Writing While Facing Facism

I’ve spent the last eleven days doing a writing “retreat” at the house I used to live in, which has been vacant this month. I put “retreat” in quotes for a number of reasons. One of our newer friends at our cohousing community likes to tease me and Don about how much time we spend on retreats. “When do you advance?” she asks.

The word “retreat,” in my case, is sort of a shorthand for disengaging to some degree from daily activities, relationships, and responsibilities to focus inward, to be in relationship primarily with myself, and to make space to meditate, feel, sing, write and make art. I sometimes joke to myself it’s what the phrase “own recognizance” should really be used for. Practice in recognizing more parts of myself.

I’ve never done this long a retreat before, and I didn’t hold rigid boundaries. I eased into it, doing some of my regular activities from here the first few days (including hanging out for part of an afternoon with my 18-month-old “adopted granddaughter” A__). Don and I messaged each other daily and saw each other a couple of times, as we did while he was here for the first part of the month. Though writing was to be my main focus, I also brought a fiber arts project to play with, and did a little stuff with clay in my soon-to-be-dismantled ceramics studio.

I also decided my “retreat”  would include what I came to think of as “facing fascism” practice: Near-daily calls to members of congress using the “5Calls” app, limited and focused news consumption, and learning about authoritarianism past and future through books (rereading Strongmen by Ruth Ben Ghiat) and films (“Zone of Interest,” “Children of Men”). This felt important in order to not have my head in the sand during  this period, and also because the main speculative fiction world I’m building has an authoritarian regime in it, which I call “chronofascism.”  (When I needed something light, I watched a few episodes of a British comedy “Trying,” or listened to A Writer Prepares, a memoir by my Dad’s famous writer friend, Lawrence Block).

A month or so ago I had a bad dream that it was the end of this retreat and I’d fiddled away the time and hadn’t gotten to the important work I wanted to do. So, I kept that in mind, along with contemplative writing teacher Natalie Goldberg’s admonition, “don’t be tossed away.” Even though I had a head-cold and felt less than well much of the time [this eventually turned out to get diagnosed as an atypical case of strep throat!], I kept coming back to writing. I had to tell myself “no” about a few things – inviting a friend for a walk, watching a TV series I knew would be addictive, and even doing more than a couple of online writing dates with friends.

Here’s a tally of the writing and writing-related things I did:

·      Hand-wrote over 45 pages in my journal and reread journal entries from the past few weeks to sort and tag what to transcribe

·      Attended 3 online writing classes, 2 writing support groups, and a couple of Zoom writing dates, including contemplative writing with Miriam Hall, marketing with the Wisconsin Writers’ Association, and Character Arcs with Tim Storm (the latter two included homework – reading and watching a webinar).

·      Read short stories and poems by others, and articles in writers’ magazines, instead of games and news and social media on my phone

·      Edited 1 poem of mine and submitted it to an online journal

·      Made notes on a new story idea that came from a dream

·      Edited an essay for a friend

·      Made revisions to the first three chapters of my novel based on feedback I recently received from a new writing coach I’ve hired, Kate Moses

·      Talked with a friend who recently read my novel manuscript and loved it; took notes on our conversation, wrote up and worked with her to edit her testimonial blurb for my marketing

·      Read my entire manuscript in a day and a half – the first time I’ve printed it out for myself, and the first time I’ve read it all at once like that – and liked it!

·      Sorted through many of the scenes and snippets I’d set aside for books 2 & 3 of the planned trilogy, and revise their outlines.

This last was the big piece of work I felt I needed to be on retreat for, because it has been many moons since I last engaged with those parts of the project, and I was scared I wouldn’t be able to remember what I’d been thinking. There is more of this sorting still to do, but I got quite far into it, finding the stories again and probing their healing core, for my protagonist, and for me (including our need to face into fascism).

Though I’m a bit sad about all the endings (see below), and scared to be heading back into everyday life, I feel satisfied. I did not allow myself to be “tossed away.”  It’s been an “advance,” as well as a “retreat.”

As I begin to pack up, I return to the realm of accounting to others, as well as myself, for how I spend my time. I return to counting time. How long can I spend on my yoga and stretching this morning, and still have time to finish this blog post? How long can I linger reading a short story at breakfast, before the woman who’s interested in my pottery wheel arrives?

Here is a sample of my writing from this week – some of what I wrote in response to the prompt from Miriam’s contemplative writing class, which was to follow and name sounds. She included a quote from Pauline Oliveros, “Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

Stomach gurgling. Heater ticking and clunking. A motor rumbling. A high-pitched, quiet hum, my computer perhaps. A very distant drone – airplane? Heater clanking and ticking, from at least two directions. Tick, tick, crinkle, clank. Vroom, a car going by. Scratching an itch on my head. Scratching of pen on paper, rasping of hand against paper as I move along in short bursts after each word, then a longer one at the end when I return to the beginning of the next line, like the original carriage return….Ah, and on this, the last page of my notebook, the scratching of the pen, the rasping of the skin, are louder, the i’s being dotted and t’s being crossed sound quite sharp, no more sheets between this one and the firm cardboard back of the notebook to muffle the sound.

I feel the poignancy of endings – the end of this notebook. The end of my use of my ceramics studio. The end of this house being my home. The end of American democracy, perhaps. The end of the world as we know it. I brought a fresh notebook with me so this ending is far from problematic, yet still, I feel the pangs of it – of time passing, my own aging, A__ growing up so fast, and what kind of world will she grow up into? I talked to the director of her daycare about how they’re doing, preparing in case of an ICE raid. A lot of the providers are from Venezuela, she said. I wonder how many of them had papers and soon won’t? Now you see it, now you don’t. The end of our innocence, the end of our complacency, the end of our imagining we’re special and it can’t happen here. It is happening here.

Tick, tick, vroom, clang, scratch, rasp, breath so quiet, computer backup disc chirping faintly as it does its scheduled job. I swallow, a watery, trickly sound. A deeper breath, sniffing through my slightly stuffy nostrils, similar to the rasp of my skin on the return stroke against the page…. Miriam’s voice breaking in makes me jump, even though I was expecting it a minute ago. End of the session. End of the notebook. End of an era? Can we listen so closely with our feet that they can hear the end of an era?[