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Dear Friends, There's a good reason why you haven't heard from me for a few weeks. I've been swimming.
Actually, I've been doing a few other things too. As some of you know, every winter (and usually one or two other times every year, too) I make my way to my favorite spot on the planet, the little village of San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, where I have a house and a garden overlooking Lake Atitlan and its three volcanoes. I come here to restore myself in all kinds of ways: to simplify my life and to think, to walk and swim and write. Nearly always, when I put some distance between myself and busy highways and ringing phones and all the distractions of so called "real life," I find myself relocating my best, healthiest and most centered self. Friends often tell me I look ten years younger when I get back home, and though this may or may not be true, I know that's how I feel. I decided a while back that I wanted to share this experience, and to introduce others in the so-called First World to this place and the people and culture here, so dear to my heart. So for the last few years, I've run a writing workshop at the lake every February. Just over a week ago, I stood on my dock and watched the boat disappearing across the water with this winter's group: forty adventuresome fiction writers, poets and memoir writers (men and women ages 29-74, from all over the U.S. and Canada) who had come here as strangers and left as friends -- forty writers who spent a week with me here (and with Robert Bausch, teaching fiction, and Jane Hirshfield, poetry), and who will, I think, take a part of this place home with them. I'll echo the words of many in the group when I say, this was one of the richest and most fulfilling weeks of my life within memory. I know part of the reason why we had such a terrific and meaningful week lies in the physical landscape here -- the great beauty and mysteriousness of the lake and the unspoiled simplicity of the place, as well as its other-ness. I've come to believe that one of the reasons I tend to write well in this place (a discovery I first made back in 2001, when I wrote my extremely American novel The Usual Rules here) has to do with the distance and perspective I always find, by stepping back from the familiar things of my life at home as I invariably do here. Up until now, at least, when I write in Guatemala , I have found myself writing about the stuff of my North American life -- but with the eye of a person who has learned, that what I might once have believed to be "how life is" was simply "how life is… in MY culture." Life as you know it looks different, when you step back. That's what coming to San Marcos allows me to rediscover, each time I return. I've given a lot of thought to what it is about this place that moves and inspires me so deeply. Partly, I know, it's the warmth of the sun, and the blueness of the water, the stillness of those volcanoes, the night sky, in which the stars shine so bright, and the sound of birds by the shore as I take my morning swim. I have learned much from the Mayan people here, who live with very little, materially, and take such joy out of so many things the rest of us may take for granted. (Children here do not own toys, but they can play for an hour with a couple of sticks and an improvised ball, or just tumble on the grass, or help their parents gather wood, or care for younger siblings. It is not so unusual here, to see a six year old, tenderly carrying a two year old sibling -- while holding the hand of a three year old. Nobody cries. And when they come to my house to visit -- as many do -- and I offer a piece of chalk, they may spend the next two hours drawing with it, on the stones of my patio. Asking for absolutely nothing.
Living as I do here
-- without a car, or a television set, or a DVD player, or an iPhone (I
have a cell phone actually; I just don't use it much). I learn to pay
attention to small things like a bird on a branch or the taste of a blue
corn tortilla hot off the stove. And what once seemed so significant (the
news of the world, my bills, the shopping, getting here and there, worrying
about book sales or car repairs or email) fades away. "I don't talk so good" I say, in Spanish, to an old woman for whom -- just like me -- Spanish is the second language. (She speaks mostly the Mayan dialect, Catchikel.) Then I tell her something about one of my children – it's my youngest son's birthday, but he's far away, and I miss him. She just nods thoughtfully, and pats me on the cheek -- one or two teeth missing, heart in place. She is a woman who has lived all her life on the same patch of land with her five children and all their children, a woman who has never traveled to the other side of the lake. Still, she does a good job at understanding. She may not know what it is to be a white middle class woman from the United States of America, but she knows what it is to be a mother. ¿Mucho dolor? she inquires. Much sadness? It's OK, I tell her. He's far away, but I know he's happy and well. This is the other part about the life I live here on the shores of Lake Atitlan, I've come to understand: Here in this country so far away from my own, with my children and most of the people I love most out of reach, I can't race around making birthday packages for cooking elaborate meals or worrying about my friends. I don't look in the mirror and fuss over my hair (whose roots are looking a little grey at the moment). I don't stand in line at Whole Foods, checking my watch, wondering if I can get away with changing over to the express line to save four minutes in my busy day, and I don't worry over the numbers on the gas pump, because wherever I go here, I go on foot.
Here in this place, looking out the window at a man, pounding on a stalk of maguey leaves, from which he will extract a certain very sturdy natural thread he will then soak in lake water for five days, then braid into cord, then spend a week crocheting into a little bag he will then sell -- for around twenty dollars, I ask myself the question "What matters in life?" The answers I come up with look different. "What does it take to make me happy?" is another one I ask, and it turns out, the answer to that one may be far less complicated than I have sometimes imagined. I can fix a platter of watermelon slices for children from the village, or talk with one of the men who tends my garden over the question of where to plant a handful of seeds he has gathered and tenderly carried down from the mountain, wrapped in the leaf of a plant whose name he knows, though I do not. I can give a woman a hundred dollars (a fortune!) that will allow her to buy a sewing machine with which she will start a business that will pay for her children's schooling, or sit on my dock and watch a bunch of little boys fishing with a string and a hook, nothing more. I may worry about the thatch that blew off my roof or the dog that normally shows up at my door around dinner time, but didn't today. But in larger ways, my mind is unencumbered by the kinds of large worries and distractions that overtake me so often, back at home. I have no choice but to take care of myself for a change, and so -- by default perhaps -- I do. For a week, a couple of weeks back, I also gave over my thoughts to the process of helping a couple of dozen writers tell the stories of their lives, in ways that will allow others, who read those stories, to relate to them. This is a valuable thing, I believe, not only for the way it helps the writer, but because, the more we know each other's stories, the less alone each of us feels, I think, and the more clearly we can see our common humanity. Over and over again, over the course of our workshop week, I watched that process occur: saw people who might not have thought they would identify with someone else's story reach out and say they did. It is one of the most gratifying aspects of my life, that I get to do this -- so much so that for the first time, I'll be leading a second workshop here this year -- from July 5-13, which is a great time of year to be at the lake. This time, I'll be joined by two marvelous writers and teachers: Ann Hood (leading a fiction workshop, but also addressing the craft of memoir and the personal essay, as I do) and Dorianne Laux, leading the poetry workshop. As with this February's workshop, there will be an opportunity (rare, in the workshop experience) for writers focused on a single genre to take part in some of the instruction offered in other genres. And, as always, plenty of time for good conversation with fellow writers, great food, affordable massages, swimming (including a sunrise swim and sauna every morning at my house, for the die-hards) and nightly fireside readings. And of course, time for writing and reflection.
In the weeks ahead, I'll be posting more detailed information about the July Workshop -- which should answer most of your questions -- but for now, you can read about Dorianne and Ann on my website, and see a sampling of photographs from our most recent workshop, and a few comments by some of my most recent students. Before leaving the subject of workshops, I'll just add that I will be teaching my one-day memoir workshop at my home in Mill Valley, California, on Saturday, April 5. A few spaces are still available for that one. I'll also be teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in June, details to come. And if you're a long-range planner, I want you to know that in addition to teaching on Lake Atitlan in July, I'm planning to be running the February workshop at the lake once again, February 7-14 (or February 8-14, depending on whether or not you choose to add on a day and night in Antigua). In other news: The paperback edition of my book, Internal Combustion, is now out and available on Amazon and elsewhere. It's a different kind of story from what I've written in the past -- a nonfiction book about a murder and the tangled family situation that inspired it, and about my own journey, as a reporter, covering the story, and what it came to reveal to me concerning my own history. With the workshop behind me, I'm happily back to work on my own writing for a while, though never so much so that I don't always enjoy hearing from you. And as much as I may celebrate the way that being here at this lake clears my mind from the day in day out concerns of life back in the USA, one activity I am likely to dive into, once I'm back in California, will be more of my Presidential Pie Parties -- in which you'll have an opportunity to come over to my house and learn how to make great pie crust, a skill some have deemed sufficiently valuable that they've traveled across the country to participate. Last time we had a presidential election, my good friend Elizabeth and I managed to reel in over $10,000 for our candidate. (We didn't quite love him, but feeling against his opponent inspired us to work pretty hard.) This time, though I can't promise my rolling pin will necessarily be quite so productive, I am sure to be rolling out some dough again, in the hopes of reeling some in, as well. You can take a wild guess who I'll be supporting this time. Rhymes with "I'm back," or close enough anyway. And doesn't rhyme, one bit, with You're So Vain or In Pain. Can you see why I
need Dorianne Laux to help out with Poetry? With friendship,
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