “That’s his Italian mother,” he said. He did in a book called Madri (mothers).
Among family mothers, we understand each other.
The funny thing is that I realised I organise writing retreats in exactly the same way.
On the first morning I didn’t know exactly who would be joining us for the day, because you know, Italians. I had a fairly good idea, of course, but there were still a couple of people who hadn’t quite decided, somebody who wanted to come just for Sunday, somebody else who might bring a friend, but the friend disappeared in no time. So every now and then another chair appeared around the table, somebody moved up a little, somebody else said, “There’s room here.”
Looking back, I think that was already the workshop before we had written a single word. In the first exercise half of the people mentioned the stress of getting there on time. Like: “Where is via Umberto I?” “No idea, whom are you looking for?” “Barbara.” “Oh, down there.”
I’ve been leading meditative writing workshops for years now, in Amsterdam and elsewhere, and over the last couple of years here in Abruzzo as well. This weekend, however, was the first time I’d really given people enough time not just to write together, but to stay together. Two days make an enormous difference. There’s time to share a meal, to carry on conversations that would normally end with the workshop, to discover that “I’ll keep you company while you have a cigarette” can very easily turn into sitting on the terrace until two o’clock in the morning because nobody actually wants to call it a night.
The writing itself is deceptively simple.
I always tell people that the point isn’t to write well. It isn’t even to have something to say. The only thing I ask is that they keep the pen moving. If nothing comes to mind, then write exactly that. “I don’t know what to write.” “Nothing’s happening.” “This feels ridiculous.” Sooner or later your hand gets bored of repeating itself and quietly takes over. More often than not, that’s when the interesting things begin to appear.
During the exercises I’m usually the one keeping an eye on the clock, handing out prompts and ringing my father’s little bell when it’s time to stop. I sometimes joke that I’m the keeper of the sacred fire, although in practice I’m mostly the woman reminding everyone that they’re perfectly allowed to breathe. It’s astonishing how many of us stop doing exactly that once the pen finds its rhythm.
And then, despite the name, there is an awful lot of talking.
People often imagine meditative writing as a silent retreat. Not ours. We write in silence, certainly, but afterwards we sit in a circle and whoever wants to share does so. Nobody has to read aloud, yet most people end up doing just that. Other are more concise. In the breaks they talk over coffee, over fruit, over somebody else’s memories that unexpectedly reminded them of their own.
And over ravioli.
On the first day Beatrice made ravioli for all of us, and I would be doing both her and the weekend a disservice if I treated lunch as a mere lunch break. Food has a way of changing conversations. People relax, stories wander, somebody remembers something because somebody else passes the bread. I’ve become convinced that writing retreats should always involve proper meals, because introspection, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, makes people hungry. Our brains have been doing lots of work without us noticing, so, that’s how it works.
This year we also ended up with a trilingual group, which felt perfectly natural. One of the participants was Dutch and spoke in English, so those who could followed her directly while I translated for everyone else, then translated everybody else’s comments back into English. After thirty years as an interpreter I hardly notice when I switch languages. The others do.
The following morning the first assignment of the worksop was: write what has surprised you most yesterday.
The answers were wonderfully varied. Some people hadn’t expected the sheer number of intrusive thoughts that would insist on appearing the moment they sat quietly with a pen. Others were surprised by the way writing about an old memory immediately showed up somewhere in the body before it reached the page. Some walked out feeling one palm above the ground. Others where sad at the discovery that they usually never unplug ot get rid of background noise. Quite a few talked about the atmosphere, the openness of the group and how quickly complete strangers had become people (“these pearls of people” I quote) they trusted.
One participant had only been able to join us on Sunday and admitted that he regretted missing it. I knew exactly what he meant. One of the unexpected gifts of spending two days together rather than two hours is that the workshop slowly becomes something else. There are the writing exercises, of course, but there is also everything that happens in between them, and it turns out that the “in between” is often where the real work gets done. Like the light through the cracks.
One of the women who came had what she described as writer’s block. In itself that’s hardly unusual, except that she wasn’t trying to write a novel. She had left a successful career as a lawyer to complete a PhD on renewable energy and had recently signed a contract with the leading academic publisher in her field to turn her Italian doctoral thesis into a book in English.
We’ve already agreed that I can probably help with the writing itself. Academic Italian and academic English are two different animals altogether, and learning to move from one to the other is largely a matter of changing habits rather than becoming cleverer, as I learnt when I was doing research in Canada.
What amused me was what happened overnight.
By Sunday morning she had simply reorganised the entire book. Sometimes that’s all the mind has been waiting to do. It just needs enough quiet for all the pieces to fall into a different order.
Sunday was supposed to be spent in the gardens of Tagliavè in Villa Santa Lucia, everybody sitting on traditional Abruzzese blankets under the trees. It was a lovely plan, except that the August heat. Within minutes we abandoned all romantic notions of writing outdoors and retreated to the old village school next door, where I’d held the first meditative writing workshop in the area two years earlier.
As it turned out, I couldn’t have chosen a better place. The school is no longer a school, yet it somehow still feels inhabited by everyone who once learnt there. At one point I placed an empty chair at the head of the table and asked everybody to spend four minutes writing to the person they imagined sitting there.
Some people wrote enthusiastically. Some couldn’t write at all. Some cried. I wrote to my father.
When he was a young teacher he used to walk up the old mule track from Ofena to Villa Santa Lucia, in sunshine or snow, to work in that very school. As I sat there, pen in hand, it suddenly occurred to me that neither of us could ever have imagined that one day I would also be teaching in that building, giving people permission to listen to themselves long enough for words to appear.
The photograph at the top of this post is connected with that story: it’s an old class photograph from the school, with my father’s name added in pen. My son send it this spring after accompanying the ninety-year-old mother of Canadian friends to Villa Santa Lucia. It was the first time she had visited the village where her own father had been born, and somebody showed him the photograph because they recognised the family name.
That’s how these things happen around here. One story opens the door for another. Seriously, how am I supposed to edit myself? I should probably leave out the dog because every creative writing handbook would tell me to stay on topic, but regular readers of this blog already know that’s not going to happen.
Last year he decided that the ideal place to attend the workshop was underneath the table, sitting firmly on Andrea’s feet. This year he made exactly the same decision and we eventually negotiated a compromise: he was very welcome to stay, just perhaps not right in the middle of the circle.
There was also our carefully planned silent walk through the olive groves, which dissolved almost immediately into a collective migration towards the village bar because the temperature was somewhere between “very warm” and “this is getting silly”. We sat on the terrace instead, drank spritzes, watched the light change over the valley and discovered that silence is not the only way of paying attention.
That first evening I went to bed convinced I’d secretly spent the afternoon carrying wardrobes uphill. My back hurt, my legs hurt, the soles of my feet hurt, which was puzzling, because apart from stirring a huge pot of chickpeas and pasta, ringing a bell and listening to people, I hadn’t actually done anything remotely athletic. Then it dawned on me that apparently holding a space also has a physical weight. Nobody tells you that.
At the end of the weekend I asked everybody to leave me with a single word or sentence.
They wrote:
Harmony.
Coming into balance and calm.
Belonging
Presence.
Synthony,
Serenity.
I’ll keep them all. Not because I need testimonials, but because they’re reminders. Every workshop ends up being slightly different, and six months from now I’ll probably remember the ravioli, the dog, the old school, my father’s bell and the conversations on the terrace, while forgetting the order of the exercises completely.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably exactly as it should be.
We’ll do it all again at the end of August, on 29-30 August.
There will be paper and pens, a bell, too much food, far too many stories, and, if experience is anything to go by, another chair quietly appearing around the table for someone who hadn’t planned on coming until the very last minute.
More info: https://mammamsterdam.net/meditative-writing-retreats/
