By Ben.
Tell me the recipe, I said, for the perfect writers’ retreat.
Rina pulled hard on her roll-up and looked to the clouds as if the answer might come as rain.
Hearty food, she replied, a balance of fellowship and solitude, freedom of movement, and the complete absence of social expectation.
Wow, I thought. Sounds like a recipe for the perfect life!
She smiled with her hands held wide as if, wordlessly, to say ‘well naturally, darling, writing and living aren’t two separate things you know – we all breathe the same air’.
Of course we do.
Rina Vergano has been running not-for-profit writers’ retreats for over fifteen years. Twice a year, she convenes up to eighteen novelists, poets, lyricists, playwrights and short fiction writers in a rambling country house in Devon. Those who can afford to pay more subsidise those who can’t, and they live like a loosely affiliated, extended family; each member to their own extent accompanied and alone, free to roam and muse and emote – and free not to. Free to be bored or unfulfilled. Yet each writer can breathe a sigh of relief to be met in a creative space, not quite in one’s own eccentricity, but somehow acknowledged for being whatever one needs to be in that moment. What the work needs. Not to escape but to retreat, to return to something part-lost-part-found and to give it more treatment, to see it anew, to turn it over again and again and again. To write.
How writers go about writing is always fascinating, not least because it is imbued with a sense of voyeuristic zeal that borders on fetishism: Does she scribble in notebooks or type on tablets? Does he drink strong coffee or vape or listen to music, or do they meditate to synch body and mind? Does she climb a hill, or go to a tropical island or down a mine or does he just stay at home? What is it they’re trying to reach, to re-treat? Think of Hemmingway in the cafes of Paris – Pastis and Gitanes. Or Joyce in Dublin’s ecclesiastical taverns (what visions through those stained-glass panels and whiskey-haze might come). Thomas Hardy, we’d like to believe, looked over rolling Dorset hills and dairy farms criss-crossed with rippling chalk streams. He didn’t. His desk faced a windowless wall. And then Coleridge, the solitary extrovert on Exmoor; opiating with the sun, his visions flaring in word-fires. Stevie Smith and Ezra pound and John Clare and Sylvia Plath and Nina Simone and hundreds of others all spent time looking at the world through asylum bars (figuratively I mean), and then there’s the role alcohol and hallucinogenics to stimulate the senses – do drugs make better poetry? Who could forget Aldous Huxley’s pseudo-scientific cult classic of acid experimentation? Swinging on the doors of perception, with his wife dutifully minuting his every utterance…
I suppose retreats can only really be partial and temporary. Writers have no freer access to experiential withdrawal than anyone else. But it allows them to enact that seductive Romantic fantasy of escape into abundant inspiration, in which the spirit-landscape might benignly over-power the trappings of rationality, and yield some of its largesse to the evolving work – the novel, the poem, the song; the eel slithering away in your hand, you’ve got hold of it, but you haven’t got hold of it.
It was clear listening to Rina (and I’ve noticed this about her before) that the gift she bestows on these writers is her maternal presence, her ability to hold them loosely in her mind so as to contain them without stifling or strangling; they can come and they can go, like thoughts, like clouds, like thought-clouds. And this is the essence of her ‘recipe’; a place in mind, in which, given gentle treatment, something can grow and take on a life of its own.
Rina Vergano is organising two Spoken Word nights for the Hotwells Festival 2021. In Bristol, she is known for her theatre critics. To find out more about Rina read this interview on http://www.theatrebristolwriters.net/Rina-Vergano-the-critic.