My Writing Retreat Weekend

Jamming to the Music of Barking Seals in the Key of Poetry on the California Coast

I wished I’d printed out the directions to the writing retreat before I left home that morning. I had driven out of civilization and cell coverage an hour ago as I approached the remote location on the coast at Point Reyes.

When I pulled my car into the parking lot at the top of a narrow road that crept down the forested hillside on the foggy coast of the Pacific Ocean, I noted the lack of people and the presence of a single deer who inched unexpectedly close to me soon after I climbed out of my car.

The ocean waves crashed below to the sound of seals barking or making whatever sound seals make. It was something like a combination of farting out of the mouth and yelling like a goat, but since it wafted up from a beautiful beach setting, it was nothing less than enchanting.

As I crested a hill and saw the house sitting on the shoreline below, I thought about how many pages I’d be able to bust out while I was there for the weekend retreat. “Probably practically finish the draft of my novel,” I told myself.

Through the window of the house at the bottom of the hill, I saw a small grouping of people in what looked like a kitchen. When I got down there I wandered in through the back door with a dopey enough look on my face to not appear threatening in case I’d somehow wandered into the wrong house.

“The writer thing?” I ask when one of the women’s eyes meet mine.

“Yes,” she answered. I stepped into the middle of a conversation between three women who had been attending these retreats together for years. They talked about the sonnets they wrote last time and how great the workshops were. I remember wondering for a fleeting second whether they praised the past writing retreats so highly because the teacher was the third woman in the room or if their enthusiasm was genuine.

I admit, I was walking into this situation basically blind. I have a habit of not looking too deeply into the details of upcoming trips in order to avoid diminishing the novelty of the experience. So, when my wife offered to book this retreat as a gift for our first wedding anniversary, she told me to check the details to see whether it was the right one. So I did my usual and checked only most cursory details, the title and the location. The Point Reyes Writing Retreat at Historic Point Reyes Lifeboat Station in Inverness, CA. Then I saw a scenic picture of a beach and I said, “That’s the one.”

The first thing that struck me as I talked to the women gathered in the kitchen was that it was like standing among a group of abstract painters. When I asked the question, “What do you write?” I got answers like, “A little poetry and I write in my journal.” The teacher said she’s working on a book but was still working out the form of it. Right now, it was a memoir about an artist that was an influential teacher in her life but she was still experimenting with the narrative structure. Another guest said that she’s a nature writer for work and is in the process of trying to figure out what she has a passion for writing in her free time. A thirty-something wandered in later and said he likes to paint a watercolor picture in his journal and then write something about it on the facing page.

The answers showed me within the span of moments how many different faces writing has. I expected answers like, “I’m writing a novel,” or “I write short stories.” Instead I glimpsed into a hodgepodge of different styles, all potentially more beautiful and interesting than the next.

After our initial small talk, we spent that night in a musky upstairs room overlooking the ocean. If we were all musicians, I’d say we had a round of short introductions and then jammed the blues. But like musicians have the common language of the blues, it seemed that the handful of writers gathered on this retreat shared the language of poetry.

Here’s one of the poems I wrote while in that room. According to the teacher, it’s a villanelle because of its 19-line form and repeated lines throughout. I have no idea where the subject matter came from. All I know is I was playing in the key of “villanelle” and the singer just pointed at me for my solo and the first thing that comes to mind as everyone waits for my pen to move is this image of me as a hobo trying to pull his way onto a passing freight train.

The train blew by and I didn’t have a chance, To grab the handle and ride into adventure, My hobo life is off to quite a slow start.

By now I should be riding through the bread basket, My pack next to me as I smoke and dream, The train blew by me and I didn’t have a chance.

But now I’m stuck in the bustle of the city, Eating steak in a tavern with clothes soft and dry, My hobo life is off to quite a slow start.

I never leave anymore — my life just stands still, Waking and working and repeating tomorrow, The train blew by me and I didn’t have a chance.

Now my savings are full and I’ve money to spare, My fridge is stuffed with food and my home is snug, My hobo life is off to quite a slow start.

I could have had a life of poverty and adventure, Instead it’s filled with decadence and doldrums, The train blew by me and I didn’t have a chance, My hobo life is off to quite a slow start.

The other writers’ poems were beautiful and sad and painted profound pictures of English countrysides and longing lovers. The sense that we were jamming out tunes persisted and I enjoyed the free-form improvisation of it all.

That night I realized that I hadn’t been in touch with my wife since I drove out of cell coverage that afternoon. The teacher told me that if I wandered far enough up one of the nearby hills, I should be able to get a bar or two of reception.

I started walking up the paved road and as I got further up the incline, the lights faded away in the background. Before I knew it I was standing in pitch blackness using my cell phone flashlight to illuminate a small circle of road in front of me. I had wandered off the paved path and up a tangle of grass and trees and eventually realized that I had no idea where the paved road was. If my phone died right then, I’d be wandering in the total darkness of night unable to see the edge of the cliff if I were to inch up to its edge. I found a spot that miraculously offered one solitary bar of reception and punched out this text as I heard the now eerie sounds of seals belching and barking in the background.

I waited a few moments and didn’t see the “…” of a reply so I began inching one step at a time in the general direction of “down” in the pitch black cold night. I punched out one more message, which was quickly followed by the dot dot dot of a reply.

In the blackness, I felt like a little kid who sees dark and ominous figures out of the corner of his eye. I started to get that tickle between my shoulder blades that signals a definite serial killer stalking nearby with a butcher knife. And the strange, tortured sound of belching and bellowing seals added to the cryptic ambiance. I felt like those chaps wandering through the English moors just before they were savagely attacked by a werewolf in the aforementioned movie. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I stepped back into the relative warmth of the musky house at the bottom of the hill.

The next day started with a morning of silence as if we were monks cloistered in a secluded temple. The teacher intended for us to have an opportunity to write for the first few hours of the morning. Getting some solitary hours to work on my fantasy novel was the primary reason I joined the retreat, so I happily complied.

I opened my laptop and set it on the top bunk. I could have gone and wrote in one of the common rooms or even at a picnic table near the beach watching the waves roll in, but my room was the only place I could close the door and get some solitude, so the top bunk became my desk. I stood there and tapped on the keys and realized after forty minutes or so that my writing sessions might not end up being the marathon page outpourings that I had optimistically envisioned as I drove out of civilization the day before.

I may be in the right setting for such an extended writing session, but I realized that I had only packed my city brain for this trip. The one accustomed to writing in stolen moments between working my day job and paying bills. This whole idea of having whole days to write was something my mind didn’t fully comprehend.

I was able to bust out some pages of the final scenes of my novel while standing next to the bunk bed and listening to the rolling waves outside the bedroom window.

We gathered again that afternoon in the musky meeting room at the corner of the top of the house. This time we wrote sonnets. The teacher mentioned that sonnets were typically one of the more challenging poetic forms. There was some grumbling as some of the writers remembered how much they had struggled with sonnets the last time they’d come to the retreat. We sat in silence listening to the scratching of our pens on our papers and after a while we read our sonnets out loud. I felt a bit like the teacher’s pet because after I read it, she looked pleased and said, “Nice. You did it.” I think I babbled some awkward attempt at not sounding idiotic and waited for the next person to read theirs. I was pleasantly surprised by the delicate images that meandered through my head as everyone read their poetic improvisations.

We broke for the afternoon with the plan of gathering in that room again that evening for another group writing workshop. My brain was oddly fatigued from writing the sonnet, possibly because I’d flexed a muscle that had never been flexed before. I told the teacher that I wanted to get some more writing time in, so I was going to bow out of the group session that evening. I felt torn as I heard the voices coming from the writing room down the hall from my temporary bedroom but the exhaustion weighed heavily on my brain. I climbed up to the top bunk with the intention of resting for a few minutes and then getting to my pre-planned marathon writing session, but I ended up sleeping all evening and waking up to the sound of footsteps as everyone walked down the hall away from the writing room, apparently done for the night.

I woke up and shook the grogginess away and then proceeded to pound out several pages before collapsing back onto the hard top bunk and sleeping heavily through the night.

When I woke, there was a note slid under my door which said that we would all be meeting at 11:30 that morning and should observe silence until then. I was still energized from my private late-night writing session the night before, and the prospect of gathering again and working on poetic forms didn’t sound enticing. I decided it was time for me take my writing retreat weekend solo. I wrote a nice note thanking the teacher and saying how much I enjoyed everyone’s company and hearing the beautiful words they came up with during our sessions but I was going to leave early today, on the last day of the weekend retreat, to spend the day writing.

Driving away, I looked forward to finding some modest motel room and sitting at a proper desk to pound out more pages of my manuscript. It took me an hour to get any reception back on my phone. I listened as the sound of the seals faded in the background. The abstract words that bounced off the walls of the little room overlooking the ocean as we improvised out poetic jam session faded back into the crevices of my memory. I’ll always remember my writing retreat weekend with fondness. The perfect gift from my wife who knows me well enough to know that sending me away as an anniversary gift was actually the perfect gift for a writer like me. The weekend ended with me tapping the keys in a motel room somewhere in between my house and Point Reyes. A weekend outside the reach of alerts from the real world was just the right priming for a day spent pouring out more words than I had any previous week before. I missed the sound of the barking seals though, and I still hummed in the key of poetry as I heard the sound of ocean waves crashing as though a seashell was held to my ear as I tapped away in that modest motel room on the last night of my weekend writing retreat.

May I send you one story a week? ✉️ 😃

Here’s the sonnet I wrote while on the retreat. Thanks to Literally Literary for giving it a home in their publication.

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