Making Your Own Writing Retreat, part two

Jeannine’s photo of the July 2023 supermoon.

Making Your Own Writing Retreat (She Says/She Says) with Jeannine Hall Gailey & Kelli Russell Agodon

This is part two of a guest post in three parts
by Jeannine Hall Gailey and Kelli Russell Agodon
(see part one here)

Kelli Says:

When I do a writing residency, I tend to stay for a week. Usually, it’s in a scary haunted inexpensive cabin where I stay inside the majority of the time, except for walks. I wear sweats or yoga pants, a comfy sweater, socks with Birkenstocks. While I’m working, I don’t talk to anyone until 5 pm, when my roommates (other poets) and I have wine and appetizers to discuss our work. I call it “going deep,” and everything revolves around my poems and manuscripts. There are no extra outside activities, no dinner, and definitely no makeup or stylish clothing.

So, when Jeannine asked me to do a two-night retreat with her at Willows Lodge and mentioned a lavender farm, visiting the resident pot-belly pigs, and going to lunch and dinner, I thought, “Well, I probably won’t get a lot done, but this sounds like a blast!”

Because I live on the other side of Puget Sound, I took a ferry to Edmonds and a good friend brought me to Jeannine’s as her partner, Glenn, had wanted to start our retreat off well with a good lunch, champagne chilling in the fridge, and cupcakes — of course, cupcakes! When I arrived, I had Jeannine’s manuscript with me with notes I had made. We had emailed what we had of our manuscript to each other the day before. Jeannine’s was really good — it had sections and thoughtfulness; it just needed a paring down of poems. I, on the other hand, sent Jeannine a bunch of poems in no order. I had two “sections”: 1) Poems I like, 2) Poems I’m not sure if I like. Okay, so we can see that I arrived with a bit of a mess.

Because I had low expectations for myself, I thought I’d hang out with pigs and drink champagne, as all the best poets do — but from the moment I stepped into Jeannine’s house, the manuscript started taking form. Wait, how can that be? Do manuscripts start taking form when cupcakes appear? Well, kind of — what it seemed I really needed to help me with this manuscript was someone to talk to about it, and Jeannine, with her smart take on all things poetry, was just that person.

I am someone who processes things out loud and outwardly. While I have some inner dialogue with myself, I learn a lot by talking about what I am doing and listening to what people say. I learned a lot from Jeannine reading my manuscript and saying things like, “You have a lot of technology, queer ecology poems,” and to my surprise, “sexy poems.” What? I have sexy poems in my manuscript? I asked. “Yep. There’s a lot of mouths and lips and thighs.” Who knew?! That’s the thing about manuscripts, sometimes you are so inside them, you miss what’s happening in them; what’s the old expression? You can’t see the forest for the trees.

From this point on, our retreat went a little like this:

Day one: Eat, talk with Jeannine about my manuscript and/or I help her with hers, go to our rooms to work on the manuscript on our own, eat/wine, talk about the poetry manuscript, field trip to lavender farm, back to the room, take a bubble bath, go to bed at 10 pm while Jeannine stays up until midnight and texts me at 5:30 am that she has my manuscript done and with notes!

Day two: Wake at 5:45 am to see Jeannine has texted, wander to her room to get my manuscript, back to my room for coffee and banana bread I had brought, work on my manuscript all morning, meet with Jeannine around 10:30 am for more talking time, lunch field trip — the best grilled-chicken sandwich ever! — a quick drive around Redmond to see wine tasting places (I had resisted when asked if I wanted to go — as much as I wanted to, this is a writing retreat, you know!), back to our rooms to work on our manuscripts, dinner together at 5, back to our rooms for a final conversation about what we’re doing, and then bedtime for me (Jeannine went out and found the supermoon and took amazing photos!)

Day three: Wake up and splurge by ordering room service (note: if you get poached eggs, say soft, not medium #LifeTip) and spend the morning searching my files for poems I wanted to add back in and make a document to print out, checkout, lunch at Jeannine’s, then a ride back to the ferry for me to head home.

Here’s the thing: I did more in those three days for my manuscript than I have done on my own in the last 6 months. Plus, I had been my own worst enemy, taking out so many poems because I believed they weren’t “good enough.” I had spent a lot of time getting overwhelmed with my manuscript, not knowing what I was doing, doubting myself, and making it worse. Basically, I was in my head, and my head wasn’t helping.

What I needed was a poet friend to help me see my own vision. Jeannine also helped me with title ideas, told me to add and write more mermaid/bisexuality poems, and to stop playing it so safe. I’m not sure if that sentence sounds bossy or tough love, but as a Capricorn, I like feedback and advice — and she gave me a lot of great advice the entire retreat.

I kept a dedicated notebook for the retreat and for my manuscript, which now includes smart things Jeannine said and possible titles. I wrote down themes, keywords, and also ideas for organization.

Did I think that a two-night stay in a fancy-schmancy hotel would get me closer to a finished manuscript? No, I did not. Did it? Yes, very much. Plus, two days with Jeannine would have been a win on its own, but add lavender fields, pot-belly pigs, and champagne — I mean, isn’t that the making of all the best literary retreats you’ve heard of? I guess it really is.

[Watch for Jeannine and Kelli’s takeaways in tomorrow’s post.]

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Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest books are Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press), named a Finalist in the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in Poetry, and Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays & Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, where she works as an editor and book cover designer. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. Kelli is currently part of a project between local land trusts and artists to help raise awareness for the preservation of land, ecosystems, and biodiversity called Writing the Land. http://www.agodon.com / http://www.twosylviaspress.com