Blog-cation

On a blog vacation while attending the Aspen Summer Words writers' conference. Back next week!

Learned at a writers' conference

Spending five days at a writers’ conference is an irreproducible experience. This was my third visit to the Aspen Summer Words conference, and every year I gain more from the opportunity. Being around hundreds of other writers for hours on end provides insight into the writing process on so many levels. We learn from the professionals about how they reached their current level of success. But from the beginners, we learn anew what it’s like to have endless possibilities ahead. We learn from those writing about everyday life that every experience bears fruit from an artistic perspective, and we learn from those writing about international conflict and political upheaval how much power words can have, when insightfully expressed and disseminated to the right audience.

Last time, I came to this conference with a work in progress and devoted most of my time here to improving that manuscript. This time was different: I don’t have a specific project under way, but in some regards I learned more this time than last because I didn’t have the same laser focus on one piece of work. Instead, I talked about journalism and journaling, about blogging and Tweeting and reading.

I ran into friends from other conferences, and I met people for the first time. Some have accomplished far more than I have as a writer; others were barely ready to put pen to paper. I came away from every informal discussion and panel session feeling like I’d learned something.

As I said at the outset, attending a conference like this is an irreproducible experience. Spending time with other writers is different from gathering in any other group, and that’s not always a good thing. Some writers, in my opinion, spend far too much time discussing the craft and would be better off powering up their laptop and doing some writing. But spending this much time together, regardless of the content covered, affirms our validity. We are writers. Published many times over or never yet in print, confident in our abilities or barely able to read a sentence we’ve written aloud, we’re here because we care so much about self-expression and the written word. And that in itself makes gathering together a wonderful experience.

Kaleidoscope writing

Among the most interesting observations I’ve heard this week at the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference is this one, from National Book Award winning novelist Colum McCann: “There are no new stories to tell. As writers, we must be kaleidoscopic.”

What a fitting image for the way we writers tell stories, I thought to myself. Kaleidoscopic. You look through a cylinder at a specific object, and you see its colors and approximate form – but it is variegated strangely, and if you turn the cylinder, the colors will change as the shapes will shift. That’s exactly what we do when we tell stories, especially if we are in the genre of day-to-day narrative nonfiction as I am. It’s fair for me to assume that nothing that I write about hasn’t been written about before. Right now there are millions of women writing books, drafting essays and blogging about the same topics I cover: daily life, child-rearing, writing, running, friendships, life lessons. In none of those spheres are my experiences unique, or even unusual. But we each shift the kaleidoscope and watch the pieces break into different shapes, colored in different hues: we each tell the same story a little bit differently.

Sometimes the same story can be told differently even when being told by the same person. When I was growing up, my father told us lots and lots of funny stories about pranks that he and his friends played when they were kids in school, or at camp, or at home. In one of his stories about junior high, a science teacher left the room briefly and all the kids put their heads down on their desks and closed their eyes. When the teacher returned, he thought the students had all passed out, and in his flustered confusion, he flung a chair through a window. I’m quite certain that the way my father told this story amused us when we were young. But years later, I heard him tell the same story with different nuances; in this one he included the detail that the science teacher was a World War II vet, and in this telling it became a disturbing story about a prank gone wrong as the teacher apparently had a post-traumatic stress disorder flashback and thought some kind of chemical had been released into the room and knocked all the kids unconscious, breaking a window out of panic.

The memory has stuck with me for just the reason Colum McCann identified: its shape-shifting, color-changing qualities. Sometimes the same thing happens to me when I remember stories from my own past: something that seemed funny or entertaining at the time becomes unnerving or alarming in retrospect. Lots of my favorite and funniest childhood memories involve glitches in household operations that as a parent myself I now realize were probably sources of frustration rather than amusement to my parents (the way that the Blizzard of ’78 knocked out our electricity for five days, for example).

A simpler way of saying it is just that most of the stories we know vary with perspective. The parable most often used to illustrate this concept is the one in which several blind people describe an elephant, each feeling a different part of the animal. I like McCann’s invocation of the kaleidoscope image, though. I’m exploring the same stories as millions of other writers: stories about children, households, community life, marriage. Shift the kaleidoscope and it’s a little different for each of us, and from there comes the art of narrative.

Biking before writing

I didn’t intend to set a precedent on Monday, but the combination of robust physical exercise in the morning and then attending sessions of the Aspen Writers’ Conference all afternoon worked so well that I did the same thing on Tuesday. Only this time, instead of hiking, I biked through Aspen’s West End onto the bike path and from there out to the Maroon Creek Road. Most bicyclists hit that road with the intention of pedaling all the way to Maroon Lake and the base of the Maroon Bells; I knew I didn’t have the stamina for that entire ride, but I decided to just start riding and see how far I could get given the time, and the strength, that I had.

In that respect, it was similar to Monday’s endeavor. I wasn’t under a tight time crunch, which is a rare situation for me when I’m at home, but that’s typical of being away: the restrictions we put on ourselves when home, and particularly the tight scheduling that tends to lay claim to every minute of the day, doesn’t take hold in quite the same way. I wanted to attend a writers’ panel at 2:30, but I set out on the bike four hours before that, so I knew I’d have time to do all the riding I wanted.

The ride was physically similar to hiking as well: a steady uphill climb, and I took it slow. It was terrain I’d covered many times before, but only by car or bus. Being so exposed, and moving along so slowly as I rode, gave me a close-up view of the river, the meadows, the wildflowers, the rocky red-dirt facades. It’s a restricted access road; the few cars and tour buses that passed me were minutes apart. Plenty of cyclists passed me; they were all on racing bikes with slender tires, pedaling hard and flying along even though they too were heading uphill. I was on a mountain bike not intended for that kind of ride even for someone with more pedaling strength than I have, but it didn’t bother me that other riders flew by. I was happy just to be out biking.

Eventually I looked up the road and saw still more uphill and decided I’d covered enough ground. An hour and a quarter had passed since I’d left town, and I had no particular goal in mind as an endpoint, given that I knew I wasn’t going to reach Maroon Lake. So when it felt like I’d worked as hard as I needed to, I turned around and coasted the same distance, all downhill. That part was easy and gave me even more time to admire the scenery, and also mull over a lot of memories of that valley.

For many decades, my grandparents owned a cabin just uphill from where I’d turned around; when I was growing up we’d have family picnics and occasional sleepovers in the cabin. When we reached our teenage years, sometimes our cousins had parties there and invited us, which was charitable of them: we were from out of town and not of much interest to anyone else attending. One of my cousins was married there, though I realized as I rode that my only memory of his wedding ceremony was having to drive back to the cabin from town with the brother of the groom after it ended because the father of the bride had not shown up at the reception and it was feared he had somehow keeled over while still at the cabin and needed help. (None of this was the case, but the drive with my cousin was an adventure in itself.)

Our family doesn’t own the cabin anymore, but that’s all right; like everyone else who visits this part of Colorado, the whole valley is ours to enjoy as hikers, bicyclists or bus tour riders. My ride back to town was fast and easy, and I arrived in time for a quick dessert stop at the Paradise Bakery before I went to the condo to change clothes and head to the conference center for the afternoon events.

When I sent my husband a photo I’d taken of myself on the bike ride, snow-frosted Maroon Bells in the background, he texted back, “Aren’t you supposed to be studying, not biking?” Not to worry, I told him, the afternoon would be full of educational content. And yet as I thought back on the bike ride with all its similarities to the hike on the previous day, and how I’d pedaled slowly, concentrating only on moving forward and not on how far I would get, absorbing the sounds and sights and smells that surrounded me, welcoming the memories they brought, and letting my own pace rather than external instructions be my guide as far as when to turn back, it occurred to me that maybe the morning had in fact been just as educational as the afternoon.

Hiking before writing

I spent the first four hours or so of the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference hiking.

I know that seems like a strange way to kick off an intensive week of literary conversations and practice, but somehow it felt exactly right. The schedule of the conference is such this year that the events I want to attend are in the afternoon and evening; my mornings are free. And I should be using those free mornings to work on my own writing. After all, that’s why I’m here.

And yet yesterday, even after an early-morning four-mile run through Aspen’s beautiful North Star Preserve, and after savoring a bagel and coffee while I read both of Aspen’s two daily newspapers, what I really felt like doing was hiking.

That’s not really a way to improve your writing skills or network with other writers, I told myself. It’s not even a way to get any writing done at all. You’re really planning to kick off the annual writers’ conference by hiking?

Well, yes. And it turned out to be a magnificent plan. Indeed, it did not result in my getting any writing done. In fact, quite the opposite. It cleared my mind in a way nothing else does. I don’t get to hike nearly enough, especially on challenging Alpine trails, but whenever I do, I notice this same effect: it seems like when I’m hiking I can’t think about anything else except the climb. I don’t find this with walking or running. As exhilarating as those activities are, they tend to expand my thinking so that I can focus on whatever writing project I’m in the midst of or generate ideas for future projects.

But hiking is different. I find myself concentrating only on putting one foot in front of the other, while I absorb the sensory input of the smells and sounds around me without my making a concerted effort to do so. The dirt, the sagebrush, the birdcalls, the rustling in the brush alongside the hiking trail: all register with my senses even as I don’t focus on them. And my mind seems to empty itself out, almost like a suitcase magically unpacking itself.

In a way, it might have been more productive if I’d been actually writing or doing something that facilitated thoughts about writing, but what this did instead was similar to stretching out before a hard workout. I felt like the strenuousness of the climb and the attention I was devoting to nothing but the trail under my hiking boots was giving me a clean slate with which to start a week of intensive writing.

I stayed on the mountain for four hours, and when I reached the beginning of the trail again, I felt ready to think about writing. So it was a useful discovery: sometimes the best way to commence an activity is with the opposite of that activity. The afternoon featured two interesting panel discussions by various writers, and the evening included a social gathering with other participants at the conference. With my mind cleared, I was ready to start thinking about writing and talking about writing. And, best of all, to start writing, with a level of attention that had missing until the hike was complete.