Into the barrancos

self esteem, isolation and writing as hard work

Last February, I went on an artists’ retreat to the whitewashed, bone dry mountains of Southern Spain. At this time, I was struggling to write. A serious neurological event the previous November had taken away some of my ability to communicate, and I was still feeling the effects of both the cognitive damage itself and the loss of confidence. It was poorly timed, this retreat. I wanted nothing less than to sit inside and write for two weeks, but I had to do it anyway. We drove for three days across England, France and Spain in a Fiat 500 with a 13-year-old terrier and arrived tired and anxious in anticipation of all this time with strange, new people.

I was there on the pretence of a project, for which I was to study botany and botanical folklore whilst writing essays about my relationship to different plants. When I had applied for both the retreat and an Arts Council grant to spend time on the project, I had some confidence in myself and my ability to carry out my work. Faced with the silence and time I had begged god for, I felt incapable.

Retreats, if you’ve never been on anything like them, are weird. Analogous occasions include press trips, tours and school trips. You’re trapped with relative strangers for several days: eating together, talking together, working together. You will cry. For some reason, for no reason, because you have formed fast bonds with total strangers over nothing other than the fact that you are trapped. Together. This one, miles from the nearest village and surrounded by barrancos and ravines filled with animal bones, had its own strangeness. Some days were 20 degrees and sunny and others saw snow. The people running it eschewed any food with carbohydrates or calories. We ate lentils, a lot of them, and sometimes on freezing evenings the food served was cold.

At night we sat around a fire and we drank and laughed and talked about the work that we had done that day. All of the attendees were older than me, some by quite a lot, and I learned things I would never have learned if I’d stayed home. Some nights we played piano and sang. I celebrated my birthday with these strangers. We had our phones but we mostly put them down, choosing to enforce a kind of isolation. How isolated? One day, seeking carbs, we drove 30 minutes into the miniature village nearby only to find their two stores closed for Andalusia Day. Andalusia Day, which I had not heard of before, is something that these people took very seriously.

But I digress. Basically, having to talk about the work we had done forced me to do it, to have something to show for my time. The thing was, though, I found the writing itself mechanical and awkward. I have always found writing easy. I wish I liked my own writing more, I wish I was capable of something different, but the writing that I can do comes easily. It has often even been fun, pleasurable, cathartic. It has at least always been fast. Over two weeks I wrote a few short stories and essays, interspersed with long spells painting and whittling. I wish I could say I found some pleasure in that slowness, but I missed the way I could once write as many as 10,000 usable words in a day.

My project was part-writing, part-visual art, part-education. Despite that, at least from the perspective of the “visual artists” running the retreat, there seemed a firm line between visual art and the respect it was given versus the stupid words for dumb-dumbs that I and a few others were working on. I heard the sly comments. When I showed someone a painting I’d been working on, he said, “ooh, visual art,” and I had a mean thought about his illiteracy.

What I saw myself was how hard writers work. I have never really thought that before–it’s not hard work the way that hard work is hard work. The hardest job I ever had was bartending. But writing, at the very least, takes time if not physical graft. Visual artists on the retreat strolled around for hours “looking for inspiration” only to end the day having produced nothing. No harm to them, that’s their “process”. Living grant to grant, they had the freedom to search without creating. The writers, however, worked hard. Not only at their projects, which they carved thousands of words out of every day, but at work. Translation, copywriting, articles, all of the things they had to exchange to buy time for art.

Before this retreat, I didn’t see writing as art. Maybe I still don’t! At least not my own. There is something about the fact that it takes effort to read, that it can’t catch you off guard, that makes it feel less like art for me than a painting or a song. But I do have newfound respect for it as a practice and a ritual. Even the worst writing takes time, time spent alone. If you don’t spend that time, there is nothing to show for it. You could say the same of a painting or a photograph, but we all know they don’t have to take that long. Not really. You can take a quite nice-looking photograph in seconds. It takes much longer to write a page of even mediocre words. Seeing the derision that (some) visual artists direct at writers while seeing the work that other writers put into their craft made me see my own work differently. Not that there are not lazy writers or hard-grafting visual artists–there are plenty of both. But I saw that the time that writing takes means something.

After making fun of artists who get grants to dick about, I came home to an offer of a grant from the Arts Council for my project. For the first time, I had the money to do nothing but write, to work on one thing without having to supplement my income. I still took on anything I was offered, because why would I turn down good work? But the Arts Council money gave me the time that writing takes.

I took what I had started in that house in the mountains in Spain and I turned it into a small collection of paintings, photographs and essays centred around different plants and their folklore. You can buy it here. I am proud of it. I pulled it together during the most difficult time for me as a writer and human person. My health problems were more serious than I first realised, and with them my ability to communicate plummeted. At the same time, I was struggling to have a novel published. My self esteem has been decimated by various things, and being told from various sides how little writing is worth did not help. But having time, space and money to create forced me to make something at a time I thought it would be impossible. I am grateful for that.

Writing is hard, new people are interesting, hot food is essential. These are the things I learned last year that meant the most.

You can buy ephemeral, botanical here.