Lectures, readings, panel discussions, craft classes, and solid blocks of time reserved for writing are all common features of the world’s most popular conferences, festivals, and residencies. But often the most valuable moments at these events are unplanned and unscripted—the result of a fateful encounter, a twist of luck, or a sudden realization.

We asked a handful of writers if they’ve ever experienced moments of magic at a writers retreat. The resulting essays transcend the usual descriptions of Adirondack chairs set across rolling hillsides or the hustle and bustle of book fairs and explore the real reasons writers gather at these types of events: to forge new relationships, gain fresh perspectives on writing and life, and perhaps even learn a little something about themselves as artists and people.

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The MacDowell Colony (Photo by: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)

Seven Hours

In my childhood fantasies of being a writer, I imagined my days spent in a tiny, book-stuffed New York City apartment, hunched over a typewriter, furiously pounding out my stories, a cigarette dangling from my lips and a half-empty glass of scotch sweating on the desk. The muses, I imagined, would keep me in this exquisite bondage for marathon stretches—whole days and nights, after which I would collapse beside a tidy, towering stack of finished pages. Only the tiny book-stuffed New York City apartment panned out. It turned out that drinking was anathema to finishing anything, and I could reasonably work for only about three hours at a stretch. In fact, all the writers I knew agreed that three to four hours was our limit. Though I only knew other writers in New York, I assumed this was a universal experience, and a comforting one. Writing was hard. I wanted to stop after three hours.

Then I attended my first residency. The first morning I sat down to work in my spacious studio at the MacDowell Colony, I took a deep breath. I sipped my coffee, and started typing. Summer in rural New Hampshire is a verdant, buzzing thing, and as I worked, deer meandered through the meadow outside my studio. A couple of wild turkeys bobbed by the screen door, peering inside with their charmingly hideous faces. After three hours, in the middle of a difficult paragraph, I stood up and stretched. I peered down the dirt road for the van that would deliver my basket lunch. I waved my phone around, trying to catch a signal so I could check my e-mail. No luck. I stood on the porch, feeling lost. Then, I sat back down and finished that paragraph. For the rest of my five weeks in that studio, I worked an average of seven hours per day. Three hours wasn’t my writing limit. It was the length of time I could successfully fend off the siren song of the Internet, the city, and, ultimately, my own impatience. Those woods taught me that I could expect more of myself.

—Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2010).

Agent Action

The first writers conference I ever attended was the twenty-fifth annual Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference in 1996. It had never really occurred to me that I could be a professional writer, but when I walked in and heard the Hallelujah Chorus—or maybe it was just the bong! of a Mac starting up—I felt I was finally in the right place. The keynote speaker was Peggy Rathmann, a Caldecott Medal winner and someone I revered in my genre of choice: picture books. I scrounged up the courage to approach her, and we spoke privately about some of the things I was working on. She suggested I talk to a friend of hers, an up-and-coming agent named Steven Malk of Writers House. He ended up loving my work, and what would become my first published title, a funny nonfiction picture book, ended up in a bidding war! Harcourt published Who Hops? in 2001, and it’s still in print to this day. I’ve been lucky enough to traditionally publish many more books for children, teens, and young adults, as well as independently publish marketing guides for adults. I’ve also developed a career as a writer-entrepreneur, coaching other writers on how to build their platforms and market themselves. None of it would’ve happened if I hadn’t gone to that first conference! I prefer going to colonies outside the United States. There’s something about moving in a space that is not my home that makes me more aware about my place in the world. And if I see myself with more clarity, I take that sharper vision to my writing. Every afternoon in Brazil, on a residency at Instituto Sacatar, I’d go to the nearby beach and float in the water, drifting into thought as my body drifted out to sea—a meditative exercise that allowed me to write a few fresh pages each night. But one time I floated so far out that all I could see was a thin horizon I suspected was the faraway shore. After the initial panic came the surrender to an entirely new perspective: If I survived this, I’d spend less energy inhabiting my past, isolating myself in books, keeping sad company in the late hours with my blank, expressionless computer screen—I’d value the days ahead of me as much as the days behind me. I didn’t tell anyone about my near-death experience that evening, though at dinner someone asked, “What are you working on?” and I said, “Tomorrow.”

—Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Fellowship

In 2001 I stood at the New Issues Poetry & Prose table at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs book fair in Palm Springs, California, patiently waiting for my soon-to-be-evident fan base to find me and ask me to sign newly purchased copies of my second book. In the first half hour, I’d signed one copy and misspelled the name of the person who bought it, starting a long tradition, which continues to this day, of never signing books using anyone’s name. On the flight to Palm Springs, I sat next to Yona Harvey, whom I know now as an extraordinary poet and a wonderful woman. She told me all about Cave Canem, a fellowship of black poets to which she belonged and to which she seemed frankly devoted. I’d thought about the conversation repeatedly over the first few days of the conference, as I pressed my way through crowds of people I didn’t know in hotel lobbies I supposed I’d never walk through again. At the book fair, I stood idly imagining that any moment, someone whose books I’d admired for years would approach me and tell me how much they enjoyed my poems. While I daydreamed in futility, Cave Canem’s table nearby was a flourish of activity in its spot inside the door of the exhibit hall. It seemed that every time visitors approached, they were taken in. First a hug, then an introduction. Handshakes. More hugs. Laughter, lots of laughter. I thought of Yona on the plane, her beautiful face framed by meticulous locks, her energy when she spoke of this fellowship, and I felt at once a great loss, an absence of this sort of fellowship in my own writing life. Through Cave Canem I saw in people a sense of belonging that I longed for. I applied to be a fellow the following year and was accepted. At the risk of being sentimental, it changed my life. Now, whenever I see my Cave Canem fellows, I am hugged, I am introduced, I am brought into laughter, and I am inspired to great gestures of devotion still.

—Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of six poetry collections, including Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014).

Red Spaghetti

If writing doesn’t make you rich and famous, it usually makes you hungry. So last winter, after banging away for hours on “Born Like This,” my novel-in-progress about a disgraced investigative journalist, a transgender movie star, and a Mormon drug mule, I was ravenous, though still not yet rich or famous. A guest for one week of Writing Between the Vines, a retreat at Moshin Vineyards, situated amid the lush valleys and corkscrew roads of Sonoma County, California, I was given my own charming cottage and the title “artist in residence.” Those seven days may be the only ones in which I’ll ever be referred to as an “artist,” and in the specific hours herein described, I was actually a starving one. Leaving behind my bramble of index cards, colored markers, and Lucky Troll pencils in search of sustenance, I hit the area’s main highway on foot, hoping to locate an Italian eatery I remembered passing on my way to the vineyard days earlier. Six miles and about ninety minutes later—I have a terrible sense of direction and do a lot of roaming—I arrived at Red Spaghetti, which must have been, and could still be for all I know, someone’s home, its ranch-style front porch pressed to the turnpike, a few ramshackle Chevy pickups parked in the adjacent gravel lot. Stepping to the porch, peering through the establishment’s thrice-punctured screen door, spotting inside a loose congress of what could have been Sons of Anarchy extras huddled curiously close to one another, it became suddenly clear: Red Spaghetti was not a restaurant at all. Offering no pasta, prosciutto, or pignolata, this joint was actually a tattoo parlor. I returned, still famished, to the vineyard, where the gently effervescent director of hospitality, Julia Lander, was delighted to fill my belly with generous pours of Moshin’s enchanting 2008 Pinot Noir. In some ways, awarding writers a one-week retreat at a vineyard, where alcohol is in such gross abundance and so near at hand, only reinforces the tawdry stereotypes heaped upon wordsmiths for at least a century. On the other hand, if you’re going to be a starving artist, you might as well be drunk. I’ve had better meals, sure, but never a finer dinner, and the next morning it struck me: “Born Like This” is about all the ways people refuse to be who we think they are. Why should Red Spaghetti be any different?

—Todd Jensen is the author of four books, including On Gratitude: Sheryl Crow, Jeff Bridges, Alicia Keys, Daryl Hall, Ray Bradbury, Anna Kendrick, B. B. King, Elmore Leonard, Deepak Chopra, and 42 More Celebrities Share What They’re Most Thankful For (Adams Media, 2010).

One Story

In 2006 I spent the month of April at the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming. A friend of mine, writer and editor Hannah Tinti, also happened to be there at the same time. I’d received my MFA from New York University the year before, and since I knew how to make a galley from my work at a small press, I had self-published one hundred copies of my thesis: perfect bound, small trim size, matte pink cover. I’d been giving them away to friends, and I gave one to Hannah at Ucross; she liked one of the stories in the book enough that she wanted to run it in One Story, the literary magazine she cofounded and edits. We worked on “The Samoan Assassin Calls It Quits” over the course of a few evenings, when we were done with our writing for the day. I had the great experience of watching Hannah make masterful edits to the story. She made it better than it had been. In a small way, I felt the same as George Saunders did when told he’d won a MacArthur: “I feel smarter already!” I hope always to have brilliant writer and editor friends like Hannah, and I hope that unhurried, meticulous editing, and the slow time and beautiful isolation of places like Ucross never go away.

—Thomas Hopkins is the author of a short story collection, “The Crypto-Jews Dilemma and Other Conversion Stories,” which was selected by Salvatore Scibona as runner-up for the 2012 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

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The Ucross Foundation (Photo by: Stephen G. Weaver)

Shaken-Baby Syndrome

I walked into my second year at the Voices workshop in 2010 feeling really full of myself. I’d had a superproductive year that included finishing a novel and cowriting a book for social activists. My arrogance was only encouraged by being accepted into Chris Abani’s advanced fiction workshop. On the first day Chris silenced the class effortlessly with a glance. His thick-fingered hands folded on a stack of papers, he asked, “Why do you write?” I shot my hand up. “It’s the air that I breathe.” Chris smirked. “Yeah, that’s that flowery shit you’ve been told. It doesn’t answer the question.” “Why do you write, Vanessa?” Chris continued. “You could have done anything else—paint, take pictures, whatever—but you chose to write. Why?” I stammered. None of my answers were enough. He kept pushing. I felt like a serial killer being interrogated by the FBI. Finally, in a cracked voice, I blurted, “Because on the page I could be myself. I could shut out those voices that said I was too much, that girls shouldn’t act like that.” Chris softened. “So you write to take back your power.” When he dismissed us, I ran to my room. All that confidence I’d come to with was smashed. I write to take back my power? What the fuck does that mean? I didn’t resurface until late evening, when my hunger pangs were unbearable. The next day, brooding over my morning pages, I realized Chris’s motives: I had to remember why I started writing to understand why I kept writing. He needed us to see that writers write from the same place—a wound. I walked up to him when I entered the classroom. “You messed me up yesterday.” He smiled. “Seriously, I was rattled, like I had shaken-baby syndrome.” We stared at each other as that image set in, then we both burst out laughing.“Thank you, Chris,” I said. I’ve been back to VONA every year since.

—Vanessa Mártir is a New York City–based writer and educator who is completing a memoir-in-essays titled “Relentless.”

Ghost Story

Two summers ago I did a residency at the Studios of Key West. An article in the local paper described the residency as a chance to “live in paradise.” Until the haunting started, it was exactly that.On my third night I was awoken by footsteps outside my window, strange movements in the bushes, shrill cries. The sound of someone walking the gravel path that hugged my cottage. Every night the noises continued. Once they were so violently loud, I hid in the shower until dawn. I had come to Key West to confront my novel. I had not expected to confront a ghost. The haunting lasted for two weeks. I stopped sleeping. I started swimming in the ocean because it was the only thing that kept me awake. One morning I came up for air knowing what I had to do with my book. Back at my desk, I deleted the last hundred and fifty pages. I saved nothing. I started over and felt as though a great weight had been lifted. Halfway through the residency the matter of the ghost was settled. Other residents had been plagued by the night noises; a casting-out ceremony was held—and it worked! But for those two weeks, a ghost was just what I needed. I spent those nights full of fear and, in the light of day, I couldn’t stand to be afraid of my book any longer.

—Laura van den Berg is the author of a novel, Find Me, (FSG, 2015), and the story collections The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009).

Magical Meetings

In 1988 I went to the MacDowell Colony for the first time, astonished and a little intimidated to find myself in such ambitious and gifted company. The list of fellow fellows was a mini Who’s Who in that moment, but the transformative encounter, the meeting that changed everything for me, was the meeting with Carole Maso. I don’t recall how we actually met, whether it was at dinner or someone’s event, but Carole likes to remind me that she said we’d be best friends—and that I looked back at her blankly, as if to say I doubted it. As it turned out, we were both headed overseas for further art-colony time (at the Joseph Károlyi Foundation, in Venice). We became close and, as she had been thinking about experimental literature and feminism longer, harder, and much more effectively than I, I had the chance to learn from her about writing, teaching, and life. But it was in that first winter (I think it may have been February) that I read her book Ghost Dance and then, in manuscript form, her brilliant hybrid novel The Art Lover. The first book floored me and the latter changed—as it did for so many others—my understanding of the way forward for American literature: In The Art Lover, genre restrictions dissolved before the great power of language as exquisite as it was bold. I would never have dared write my book The Tales of Horror, to begin the great adventure of writing not toward given expectations but as a way of finding out what can happen, without her example and friendship.

In 2003 I went to MacDowell for the last time. It was a bit of an emergency: I had a book that needed finishing (and a relationship that probably needed finishing too—but that’s another story), and I snuck in a couple of weeks in January. By great good fortune, I happened to overlap with the composer Jason Eckardt. Again, I’m not sure exactly how it happened: that mysterious shift from pretend acceptance (anyone not superfamous usually exhibits a vague general friendliness at meals) to real recognition and trust. For Jason a key moment came, I later learned, when he, having worn out his interest in the CDs he’d brought to MacDowell, asked if anyone had anything they could loan him, and I just happened to have the complete Xenakis chamber music (tucked in there with Hole and Modest Mouse). I think we’d already established a certain level of understanding—we shared a desire to talk seriously about life and art—but that opened the door to an exchange of work, leading to me reeling around in the icy bare trees at dusk with Jason’s “After Serra” pouring through my headphones, the strict geometry and passion of his compositions seeming like the audible manifestation of the stripped-down landscape, or the combination filling me with a kind of holy euphoria. And then Jason saw the manuscript that would become my book Subject before anyone else—and set the final poem as a song cycle, which premiered at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre and then at the Musica Nova festival in Finland.

—Laura Mullen is the McElveen Professor in English and the director of creative writing at Louisiana State University. Her most recent book is Enduring Freedom (Otis/Seismicity, 2012); a new collection, Complicated Grief, is forthcoming from Solid Objects Press.

The Mimes of Bogotá

The Mayo Clinic Dolores Jean Lavins Center for Humanities in Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, was full of artists. In a hospital conference room, Jack Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Forecast Public Art, told us about the mimes of Bogotá. A former mayor of the Colombian capital, Antanas Mockus, made art public policy when he hired roughly four hundred mimes to replace police at traffic intersections to parody people who did not obey traffic rules. Within a year, performance artists had reduced traffic fatalities. The idea was compelling: art integrated into the wellness of the city.

I’d come to the Mayo Clinic Arts in Healthcare Symposium to present a paper on ways to use creative writing in a medical setting. I plan creative writing classes that take place in hospitals; medical professionals often ask me what impact narrative programs have on a patient’s health. I tell them that creative writing can enliven patients and create opportunities for catharsis and empathy.

Jack Becker’s anecdote about the mimes of Bogotá called to mind a deeper truth I hold about narrative: that stories permit one to imaginatively leave the hospital. I know this from experience. When I was seventeen I was hospitalized with a collapsed lung. The diagnosis was spontaneous pneumothorax: One day, I simply couldn’t breathe. In the hospital, I had a tube in my chest the size of a large drinking straw. On my last day there, a mime walked into my room. His face was painted white and black, his lips a cherry red, and when I saw him standing in the doorway, I was suddenly reminded that I was a patient. Until that point I had been reading, absorbed in a book. In my hospital bed, stories had comforted me. Reading had granted me an escape from the boundaries of the walls that surrounded me. I hadn’t recalled that moment for years. Becker’s talk at the Mayo Clinic Arts in Healthcare Symposium gave me a much-needed reminder of the importance of writing and literature.

—Kathryn Savage works at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and has received scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ucross Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center.

Match Made in Paradise

Thisbe Nissen and I met at the 2006 Writers in Paradise conference in Florida. Thisbe taught a short-fiction workshop; I drove the faculty van, which I managed to get stolen. When the van was found—a campus custodian had commandeered it—I used it to woo Thisbe, who was approachable but, I eventually learned, not wooable.

The conference ended. We went our separate ways. We corresponded and swapped writing. We visited. A working friendship turned whirlwind courtship. As the 2007 Writers in Paradise conference approached, we talked marriage—not if but when, how, and why. Thisbe suggested to the organizers, Sterling Watson and Dennis Lehane, that she and I teach her class together. I would once again drive the faculty van (Sterling implored me to keep better tabs on it this time) as well as introduce Thisbe’s faculty reading. I felt obliged and obliterated—here was my chance.

On the day of the reading, I was a mess. My mom was going to be there! I drafted a marriage proposal, but the last thing I wanted was a public display. My idea of living hell is being the center of attention. But Thisbe, while a successful fiction writer, is first and foremost a failed showgirl. Her first love is musical revue. She adores a good show and even appreciates a bad show. I drove a van full of rowdy novelists and poets to the reading, having a hard time remembering my name—let alone the way to the auditorium. I reminded myself that my passengers—a lot of them repeats, a number of them couples—were pulling for Thisbe and me. Master writers, they recognized before we did what a good love story we’d make. Beth Ann Fennelly leaned over my shoulder. Her husband, Tom Franklin, would read first that night. Ribbing me, she said, “I’m reading a love poem to Tommy for my introduction, Jay. How’re you gonna top that?”

I steered and shrugged. I sweated. My proposal smoldered in my pocket. Blanking my way through Tom’s reading, I found myself onstage. Behind the podium. Groping in my pocket. There, I fingered my notes. Also, the little plastic ring I’d won, in secret, from a gumball machine at a Florida dive of a diner, Skyway Jack’s, where Thisbe and I ate brunch and ogled the sexagenarian waitresses subjected to the indignity of their T-shirts: a pair of sunny-side-up eggs emblazoned high above their low bosoms.

Gathering myself, I glanced at the audience: a hundred or so faces. Sterling nodded. My mom beamed. I faltered. No one but me knew what I had planned—I could still back out.

“After Thisbe’s reading,” I said, plowing ahead, “there will be a Q&A. But while I have the microphone, I’d like to ask my question before someone beats me to it.” I turned to where she waited. “Thisbe Nissen,” I asked, “will you marry me?”

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I took a knee beside the podium, shut my eyes, and offered up the kitschy ring.

The crowd, myself included, waited. Thisbe, her cowboy boots striking hardwood, bounded onstage. She kissed me and claimed her ridiculous ring. Leaning into the microphone, pausing a moment, she said, “Yes.”

We wept. A hundred people—Sterling, my mom—hugged and applauded. We took our seats and sat rapt—the show must go on!—as Thisbe launched us, with gusto, into her reading and our lives together.

—Jay Baron Nicorvo is the author of the poetry collection Deadbeat (Four Way Books, 2012).

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.