Unexpected Journeys
Over the past four years a few writer friends and I have been trying to schedule an informal retreat, our simple plans complicated by life events that are not unique to middle age but seem nevertheless to proliferate over the years. Apart from the global pandemic that delayed our early designs, one or more of us have experienced the declining health of parents, kids’ graduations and college move-ins, cross-country moves, and assorted obligations both personal and professional. This summer will mark twenty-seven years since all four of us have been in the same place at the same time (graduate school), and our friendship, stretched from coast to coast, sustained by group texts peppered with literary allusions and aspirations (still), is a lasting testament to what I believe is the most profound yet intangible value of an MFA program. We’ve finally hit on a location and time for our reunion-retreat—at a secluded cabin this autumn, fingers crossed—so I had to chuckle when I came across one particular piece of advice in “The Retreat Has Left the Group Chat: Planning and Executing a Successful Retreat With Writer Friends” by Joy Baglio. After describing novelist Vu Tran’s experience with friend-organized retreats and sharing his suggestions for a productive gathering, Baglio adds that “what ‘productive’ looks like is up to you.” I appreciate Baglio’s take because it gives me permission to measure the value of a retreat with writer friends using a metric beyond word count, and it is an example of what I hope this magazine consistently delivers: inspiring, insightful, and useful information, yes, but also guidance grounded in the real. We have tried to collect precisely that in this issue’s special section, “An Unexpected Journey: Road Trips, Retreats, and Residencies to Shake Up Your Writing Routine.”
Speaking of unexpected journeys, are you sticking to your reading plans for the new year? I’m already off course and loving it. Despite my intentions to tackle last year’s notables that I missed—so much to read, so little time—Karen Russell’s The Antidote, her epic novel set in 1930s Nebraska, led me to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), set in the same state forty years earlier, then prompted me to revisit Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) and James Welch’s Fools Crow (1986), which I read in college in the early nineties but I was eager to reread with a fresh perspective. I look forward to seeing where my reading takes me next. As Russell says in this issue’s cover profile, “I think that many people, like me, are hungry for stories different than the ones we’ve been told.”
