Every summer I go on a retreat with a group of writers. We met when we were students in a creative writing MFA program at Goddard College. Five of us travel from the edges of the country to meet on tiny Decatur Island, in the San Juan Islands, to talk shop and lend one another support. Our schedule allows for quiet writing time, readings, and seminars conducted in the late afternoons.
We’ve entitled our annual retreat Mystery and Meat, and if you were to ask exactly what we do there, I’d say it boils down to these two M’s.
Our styles and genres vary, but what we share is our dedication to storytelling. Part of the mystery is our compulsion to persevere. Maybe it’s because the creative act is addictive. I suppose we also write to know ourselves, to get at the mystery of what it is to be human.
In her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor says: “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.” We write and are surprised. We read each other’s work and we’re delighted to discover answers to questions we never thought to ask.
We also drink wine, eat good food, and discuss craft. We talk about how to hone into the core of character and about the importance of concrete detail in our writing. We discuss what essential questions to pose to alpha readers when seeking feedback and we hash over logjams in our plots. This is the meat part—necessary if we want to create more effective tales.
But it will never help us solve the primary mystery, which is why humans crave stories and why we can’t refrain from telling them.
We meet again in July. This year we’ll celebrate publishing successes, celebrate the sheer number of pages we’ve wrung out of ourselves in the previous year, and make irreverent jokes about rejections. We’ll carve into the meat of craft, and marvel at the mystery of our shared compulsion to tell stories.
*O’Connor, Flannery. “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. FSG, 1969.
