Posted by Guest Blogger
https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/09/29/inspiration-and-cheese/
http://brevity.wordpress.com/?p=28308
By Meg Robson Mahoney
I settle with my coffee at the front of the house and gaze out the window. The dogwood tree is dropping its cherries, round, red, calling to be swept away. Beyond the windowpane, a hummingbird hovers over pink blossoms on my abelia bush, which needs to be trimmed. But the garden can wait. I’m feeling inspired.
What keeps us going as we write? Willpower or inspiration? I’m good at the persistence part—showing up and slogging along. But inspiration? It comes and goes.
A year ago now, I was 25,000 words into Draft Four of a memoir about a woman who once expressed herself through dance and, in retirement, crafts words to break her silence. Perhaps fall was a bit further along—the leaves on the maple tree beyond the abelia were redder than they are today. I was beginning to understand my story, but every day felt like work.
I’ve done workshops—at Hugo House in Seattle and online from Lighthouse in Denver. I have two writing groups, leftover from classes; we meet mostly online. Wonderful people—a group of six twice a month and a trio monthly. I’ve watched as compatriots publish their books.
Then, one morning I happened upon a notice of a week-long writing workshop to begin on the last day of May. In France!
I had never imagined such a thing. But the workshop promised a deadline to work toward, a goal, a prize! A commitment, strategically timed.
I signed on, aiming to finish Draft Four in time for the retreat, which was eight months away. I kept track. October: 26,000 words revised. November: 29,000. December: 44,000. January: 58,000 words. February: 65,000.
By St. Patrick’s Day, my husband and I landed in Ireland—he loves to travel, and travel plays a role in my story. My willpower was exhausted by then, so I rested from writing as we traveled, knowing I’d plunge in again, in France. On the final day of May, I left my husband in the nearby city of Pau and arrived at Clos Mirabel, a retreat center at the edge of the Pyrenees in southeastern France.
I was anxious. How would I fit among 16 writers? I had the usual insecurities: “Do I Belong Among Real Writers”? And “Where Do I Go From Here?”
On the first morning, I was last of our group of sixteen to arrive in class. Perhaps nerves made me late. There was one seat left, farthest from the front of the circle. After a short class on “beginnings,” we took a break, to be followed by something called “live-editing.” Not knowing what that meant, I mustered my courage to offer pages for review, figuring I’d best find out how I fit in a roomful of writers who’d committed to a week in France. I assumed someone else would go first.
My words jumped onto the screen. The workshop leader’s respectful and lightning-quick fingers made edits. They were minor. They were wonderful. My writing was graciously received. After treading water all year, here came a life ring!
Afternoons, we wrote on our own, with two instructors on hand for informal consults.
I met with one instructor three afternoons in a row, reworking an essay I’d fussed with for years. He read it aloud, over and over, pausing with questions. By the end of the week, I had it finished and titled.
Nervous about my memoir, I didn’t bring it forward right away, and when I did, it wasn’t my writing I offered for review. Instead I showed the instructor my story map, which I had also been building all year—the sequence of events that formed me and then drove me toward change.
I wasn’t cheered by her feedback, which came after a glance at my single-sentence chapter summaries. She accepted the first as a beginning of the story but dismissed the next three—two thousand words in which I introduced characters, recounted injuries, described my work, and grieved my mother’s death.
Despondent at the idea of losing my carefully wrought prose, I set it aside, ready to chuck it.
Fortunately, meals were gathering times, with conversations about writing and life. Everyone had a story. We traded laughter and hilarity over sumptuous feasts. I developed quite a liking for the cheese course that arrived each night between dinner and dessert. Given a day or two of conversing with writers over wine, I looked back at memoir.
In any life, there are events that build a story, and there’s life that happens along the way. No easy task, to decide what’s an irrelevant nugget.
When I deleted the errant chapters, I was surprised to find that the next section, in which nightmares drove me to action, was a great fit following chapter one.
On our final day, I visited with the retreat leader again. “Is this the idea?”
“Yes!” she said to my changes. She helped me create Draft Five in Scrivener, in order to analyze each chunk for inclusion.
So my writing retreat—in France!—was not so much a week as a year. A year of doggedness fueled by anticipation, ending with insights gained from having other eyes on my work.
I’m back at my window now, watching the maple leaves turn bronze, the dogwood drop cherries, and the hummingbird hover at the abelia, which I won’t trim until all the sweetness is gone from its blossoms.
And I’m 50,000 words into Draft Five, moving faster than I did before, as I trim this story of a woman searching for who she is without work and family to define her, who uncovers memories and artifacts that reveal how she was raised to be silent, who blames husband and family as she tries to create a new life.
I’ve seen the end, and I’ll write it soon. Thanks to the willpower and inspiration that came together on a mountain in France.
___
Meg Robson Mahoney has been published in Does It Have Pockets, The Baltimore Review, Tiny Molecules, Lumiere Review, and teaching artist journal. Retired from the great fortune of teaching dance in a public school, she writes while exploring Puget Sound and the Salish Seas with her seafaring husband. Learn more about Meg and her writing on Substack.
https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/09/29/inspiration-and-cheese/
http://brevity.wordpress.com/?p=28308
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