New York State of Writer's Mind

Mohonk Mountain House looms like something Seussical, a castle birthed by a truly audacious imagination.

I challenge you to break the spell, it says. And you can’t, despite the potentially prim staff at the front desk who teeter precariously on the brink of stuffiness.  The eccentricity of the place wins hands down, takes your breath away; the perfect place to topple the mind’s carefully constructed defenses against the fantastical.

Natalie Goldberg called it ‘Wild Mind” and this was the kind of space we were about to enter in this extraordinary otherworldly place. It was perfect. It was also scary, scary because writing anywhere other than alone feels daunting and because writers with considerable word clout were going to be present.

Never mind, I said to myself. It’s the experience itself that matters. No expectations, right? I reached out and took my hand. I’d looked at the link Greg Correll had given us for Kate Hymes who was running the workshop/retreat.

I noted that the writers’ process she taught, allowed you to ‘pass’. What this essentially means is that, as well as writing, you can also not write. I mean you can fail to write even when given the perfectly provocative prompt. You can fail, go blank. No pressure.

This mattered enormously. I had a horrible history of performance anxiety despite my efforts to lecture myself thusly:

“No-one cares that much, really. Not enough to stone you for poor performance, pelt you with rotten fruit. Remember, even. That’s the truth of it.”

This implacable fact should have resulted in a relaxation of the knot in the solar plexus. It did for the morning.

There were three opportunities to write and to read to the group. No criticism was allowed. If all else failed that life saving ‘pass’ could hold me until the trembling stopped.

I made it through two. I failed at the third, but who cares. What happened had nothing to do with the mind’s tendencies to measure and judge. What happened leapt clear over the mind, transcended it. Had we all not been listening to each other so intently, we might have looked up to catch a glimpse of its silver arc.

Yes, there were words, extraordinary words, and voices, images that scooped out our insides and stole our breath away. We sat in a circle, facing each other. As we wrote and we spoke we could watch each other’s faces, see ourselves reflected in what happens when defenses drop and words touch what is inescapable about the human experience.

The day went on and lasted a week, a lifetime and at the end of it we, none of us, wanted to leave. We’d opened up and put that in words and it felt so liberating.

We were drenched in the sheer brilliance of what human beings sound like when they feel safe enough to fly.

There. I didn’t think I could put it into words, this experience, but there it is.

Huge thank you to Greg for setting this up and baby sitting all our writers’ idiosyncrasies and limitless capacities for many inventive versions of dithering.

There was Sunday morning for example. We’re all checked out of the hotel. We’re standing at the entrance attempting to negotiate a feasible exit, the logistics of getting Lea and her husband, Nikki, Greg and I to Poughkeepsie where we’ll join the others and hop on a tugboat to conquer the unsuspecting Hudson.

There are not many of us, not too many variables, you would think, but we manage to dither, quite comically really. Monty Python comes to mind. In the end Lea and I are in full giggle.

“Do call us. Be sure to stay in touch,” we chime as we wave goodbye and head off in separate cars on the very straightforward 30 minute drive to Poughkeepsie, something we’d prepared for as though it were a three week expedition into unexplored regions up the Amazon.

Being with other writers is magical in so many ways. Writers, good writers, take you to places you never even know existed then they help you recognize them. They can make you laugh from your belly, they can reduce you to tears. All of this is amplified when writers feel utterly safe, when you diffuse the anxiety and the competition and allow them to simply play their instruments, sing their songs.

Lastly thank you to Kate for creating a safe birth space with such grace and gentle authority.

Thank you, too, to each and every writer present who, without exception, exposed their brave and brilliant selves with such daring. It was worth the risk. It is always worth the risk.