Retreat

On Thursday I went to a day-long creative writing retreat. One reason I went, apart from my interest in creative writing (is there any other kind?), was because the location is so close to home. It was held in a village called Biton Aharon, which is just outside Netanya. So the traveling was minimal, 20 mins at most. It was organized by Evan Fallenberg, author of a recent book ("Light Fell"), who is from Cleveland, Ohio, and who lives in a large house with a "studio" out back where the retreat took place. There were 46 attendees from all over the country, and two other lecturers, Joan Leegant (from NY) and Judy Labensohn (from Ohio), who teach in and run the creative writing program at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan (their web sites are www.evanfallenberg.com ; www.joanleegant.com and www.writeinisrael.com ).
A lot of the presentations were devoted to advising people how to write and persuading them to commit themselves to writing regularly. The vast majoity (90%) of the attendees were women, and so a lot of this content was focussed on their needs. I said that I didn't have these problems, I write with facility, but my problem is getting feeling and emotion into my work.
Apart from a lovely lunch at a rustic restaurant nearby, the chief interest was in the people you meet, briefly, in passing and by chance. I had a conversation with two women about family secrets. One of them, her father had left when she was small, and she had never found out what had happened to him until she was grown and had children of her own. Now she knows that he died a few years ago in the US and that she has a family of step-sisters there.
Another woman described how she had recently visited a small town in the German region of Franconia, where there are now no longer any Jews. She knew that her mother had come from this town, but her mother had died young in Israel when she was 12 and her other family members had perished in the Holocaust, so she had no connection. But, she and her husband were taken up by the locals and shown around. At one point they took her to meet an old lady in her 80's, who told her that her mother had been her best friend at school, and she produced a photo album with her mother's picture in it and an inscription on the back to her friend. This lady had kept that photo for 70 years and was still sad that after the war her friend, the woman's mother, had never contacted her again.
Such are the stories and such are the reasons for the drive to write. A retreat can lead to an advance.