At my ‘nother house: In praise of writing retreats

I’m pretty sure my kids did most of their growing in summer. I mean, they were often two feet taller in August than they were in May—or it seemed like it anyway.

I know that didn’t occur because of sharp injections of human growth hormone. I think it happened because summer can be a powerful state of mind.

Which brings me to another memory—of my friend Tish’s wild twin boys when they were very young. These boys were so crazy that their parents had had to remove all the furniture from the living room so that the boys could race around and around it to burn off manic twinnity. There were no knobs on the front of the gas stove. I could imagine why.

It wasn’t that the parents were negligent or didn’t try to get a grip on the boys. It was that they were completely twin-justifying in their behavior. If one of them needed approval for what he was doing, he had but to look into identical eyes, know, as he certainly did know, that he would get the nod from his brother.

There were quite a few disasters that ensued but one time they were unexpectedly philosophical when denied their latest wish.

They had asked their mom for some of the beer she was enjoying (who would blame her if she enjoyed it all day every day?). When she said no, they had a brief conversation with each other, mostly without words, and then looked perfectly happy.

“Wait a minute,” she said before they could wander away to commit some act of retaliatory destruction. “Why aren’t you upset about not getting the beer?”

One of the little angels looked back at her like it was hard to believe he had to explain and said, “Because we are going to have beer at our ‘nother house.”

They went to explain that, in their twin-constructed universe, they had another house where they could absolutely do whatever they wanted.

I have always thought that was an amazingly handy concept—whatever I want, I can have at my ‘nother house. There, nothing is denied, everything is permissible. There, I still smoke Lark cigarettes and drink Bombay gin on my birthday.

I actually have a version of that ‘nother house and I’ve just come back from it. Every year I go to the Cedars of Lebanon near Nashville and live for a week with my dogs and no internet. It is a kind of heaven.

I don’t smoke or drink there. Instead I do something that is in some ways even more heady: I have a long stretch of time wherein I read, walk outside in the scorching Tennessee summer with the cicadas at deafening volume, think, watch my perennial movie favorites—the Oceans movies, Mr and Mrs Smith—and write. I visit my wonderful friends in Nashville a bit and have a birthday dinner there. This year my older son flew down for the dinner and that was a whizbang birthday present.

But mostly I have my brain to myself, my thoughts, and I collect them and mull them over and put them together and consider.

It doesn’t seem like a lot, but what I emerge with is a vision, a coherent whole, a set of priorities for the fall, my favorite time of year.

The house is eerily like the house that Amelia Grant lives in in the Adirondacks in The Algebra of Snow, the ebook version of which is going to be issued in October. And I made that one up. Then I found the cabin in the state park in reality.

It’s odd how that happens—how the imagination precedes reality, how the dance between fact and fiction is so infinitely more mysterious than most of us routinely think.

I am a great believer in Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft concept, and in the small steps it takes to get to a creative vision.

But first you have to have the vision—and that is what retreats, ‘nother houses, are for.

First the vision, then the steps, the execution.

How do you find time and space for your vision to unfold? Do you need a long, continuous period of little interruption to get a good roll out of your vision? How can you create that? Do you have a ‘nother house to go to, in reality or metaphorically?