Tomales

A few days ago I tore myself away from my beloved coastal Oregon to return to California where I lived for the past twenty-two years. I do have love for California, but had been ready to move home to Oregon for many years before I was able to. I found myself heading back to California this time with some reluctance. On the heels of a divorce and the ending of that shared life, there have been some memories to contend with, alone in my truck driving south for eight hours with my self-help audiobook, traversing these very familiar backroads. Only a few things will bring me back at this point, and a week-long writing retreat with my favorite writing organization (WritingxWriters) is one of the main ones.

So here I am on Tomales Bay surrounded by rolling brown hills, and the familiar smell of eucalyptus, up the road from the oyster shack where I first sat in the sun next to the glistening water of this particular bay, first shucked an oyster, first felt a little bit fancy doing so…along this road where I’ve been on dates, spent weekends with friends, explored alone, and passed right through to get to the more northern surf breaks. I have feelings about this landscape—loss and fondness and a sense of done-ness arise here for me. There’s a letting go and a real goodbye of something, maybe it’s another layer of reckoning.

In my workshop with Pam Houston, twelve of us have read each other’s writing and are spending each morning discussing and offering our insights, talking about craft and structure and story, about who the characters are in the pages and how they make us think and feel. It’s such a gift to get feedback on a story just-birthed, still new and not fully formed, to hear about where it resonates and where it loses people, to learn how different people’s minds work, and how they understand or don’t understand what you’ve tried to do on the page. It’s a process that’s not always comfortable but most often very helpful.

Both nights so far, after dinner, after the bats have done their dusky dances and the first stars come out, the faculty have read from their work, and both nights I’ve been overwhelmed by their insight, effort, vulnerability, and richness of life, of having lived and paid attention to living. Any time Pam reads anything at this point I just start crying, and it’s that best kind of crying—her words tend to remind me that the world might still be a place to believe in even with all the heart-ache—and where afterwards I’ll walk alone back to my room and look out the window and take some deep breaths and drink some water and then want to write my own words, want to be that brave and honest and real in my own way.

There’s something so beautiful about this space, a writers’ community, where people are revealing their truths, the actual real truths of their lives and ideas, whether they are writing fiction or poetry or nonfiction. Every time I’ve attended one of these, I feel a pervasive rawness, like I’m just a nerve ending walking around and (sometimes) talking but most often listening with everything I have.

I have two more days here, six more stories to discuss with their authors, a couple more oysters to eat, a few more walks up the tallest brown hill on the property to look out over the water—all those little, white sailboats bobbing like corks on the expansive blue in the distance. I am having this whole experience here and now, and also thinking about my novel that will soon be in the world, how it might mean something to someone somewhere? Maybe? I guess that’s the hope: that like these teachers I’m with this week, the words I’ve put together, the story I’ve told, will be for something—something distant from ego, something more like the attempt of a gift, an honest offering.

Soon I’ll be driving back up the coast, to the wet, dark Oregon of my dreams, to the mossy and tender life I am building there, and I am so looking forward to getting back to it. But for now I’m completely here, writing what I can, and feeling all the feelings, taking deep breaths, and trying to find a way to get it all down.