It is my pleasure to have back with us, Michael Diebert, Poetry editor for the Chattahoochee Review. His last post is very popular with my readers and I'm sure you will enjoy this one.
Gulf Shores, Alabama, January 19. As I draft this, my feet are propped on a
leather ottoman in a house not my own. I
face an empty fireplace. I hear a pen
scratching paper and the thwack of a knife chopping vegetables for dinner. I see four fellow writers hunched over
monitors and notebooks, in pursuit of the proper word. Outside, Mobile Bay is our backyard. There’s a pier over the water, a covered
porch, a pool. Pelicans roost on posts
near shore. Past the RV park next door is
a little lagoon where mullet arc out of the water and herons troll the surface. The Gulf of Mexico is near, but we’re not
here for the big water or the beach.
I am here on a writers’ retreat with
four dear friends; we have been retreating together since 2011. Our travels have taken us to northeast
Georgia and here to coastal Alabama. We
gather for a long weekend; we bring suitcases, food, and writing
essentials. We cook, laugh, go for
walks, stare at the water, work on our writing, and share. Sometimes we read other poets aloud. Sometimes we fantasize about winning the
Pulitzer. One hard-and-fast rule: the TV
stays off, and phones are set to silent.
The mood is relaxed, the body and the mind are receptive, and much gets
done—more than can get done in our busy day-to-day lives.
The complaint is familiar: we live in a
world where it’s hard to make the proper time for writing. The common lament of our email correspondence
to each other is “Man, am I ready for writing time!” So we make the time. We gather; we exit one world temporarily, and
we enter another. When we retreat, and
when the writing is going well, we are, again, in that most exciting of places,
the realm of receptivity. And when I’m
receptive, I’m nicer to others and to myself, and I become a better writer.
I was lucky to be asked to join this
group eight years ago, and we have maintained the same core group since. There have been necessary, regrettable
absences—schedule conflicts, health scares, children moving off to college—but
we continue to meet, write, and exist in each other’s company twice a year. Chemistry, that ineffable ingredient, has
been present in our group from the beginning.
I write this post to encourage you to find your own group and cultivate it. This takes time, but it’s essential. You don’t necessarily need to retreat far—your house, your local coffee shop, a park. The support of a few like-minded friends, engaged in the same pursuit you’re engaged in, can bolster your motivation and keep it going. And above all, that’s the trick when our day-to-day comes calling again, all too soon: to keep the buzz alive, to be able to retreat to that place of receptivity even when we’re not there.
Michael
Diebert is the author of Life
Outside the Set. He serves as poetry editor for The Chattahoochee
Review and teaches writing and literature at Perimeter College, Georgia
State University. In recent years he has led workshops for Writers
Circle around the Table, the Chattahoochee Valley Writers' Conference, and the Blue Ridge
Writers' Conference. Recent poems have appeared in Free State Review
and jmww. A two-time cancer survivor, Michael lives in Avondale
Estates, Georgia with his wife and dogs.
