Chopping Wood: On Writing, Retreats, and Starting a Fire

It was cool, late March, early in the day and still wet from all the recent rain. Dodging puddles, I schlepped everything out of the car and onto the stairs down to the cabin—comfortable clothes for three days of writing, extra blankets and sheets in case the provided ones smelled of Bounce or scented detergent, my pillow from home, a cooler of easy food to fix. Then lap desk, laptop, power cord, and fat file folders full of drafts.

(Overcoming the Pressure to Be Flawless.)

I turned the key to a clean, small, perfectly cozy studio—called Tree House—sliding doors to a deck overlooking the creek—the beautiful rush of it, masking any other noise. Delight. Everything I needed was right here—the dreamy writing retreat I had envisioned, funded, and planned. Standing on the deck, looking down at the swollen creek, I could almost taste progress. This was going to be perfect.

After a quick lunch, I settled in to write.

All the writing retreats I’ve done over the last five years, I’ve arrived with several works-in-progress—essays started but unfinished. The plan was always to pick one, reenter it, and if I start flailing, just pick another. By coming armed with drafts, I have options.

I opened the draft of one essay but looking at its three pages made me kind of sick. I had no interest, saw no way back into it. An editor at one magazine had expressed interest, but then she retired; the new editor had passed on the pitch. I needed to reframe it for some other audience/publication but couldn’t see how. I’d be working on an essay that was destined to fail. Why not save myself the time and misery?

I pulled out the other drafts, equally unfinished, and pondered each of these options to similar conclusions: no, no, and no. No motivation; no juice. Every option in my arsenal sucked.

BAM. Utter panic.

Fear, resistance, dread.

After 40 years of this writing life, when I begin a retreat, why must I still descend to a deep, dark hole of anxiety and self-doubt? Though I recognize it, know it well, each time it feels as though THIS time it’s different. THIS time it really is proof of my being washed up. This time, any of the usual explanations or comforts will not fix the problem. Because this time it’s really true: I can’t do this anymore; have nothing to say; have exhausted whatever talent and vision I once had.

This time, on the first evening at my cabin on Oak Creek in Arizona, I decide the reason it’s so real is my age: 67. The well has run dry. The brain is loose, has holes. I’m too old to feel drive or ambition.

Let’s face it, for the last four years, maybe one retreat per year, not one of those drafts has been finished. There’s one about teaching memoir in the college classroom, and one about John Prine, one about a good friend’s recent suicide—and they all stall somewhere—they persist in being incomplete. I look them over, trying to conjure motivation for any of them. I send out pitches, because if Oxford American likes my John Prine idea, my own belief in it will be restored. If the AWP Writers’ Chronicle likes my teaching memoir essay, I’ll be reinvigorated to work on it again. If any mag wants anything of mine, that will be the validation needed to finish it, figure out what it needs, to give it a size and word count, a target audience, a reason for being. 

It’s not that I can’t write and finish an essay on my own steam, my own unflagging belief in a good idea; I can. But I have watched some long-ago finished essays get rejected over and over, one of them going on eight years now. So if I do all this work, will it even see print? Who or what am I doing this for? Is grappling with the subject, making sense of it, reason enough to complete an essay? If it never gets published, is it still good that I wrote it?

As it got later and became clear it was a totally lost day, I wanted to cancel my goodnight call with my husband. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to him; I just didn’t want to talk to him about this. So I sent him a text saying I would call before bed as planned but please don’t ask how the writing went. And I said I know it’s only 8, but bedtime has been moved up. I just want to sleep off a rotten day.

He called right then, and we joked. “Today was just horrible,” I said, “but we’re not going to talk about that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “that it wasn’t a good writing day, but we’re not going to talk about that.”

We talked about it without talking about it. He was sweet. He knows he can’t solve my problems for me but just being with me through my self-inflicted turbulence is a comfort. I know his feelings for me are never going to change just because I’m a dope. As a jazz drummer, he has his own weak spots and days he feels washed up. Sometimes during his three hours of practice per day, he’ll be drumming and all of a sudden, he shouts out FUCK. Then he starts the piece over again. Some days he quits early and tells me he just has to stop, and hope for a better tomorrow.

As a creative writing professor for 25 years and a freelance coach and editor for 10 years after that, I have designed and led writing retreats in Prescott, AZ, Acrosanti, The Sierra Ancha Wilderness, Playa Summer Lake in Oregon, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, and Paros Island in the Cyclades of Greece. I taught a master class on Writing Retreats for the James River Writers Conference and published a three-part series about this topic.

Having done so many retreats myself over the last 35 years—from self-funded to awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Ucross, Hambidge, Djerassi, Playa, and Dorland Mountain—I make a point to warn my students and clients of the obstacles they may face. I build knowledge of these and strategies against them, into the design of retreats I mentor. Handouts completed at the start help them identify goals, set a reasonable and balanced itinerary, anticipate obstacles, and prevent freak-out when they hit the first brick wall. 

Alone in their rooms with their thoughts, instead of feeling stupid, lazy, or fraudulent for days on end, they can see these demons approaching, acknowledge them as occupational hazards, and send them on their way. Or that is my hope—that the requisite crisis will be abbreviated and diluted. Instead of losing half the week to feelings of incompetence, maybe they will lose an afternoon or a day. Some such loss is expected.

I used to take college students, creative writing majors, to Forest Service cabins in Arizona’s Sierra Ancha Wilderness for 16 days of writing and reading and unplugging. Not only was there no internet, there was no electricity. (Stoves, fridges, heaters, and lanterns were powered by gas.) We wrote longhand and held read-aloud workshops for feedback. One goal of this writing intensive was to replicate a part of the writer’s life, post college. If you choose to pursue this as a career, I would explain, you will be competing to get residencies at places like Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi, and Hedgebrook. And once you land at one of these places, you will have all the time in the world to write and it will scare the bejesus out of you. 

It’s a common refrain among writers: “If only I had more time….” Yet suddenly, there we are with sweet, cozy lodging, the encouragement of having been selected in a competitive process, exquisite views, chef-prepared meals, and hours upon days upon weeks to do nothing but write. The “too busy” excuse has vanished, and it’s terrifying. We want that excuse back.

Because now, when all obstacles have been removed and all manner of support and belief in us has been provided, all that stands in the way of success is the Self—a potent hurdle.

One of my students, several days into immersion in writing and reading and solitude, wrote in his journal: “All this time in my head just makes me want to chop wood.”

I get it. Substitute for “chop wood,” do anything else.

Here, the wood is chopped for me and there are free standing fireplaces in each cabin. The resort provides matches, newspaper, skinny strips of kindling and beautiful split logs. Because of all the recent rain, these fire ingredients were damp.

But before going to bed, I gave it a whirl anyway. (This is akin to trotting out that old, unfinished draft about teaching memoir and trying to force it. Damp. No spark.)

I rolled up the driest of the newspaper pages into little balls and placed them all over the fireplace grate. Then I laid down strips of blonde kindling to make the shape of an asterisk, then bigger kindling on top of that, and then a nice fat log. Held a lit match to the edges of the newsprint and waited. It’s deceiving, because at first the flame is big and bold. I put the protective screen back on to keep sparks from flying into the room, but within five minutes, the kindling and paper have burned up and the log on top is clean and cold.

Come on, I know how to make a fire.

I pulled some dry paper out of my notebook—might as well use it for something—put on shoes and went to the woodshed for more kindling. I assembled all the parts as before and struck the match. For a minute, it was big and I texted a picture to my husband. He texted back: “Good job, Girl Scout.” But it was another five-minute wonder.

Fire making as a diversion is effective. It’s entirely possible to spend two hours and two tiny boxes of matches trying to get a blaze going. And failing.

I have a friend from graduate school who gave up writing. We both had some short stories published; we each eventually had a book out. While I taught full time, she was raising five kids. At some point she just tired of the inherent rejection and decided she was done. I objected, tried to talk her out of it, suggesting she just take a long break from writing, but not divorce it completely. But this friend is a precise, organized, and orderly person and she wanted to lop it off cleanly and deliberately. And she did. And had no regrets.

There were others from my MFA program who gave it up. One woman who had written such funny stories, later gave it up and started a computer programming business with her wife. She took her skills with humor and creating funny characters into an improv comedy workshop, and she had actual FUN. (For me, writing would rarely be classified as fun.)

Another friend from our program—one of the most talented—gave up writing. She had published a collection of short fiction and won awards. A fan of her work, I invited her maybe 20 years ago, to give a reading at the small college where I taught. During the Q&A, a student asked her how she had come to write such a beautiful love story as the one we’d all read before her visit. She said, “Since I couldn’t find a good man in real life, I decided to invent one, and that is how I came to this character and this story.” It was an answer and a strategy I would call up later—what is missing in the world? What would I like to invent? Write the love story you long to read. Etc.

This writer friend is so wise and so talented, inventing characters our world needs, yet she gave it all up. She has a flexible day job, makes decent money, and the work doesn’t tax her mind. She raised a daughter and twin boys. She runs those 50K races on wilderness trails, into the night, in winter. She has taken up the saxophone.

Until this crisis at Tree House, I could not fathom how someone could give up writing.

Maybe I am done with writing. Maybe it is done with me.

Having gone to bed early, plagued by self-doubt, when I woke up, it was so very clear this recurring crisis was what I needed to write about. I was excited and eager to start.

Miraculously, I write. Day Two of my retreat and I’m too busy filling pages to even think about making a fire. Later, after having been productive, I get a stack of damp newspapers, open them all up and carefully separate the pages, laying each one flat on the tile floor to dry. This is Arizona; this should not take long. I restock kindling and logs, laying the new logs on the deck in direct sun.

On Day Three, a nearly finished first draft behind me, I try again to get a fire going. Who knows what I’m doing wrong. Because everything is drier, the logs light long enough to be charred in the middle. But the fire is never a blaze, nothing to marvel at, and certainly no help at heating the tiny Tree House. I turn on the wall heater and make another round of nachos. The broiler is reliably hot.

Most jobs people have over their lifetimes, they eventually retire from. Maybe it’s been a career in medicine or law or tech. People leave these careers behind. What writers do you know of who write up to a certain age—say 60, 65 or 70—and then draw a finish line, say they have done well or well enough, are satisfied and ready to turn to other things they enjoy?

I think writers, as long as their brains continue to work, keep on having something to say, to grapple with, and then share. John McPhee, interviewed on NPR about his most recent book of essays, Tabula Rasa, talked about this. At 93 years old, he had enough new work to add up to a book, but he feared publishing it. He relayed a conversation he had with friend/fellow writer/former student Joel Achenback of the Washington Post: “I’d love to publish some of this,” McPhee said, “but the whole idea is not to finish it, because you want it to keep you alive.” To which Achenback replied: “That’s no problem; just call it Volume I.”

“The whole idea,” McPhee summarized, “is to not die.”

I have no way of knowing how long my brain will work well. But for now, heinous as it makes me feel sometimes, writing isn’t something I’m ready to abandon. I will continue to schedule these writing retreats, and I will likely delude myself into feeling so excited and hopeful! Then, inevitably, will feel like a fraud. Wondering if this, finally, is the end of me and writing.

Had I not planned to go to the cabin at all, I could’ve avoided this crisis. But then I wouldn’t have this essay either.

It is on my last night at Tree House, past two full days of productive writing (dare I say fun?), that I start over with the fire making one last time. I move all the ash from the failed attempts to the sides and back and have dry newspaper and kindling and logs. I build the fire well, just as I have the other days, light the match and it takes. As I’m making my dinner of ramen noodles, I hear popping and cracking behind me and turn around to see that even the log is fully involved. While the going is good, I add two of the five failed logs with their minimally charred middles and they too succumb wholly to the inferno. They pop and sputter. What the hell, I add the other three, and it’s crowded in there, but I want to burn up all the failure.

Now THIS is a fire. The tiny room gets so warm I have to open doors and windows. It is 50 degrees outside, but even with the doors and windows flung wide, the thermostat says 75 and rising. An hour in, the base log fully burned, the others I’ve piled on top of it tumble forward, not onto the floor but close to the screen so that the smoke no longer lines up with the flue, and starts to roll into the room. With the shovel, I push everything back into safe position and lift a log on top of another to give the fire air. Air is its nutrient.

Success. The tumbling log episode is remedied without having set off the smoke alarm and the fire is something to behold. Overkill, yes. But so satisfying to watch every failed log of the previous three days’ attempts ignite and surrender.

Combustion. Ignition. Heat.

Dry kindling is what we need as writers, and the right conditions, a surplus of matches. An idea, a spark. The requisite crisis? Spread it out on the tile floor to dry. Watch yourself fail over and over.

Try again.

Postscript:

Interestingly, as I checked with my friends/writing colleagues to ask permission to include them in this essay, I learned that guess what? They’re all writing again. One of them says she never really stopped; one is working on a novel, but not pressuring herself to finish under any timeline; and one writes for Sierra Club, as a form of environmental activism. And the one who never really stopped, coincidentally, when I caught up with her, had spent her day chopping wood. No lie.