Come Away With Me, Julie Maloney

COME AWAY WITH ME

By Julie Maloney

The first time I led an international writer’s retreat, the person who invited me ended up in hospice a month before we both were to fly to Greece. Due to her illness—of which I knew nothing—she had left most details unattended. In desperation, she called to ask me to fly to Athens and take over the logistics, the planning, the hosting, the money, as well as what I was hired to do in the first place—lead the writing workshops. So I did what I had to do. I did it all.

When the ferry docked on the small fishing island of Alonnisos, the Greek owner of the pension greeted me with a warm embrace and said, “I have a solution for every problem.”  This was twelve years ago and I’m still returning to this magical island to lead writing retreats.

Other than a hold on two years when we all went through the worst of the Pandemic, I’ve been leading annual writing retreats for women writers in different and beautiful places. As a writer, I didn’t start out to do this. A simple invitation to writers to come sit around my dining room table in my home grew to a weekend retreat at the Jersey Shore and then to that first invitation to work in Greece.

After my heartfelt promise to the person who soon passed away to continue to offer writers the opportunity to retreat on Alonnisos, others showed up with destinations for me to bring writers to write. It was an organic thing. I simply followed the leads. 

As writers, do we need to leave our kitchen tables to write? No. Or what about checking in to a hotel the way the incomparable Maya Angelou used to do when she was finishing a book. Or flying off to Cuba like Ernest Hemmingway. Must we be like these literary icons to finish what we’ve started on the page? No. And yet I’ve witnessed a kind of beauty that happens to nearly every writer who writes far from home.

A writer who lets go of her agenda, who travels with an open mind and an open heart, who brings a notebook and pen to the workshops while her computer rests in her private room—this is the writer who settles down and discovers who she is as an author.

It is the writer who fails to look outside herself and see what the beautiful novelist, Lynda Loigman, writes in the voice of her character, Sarah, in The Matchmaker’s Gift, “The heart is big enough to hold both grief and love,” who misses the point. Beauty and adventure change our vocabulary. It gives us insight and depth. When we breathe more deeply, we become more alive. I see it all the time.

I hear the writing sharpen. Characters develop, scenes jump off the page and poems get started. Sometimes, lives change. I think it’s because there is so much that recharges us when we write in a new place where we feel safe. A writing retreat offers huge creative leaps if it’s planned with care and attention to detail.

As the founder/director of Women Reading Aloud, a writing organization since 2003, I have had the immense joy of seeing writers come together from throughout the USA, Canada, Portugal, Australia, England, Germany, Greece, France and the Czech Republic and soon . . . Amsterdam!

What remains the same are the faces that change. An inner joy gets discovered via the words on the page. Muscles stretch into a forgotten smile, light shines behind the eyes, arms link as two or three or four writers walk down to a taverna by the Aegean Sea. A swim. A nap. A reading out loud that we heard in an early morning workshop after breakfast together stays with us. In the retreats, we not only share our words, we share our silences. We share the balance of community and solitude. We hold each other up by listening to something new. We pay attention. And isn’t this a little bit like praying? 

Writers of all genres attend WRA retreats. They write poetry, continue their memoir, create new scenes in their novels, revamp a forgotten essay. All following the directions to a prompt. How does that happen?

We write what needs to come to the page. I choose the prompts carefully with the intention of being still, getting quiet, and then moving to the white space and letting go. Writers tell me a WRA retreat changes them. I think it’s a combination of many things that might not happen around the kitchen table or at the local coffee shoppe. The freedom of unfamiliarity offers something special. Combined with warmth, encouragement and support, with huge dollops of kindness, writers discover what may get lost at home when they sit down alone to write.

Going to a writing retreat is not the way for everyone to move a writing project forward but it is an alternative to leaving smallness behind and for thinking large. The world is big. If you need a boost, come away with me. I love this work. 

—

JULIE MALONEY is a writer/poet and founder/director of WOMEN READING ALOUD, a non-profit international writing organization. She teaches writing workshops throughout the year, gives readings, hosts author salons, and speaks to “Writing As A Life Tool” in a variety of venues. She leads a “Writing to Heal” series she developed for the Carol G. Simon Cancer Center at Morristown Memorial Hospital in NJ. Her book of poems, Private Landscape, was published by Arseya Publishing.

Her award-winning debut novel, A Matter of Chance (She Writes Press), was selected by USWEEKLY Magazine as a trending book and won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for General Fiction for 2019. In April, 2024, she will lead a writer’s retreat in Cornwall, England for her twenty-eighth retreat. She also returns to Greece in June, 2024 to facilitate her twelfth international writer’s retreat on the island of Alonnisos. Her new manuscript is in the works now. Visit: www.juliemaloney.net and www.womenreadingaloud.org.

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing