What the desert says: Wayward Wormhole 2024
I meant to do a writeup of my time at Wayward Wormhole, Cat Rambo's residential writing workshop, as soon as I got home, but life had other plans. I'd like to update this newsletter once a month, but I'd also like to be gentle with myself and my creative impulses, to resist the drumbeat of making, publishing, and promoting Content(tm). More and more I'm learning to listen to the silence at the heart of my creative drive, the protected boundary of quiet space where the currents of inspiration drift through.
That's part of what I learned at Wayward Wormhole: to listen to the silence.
Other members of my cohort have already written about the structure of the workshop: mornings in a big group talking about craft theory, afternoons in smaller crit groups giving and receiving feedback on excerpts of each of our novels, individual one-on-one sessions with industry experts to talk through our entire manuscripts.
I did very little writing outside of the notes I took in classes and during my critique sessions. One afternoon I sat down on a chaise lounge and banged out 1800 words of a new scene on my novel, but more than anything else I spent the workshop learning to think about my work, to take the entire structure of a novel in my hands and feel the shape of it.
My boyfriend talks about developing writing skills as expanding your locus of control--that you can start by understanding small pieces of work (scenes, conversations, poems, flash pieces) and slowly increase your ability to grasp larger pieces of fiction in your minds, to plunge deep into them in order to not only investigate but understand what's working and what's not.
My experience at Wayward Wormhole expanded my locus of control. I went into it knowing that there was a lot wrong with my book (full disclosure: I did not expect to get into this workshop when I applied, and while waiting to hear if I got in or not, I initiated a divorce. I had a mental health crisis. My life began to fall apart. I ended up finishing the first draft of my novel just barely in time for the submission deadline.) For example, I knew I needed to rewrite the entire third act before the book would be something I could be proud of, proud enough to send it out on submission.
But I didn't know what I didn't know about my book (and I won't detail it here--that kind of thing is boring unless you're the author, and too specific to be helpful to anyone else). And the critique groups helped identify some of those things, and the one-on-one sessions helped even more. It was a wonderful atmosphere to be critiqued in, for the record; everyone was friendly, helpful, encouraging, enthusiastic. It probably also helped that I went into the workshop so shell-shocked by the year that I didn't feel a lot of anxiety about being critiqued. I went in telling myself that I was there to learn, and that much worse stuff had happened to me in the last 6 months than a bunch of strangers not liking my weird book about a city under a dome run by different factions of environmental oligarchs.
I haven't said anything about the setting yet, so I will here: the solitary desolation wilderness outside our door and the ready access to a group of other writers was the perfect combination. I love the desert--between the time I spend in Black Rock City every year and the trips I took to eastern LA country through so much of 2024, I've seen many of its different faces and moods. But much of my cohort had never been to the desert before, and came into the house from long walks talking like they were freshly returned from the surface of an alien planet. I was happy to meet a new desert, and happy to see my new friends find as much to appreciate about it as I have.
As for myself, I took walks by myself, picking over goat bones and shotgun shells, finding the perimeter of the property and thinking about the arbitrary lines we use to carve up the earth, thinking about the arbitrary lines we use to subdivide our lives into chapters and eras and relationship statuses, and listened to what drifted through the bubble of silence.
The desert only ever says one word, and that word is listen.
At first I was skeptical that I would make friends at the workshop, much less keep them. I have a big social presence, but I’m a weird little neurodivergent introvert and I don’t often make new friends. But going to a writing workshop means you’re joining a group of people who understand the complicated balance of blending an intensely solitary passion with lives that gain their richness through friends, family, careers, and other connections. We all understood the inherent selfishness of the work we do. Many of us had spouses, partners, or coworkers who were taking on additional work or making financial sacrifices so we could have this dedicated space.
There’s a unique value to being able to talk through the problems of being a writer, both the micro (“I need my characters to do the thing, and they just won’t do the thing!”) and the macro (“I’m going to be asked to step into a more senior role at work next year, but to do that I’ll have to give up writing fiction. What do I do?”). In the evenings, we would gather in a couple large rooms, cook and eat dinner, drink water or wine or (by my request and that of another workshop student) gin and tonic, and talk shop (or talk shit). We’re a weird bunch of very different people tied together by this one weird thread. And now we’re all in a shared text message group that’s still going strong four months later.
I didn’t get a lot of writing done, but it turns out that for me, that’s not what the workshop was for. It was to rest, and to learn, and to plan.
(And the food was fucking great.)