Hola!
I returned from my Spanish writing retreat on Tuesday late afternoon, tired but happy to be home. I’m still adjusting, still in mourning for the warmth and the mountain light, for time dedicated to nothing but writing, walking and eating. Of course there was the talking too, conversations round the table and on the terrace with fellow writers from across Europe, the U.S.A. and Canada, a rich cross pollination, a melting pot of ideas and inspiration.
Productive as it proved to be, I don’t know if I’ll come back to Casa Ana a third time. The journey into the Alpujarra is long especially the last hour in a minibus on relentless, winding, mountain roads. For me, arriving was a question of whether I could hold on to my stomach or not.
Casa Ana is a long way to go to write. You could be forgiven for thinking too far. I was thinking much the same for the first few days. Couldn’t I work just as well at home or in an airbnb somewhere in the UK? The going, by that I mean the writing, was tough. Quite possibly because I was writing about difficult times. But I kept it at, after all it’s why I’d come, and now I’ve returned with 12,000 plus new words, plus work in my notebook still to be transcribed and the drafts of four new poems.
For me, this village and these mountains are a place where poetry calls. And I was happy to share a terrace with a gentle poet from Tennessee - Katherine Smith. You can read some of her work here. Also to have numerous conversations about both my memoir and poetry with brilliant, retreat leader and friend, Mary Jane Holmes.
The mountain is different in summer, hemmed in leaf on the lower slopes, greener than November, blue in the heat. It has yet to receive me, as in my poem of before, its face seeming to slant away from me, east to north east, the direction of home. I take the path through the village to the fizzy fountain (yes, the water really does fizz) and beyond to the Era, a great stone pavement where corn was threshed, that sits like a small amphitheatre in the bowl of mountains. I pass olive groves and orchards, ancient chestnuts and hardy Scottish oak. There are cardoons, and scabious scattered like tiny blue butterflies in the blonde grass. I ask myself what would it be like to live here, to be born cradled by mountains, to have a small plot like the one I pass where a cane table covered in an old white cloth, and two chairs sit in roughly mown grass facing across to the other side. I think of the white-washed villages of the Alpujarras, their past, the years of the civil war, how here there would be many places to hide. How the women still to this day go out looking for the bones of the lost, the loved ones shot, disposed of, cast out like dogs. Time loosens and fades, runs to the sound of the unseen river through the deep gorge, and beyond to the sea.
It’s on the second Sunday that the magic happens for me, the morning after the storm when the loquats have been blown from the tree and lie squashed on stone. The air is cooler. I sit on the terrace to write instead of staying in my room. The writing flows. I write the climax to part three, a piece I’d been dreading. And in the writing of it here, in this place, it is transformed. The storm has brought destruction but the rain has brought the green; life sustained, new life. The rage of which I’ve been writing, which I’ve been re-experiencing, is dissipated. The church bells, the soft Spanish voice of Sunday radio, the sun warming my feet, are a million miles away from the rage of a beating with a wooden-handled brush. There is transcendence here. The mountain receives me.
Maria Popova’s wonderful, free newsletter, The Marginalian, appears in my Inbox, it is all about joy. I follow her links. I listen to Nick Cave’s beautiful, haunting song Joy, from his new album, Wild God. I read Ross Gay’s, The Book of Delight. The possibility of a new daily practice, of observation and joy, appear on my horizon, a winter task. There is still the memoir to finish of course, but that will take care of itself.
I ask again, is the journey to Casa Ana too far and too gut wrenching? We discuss it among ourselves, maybe it’s like childbirth, we say, in time the pain recedes until its forgotten…
For more about this Casa Ana retreat, read the lovely, talented, Lynn Hanford Jones here
As always, thanks for reading
Avril x
Beautiful writing Avril and thank you for mentioning me 🏵️