What happens on a writing retreat?

By Kim Moore

I am currently on a writing retreat at Galloway House Estate, thanks to the kindness and generosity of the poet Marjorie Lotfi. I arrived yesterday in glorious sunshine and am staying till Friday. I think the last time I did a solo writing retreat was probably about 15 years ago in Scotland. That week it rained all week, and the wind blew and I hadn’t brought enough books with me, and I sat around feeling miserable and unable to write.

This time I came with a bag full of books so that I didn’t slip into a dark night of the soul, but I have mostly been reading Marjorie’s books that she kindly left for me, and I have been writing this time. Last week, I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to get done this week. I decided what I was most looking forward to was

1) going to the toilet without having to explain I was going to the toilet to my five year old
2) going to the toilet/bath/shower in privacy
3) eating when I wanted

If only the above is achieved I will be happy! But creativity wise, my plan is
1) Finish another draft of my collection
2) Start drafting a short story
3) Read lots of books.

Yesterday I arrived, then realised I’d forgot to stop and get food, so I unloaded the van and went straight back out again for supplies. When I finally got back, I went straight into this glorious outdoor heated swimming pool.

The outdoor swimming pool at Galloway House Estaate

I sat next to the pool on a lounger and dried off in the sun (in Scotland!!) and then went to my apartment and read some poetry in the bath ( Leontia Flynn’s Taking Liberties and Niall Campbell’s The Island in the Sound). Then I had a beer in the garden and carried on reading.

the garden - you can just see my favourite spot for a late afternoon beer in the corner!

Today I have been on a 10k run to Cruggleton Castle, had a shower, and have been working on my collection all day, on and off, in between keeping up with emails.

Below are some insights from my notebook, which include some notetaking in the garden and some thoughts on editing collections, which I hope you will find useful if you are currently editing or writing, or if not useful, at least interesting!

This is kind of a diary, which I’m keeping as a way of holding myself accountable and not doing too much emailing. The pressure is on now to do this again before the week is out!

Day 1

I am sitting in the garden with the noisy rooks shouting at each other in the trees. I am determined this week to be the sort of person who sits in gardens and reads, to be the sort of person who has time to sit in a garden and write in a notebook.

I am reading a poem by Leontia Flynn called “The Swallows in the Courtyard”. I’m struck by the way the poem starts as a series of statements, a series of facts.

The swallows
in the courtyard.
The moonlight 
over the outbuildings. 

The footprint trail
in the terracotta tiles 
left by a cat 
who stepped two, three, four times

from the 16th century 
to vanish here: 
in silence and splendour. 
Your mothering work 

sinks out of sight
amid Norman woodland...

The poem continues and moves away from the statement into commentary. It references Vivian Mahler and Henry Darger - I make a note to look these references up later. I decide to try my hand at some Leontia Flynn style statements of fact.

The rooks
in the great church
of the horse chestnut tree

Unruly congregation
without a priest
all shouting at each other.

The blade of a pheasants cry
The heavy buzzing of bees.
The scribbling of the flies

in the still air above the lawn.

DAY 2 - morning

I’m working quickly, trying to trust my instincts. I open up my collection on my laptop. I finally, finally delete the poem that has been bothering me for a while. I am ready now to admit that it is not strong enough, that it is not saying what I wanted it to say, that perhaps what I wanted it to say is a journey I haven’t started yet.

Here is the poem:

my daughter pegs her dolls
to the bent-backed washing line 
they hang like tiny villains 
each little death is mine

This is from those early days of motherhood, well those early years, when my daughter could walk and do things like peg dolls on washing lines, but still needed me to get to sleep, still needed me through the night. This is from that exhaustion time, when I always leapt from sleep at the sound of her cry, or sometimes I was dragged from sleep, or wrenched from sleep. This is from the time of dark thoughts, when I imagined something terrible happening to her, illness, death, abduction. The dolls have been washed but everything reminded me of death, of the potential for violence, or if not violence, just disaster. Giving birth brings us to the threshold of life and death, but it was like I’d forgotten to close the door and carried on standing there and suddenly understood how death and life exist side by side.

In the collection, this poem follows a list poem called “The Black Notices” . Here is the note that I think will appear at the back of the collection about “The Black Notices”:

“‘The Black Notices’ – A ‘Black Notice’ is an Interpol alert issued to police worldwide in the search for information about unidentified bodies. ‘The Black Notices’ is drawn from ‘Operation Identify Me’- a public appeal to identify 22 murdered women, with cases spanning across forty years. Following the launch of ‘Operation Identify Me’, and at the current time of writing, one of the women, the woman with the ‘flower tattoo’ in this poem has been successfully identified as British woman Rita Roberts. The remaini

ng 21 cases remain unsolved.

Next to “The Black Notices”, perhaps “The Dolls” said something about complicity in violence, our complicity as a society in our acceptance of the murder of women - but today I realise I don’t really know what this little poem is saying or if it is saying anything at all - the dolls are villains because if they are lost there will be hell to pay? The form nods to Emily Dickinson, but none of these things are enough to make it a poem that stands on its own. So out it must go. I replace it with a brand new poem that I’ve written during National Poetry Writing Month: “Talking with my Daughter” which is about a conversation I had with her, where she told me that a boy told her about someone he knew who was murdered. After talking with her, I realised she didn’t know what “murder” meant. In this poem, I am trying to write about that moment as a parent when you realise the world in all its brutality and terror will come for your child, that there are things you cannot protect them from. And yet, imagine if as a society we just decided we would no longer teach children what murder was - would the act disappear from the world at the same time as the language? Probably not, but there was for at least a small amount of time, a corner of the world where ‘murder’ didn’t exist, or couldn’t be imagined as a concept.

DAY 2 - afternoon

In the collection, there is a four part sequence called “Self-Portrait with your Death” which is an elegy for a friend of mine who died in his forties in a road traffic accident a few years ago. I wrote another poem for him the other day and I wanted to see if I could insert it into the sequence.

I knew this friend for twenty years. Once we loved each other, or were lovers, then briefly enemies, then finally friends, or at least, we were a version of what friends can be. I was looking through our old text messages and email exchanges and found a message he’d sent me where he invented an adjective from my name:

Kimish (adj)

1. Moving quickly and lightly; lively

2. Restlessly active or nervous; restive

3. Undependably variable; mercurial or fickle

4. Shy, bashful

There are parts of me I recognise in this, and others sound like another person. The poem is about ‘seeing’ another person - what does it mean when we see someone clearly, what does it mean when we get it wrong? The person he was writing about was 19 and had not been in an abusive relationship, had left the UK once, had not heard of ADHD, had written poems but had only showed a few to an English teacher, was one of the first people in her family to go to university but had no idea why that coloured everything, knew that women were treated differently but knew only the coping mechanism of being one of the lads to survive it - the poem is asking who was the person he saw.

I hope these notes give some insight into what can happen on a writing retreat - who knows what will happen tomorrow?

A small writing exercise - have a go at making an adjective of your name which captures some part of who you are at a particular moment in time.