Dear Readers & Writers:
A long pause. Is that what all this feels like to you? Even if you’ve gone back to work or never stopped, does the rest of your life seem off-kilter? Do you find that your old routines are no longer working? Did you find that the stay-at-home orders forced you to reevaluate all the things that you had once done as a matter of course or taken for granted? Are you still sheltering at home as much as possible or are you out there fighting for change? Either way, it’s like all the pieces of our lives were tossed into the air and now are drifting down to land in some random configuration. We pause, breath held, to see what that will look like.
Several of you have subscribed to this newsletter since I sent the last one and so, perhaps, I need to introduce myself. I’m a writer from Arkansas who moved to Italy in September of 2017 to write my historical novel about Boccaccio, the 14th-century Italian writer. When I moved, I brought my 92-year-old mom and my four-pound dog named Prose. We lived in a two-room apartment in a medieval village built in the 1200s, the kind you see in pictures of Italy and wonder if anyone really lives there. I did and I was pretty darn happy.
I actually began my long pause before the coronavirus struck. December 10, 2019, I had a double hip replacement in Baton Rouge. All that went great, and my mom and I returned to Italy on February 6. There were some murmurs of a virus in China but I didn’t pay any attention. We had about two glorious weeks. I got to use my new titanium/ceramic hips to climb one of my beloved medieval towers and spent a great day in Siena with my friend Silvia.
Then, overnight, the virus numbers began climbing in the north of Italy. It very much felt like it was coming for us. I told my mom we either needed to leave ASAP or plan to stick it out. We opted to stay, though it meant I was responsible for the health of a 92-year-old woman in a foreign country where we didn’t speak the language and if one of us went to the hospital, the other couldn’t come. Facing this grim prospect, I locked us in on February 25, earlier than the Italian government finally did. In almost three months, I left our apartment five times. Twice to meet friends who had picked up groceries for us and three times to walk to the ATM for rent money, which I left in a coffee can in my garden for my landlord to pick up.
At first, I didn’t think this would last more than six weeks. I lounged around, did sporadic physical therapy, watched a LOT of Netflix, and told myself I should be doing something useful but never really settled in to anything. During this time, after a year of shopping my novel, I signed with a literary agent, Jenny Bent. This was a moment I had dreamed of for decades. I thought it would make me ecstatically happy. But I felt more numb than anything. I didn’t even share it on social media. I just immediately began worrying that rejections were starting to come in from the publishers she sent it to.
I began to understand that not only was the world changing, but I was changing. From the perspective of a couple of months of solitude I could see that my former life had been busy to the point of hectic, that some things that had once given me satisfaction had become just items on my to-do list, and that I really was not the deeply spiritual person I wanted to be.
Now, I asked myself, who do I really want to be and what part does my writing play in that? How can I turn the Etch-a-Sketch over, give it a good shaking, and begin again?
I still wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t want to be only a writer, and it seemed that that was what I had become. My novel, the Village Writing School, my research, my social media—everything was about my writing life. I wanted my life to be bigger than that. I wanted my writing to arise out of a more centered, aware, spiritual place.
I decided we needed to move. It hurt my heart to leave my beloved medieval village, but I felt that I needed bigger windows, more air and sky. If we were going to primarily stay at home, home needed to be bigger, not just in terms of more than two rooms (though that is nice) but bigger in terms of a solitary place to walk and a place to sit outside that did not abut the neighbor’s garden. I watched Italy’s virus numbers decline until the percent of people testing positive was under 1%. Still feeling that I was taking a chance, I went out and looked at apartments and then moved us to house in the country. We have one neighbor, a young woman who is a doctor and speaks great English. Prose and I walk every morning at 6:00 in the woods behind. My room has giant windows that look down on the rolling hills of Tuscany. But I’m only ten minutes from my medieval village, which I can see from my yard. In the morning, roosters crow. At night, we are beginning to see fireflies. This week I watched a man move a huge flock of sheep with two big, white dogs.
It feels like a holy space. Because I have declared that it is. I have declared that here I will take a long pause to work on myself. To read the books I always wanted to read. To rewrite my first novel, a story that I know will never be published commercially, but a story that I love. I want to make it the best it can be for me. I want to create routines that make me a deeper, more compassionate person, more at peace, more aware of divinity. I want the trivialities to fall away.
If Jenny Bent finds a publisher for the Boccaccio novel she is shopping, I will write another one, a companion piece. If not, well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make a 90-degree turn and do something else. I have been accepted to a program at Notre Dame University for people wanting to explore the next chapter of their lives. I was supposed to start in January, but I deferred to the next cohort, starting August 2021 because I wanted more time here in my House of Pause.
What about the Village Writing School? Again, I don’t know. I know that what the VWS does matters—writing matters. Especially now. But when I think of putting together another summit, all planning and inviting and emails and technical angst, my heart says: not yet. Every Tuesday at 9 central, I host an online write-in, where we simply write for one hour. One participant has completed a personal essay in just our time together. Another says that she writes for that hour and then gets in another three before she stops, because that little kick-start is what she needs to settle down in these crazy times. This little write-in makes me happy. If that is something you would be interested in, contact me. We invite you to join us. Otherwise, we have our great recorded summits and workshops still available at VillageWritingSchool.com.
I think about a Village Writing School 2.0 and what that might look like. How can we nurture writing for healing in these troubled times? How can we support people writing for publication without shutting down people who only want to write for themselves, for healing, for connection, for empowerment? We will see what unfolds.
A pause can be like a waiting room in which we fidget and read old magazines or it can be a sabbatical from which we emerge reinvigorated, renewed, transformed. As long as the virus is around, all our choices to go out carry a risk. Some risks are worth it. But just making these choices can lead us to evaluate what is really important to us, to think before we act, to be more intentional. And all the time that we used to spend overwhelmed by our frantic society and our unthinking busyness can now be channeled toward building a more centered, balanced life that nurtures our hearts and souls.
This virus is a catastrophe and will, perhaps, surpass the Black Death as the worst disaster of human history. But it is the nature of the human spirit to grow during crises. Whatever this pause looks like in your life, may you find a way to enter into it and nurture your spirit.
Finding our stories . . . and ourselves.
— Alison