Chocolate, Wine, Bread, Writing, and the Sky

A transformative (and delicious) week in Paris.

It was the best of times…it was the age of wisdom…it was the epoch of belief…it was the season of light…it was the spring of hope…

It was chocolate, wine, bread, fresh-squeezed juice, and sunsets.

It was beauty, wit, work, fellowship, and fun.

It was all of the best with none of the worst. (Except the cold I caught. But I didn’t let that stop me.)

It was Paris in April.

It was The Blue Hour.

We met in this room every day for a week: nine women from eight different cities, guided by two professional writers, watched over by one slyly smirking nun. We decimated croissants, quaffed coffee and orange juice, took in wisdom and advice, poured our hearts out through our pens, then splintered off to explore the streets of Paris.

We laughed and learned, shared and supported, batted revelations about like shining shuttlecocks. We concluded with an epic farewell dinner and epilogued with a wander through the world’s largest flea market. We soaked up every lumen of the City of Light.

Susanna Schrobsdorff and Glynnis MacNicol have created a kind of alchemical magic with this writers’ retreat, which twice a year welcomes women over forty who are exploring the genres of memoir and personal essay. A week later, I’m still parsing its full impact, wondering why such a vivid experience has left me somewhat lost for words. And why returning home has made me feel so…

Blue.

Perhaps it’s because the most affecting aspect of the week was one I can’t replicate on my own—one I hadn’t known about in advance. Each day, after writing for an hour or more in response to a prompt—a question, an invitation, an exploration or description—we were invited to read our raw first drafts aloud.

There were two rules:

1) We were to respond not with criticism, but with observation: what we liked, what stood out, what we noticed, what we heard.

2) We were not to approach each other about the content of the writing afterward. No saying, “I had that same experience.” No asking for further details or explanation.

And so the phrase I keep returning to in recalling The Blue Hour Paris is a common English idiom: to be taken at your word.

In sharing my work with the group—work so full of intimate detail and personal history that the bulk of it, I feel, is unpublishable—I felt received. Not judged or assessed, but listened to and heard.

I didn’t have to explain, or justify, or translate. I didn’t edit, suppress, self-censor, hide. On the first day, before I began, I announced: “I perform for a living, but reading my own work aloud makes me incredibly nervous.” Every day, shaking in my actual boots, I made myself do it anyway. By the time I read my final piece at that epic dinner, the shaking had only subsided a tiny bit. But the unconditional encouragement I’d received from Glynnis, Susanna, and the other writers helped me to believe that my words were worth sharing.

Unlike live performance, in which audience response is part of the creative process, writers work alone, and we often don’t let anyone else’s eyes hit the page until we’ve revised a piece several times. When I publish something, I might receive responses from readers, but there’s none of the interactive immediacy that I enjoy as a performer.

This has long been a source of perplexity for me in my career as both writer and actor. Often, as soon as I’ve finished writing something, my impulse is to show it to someone—to say Look! I made this. What do you think? Yet, soliciting that response, especially by reading the thing aloud, is terrifying. I always fear I’ll be judged as harshly by others as I am by my own inner critic.

In Paris, there was no judgment. There was no no. There was only yes after yes after yes.

Yes, you are a writer. Yes, your ideas are worth writing about. Yes, your writing style is appealing. Yes, your work is of value. Yes, we understand what you’re saying. Yes, we relate to your experience. Yes, you can do this. Yes, yes, yes.

For nineteen years, I have heard the word no far more often than yes in my career as a freelance artist. So to experience an entire week of affirmation…well. I suppose it’s no wonder that I now feel a bit like I’m going through withdrawal.

The other key element of the retreat, for me, was the permission we were given on Day One to write about ourselves in the third person. The ability to describe my experience from the outside, without any specific agenda or goal, proved wildly liberating. I began to write in a voice that stemmed from some deep place I hadn’t accessed in eons. Though I wrote poetry prolifically from ages eleven to twenty-five, over the past fifteen years that part of my creativity has gone dormant in favor of dramatic writing and creative nonfiction. Yet, each day in Paris, as I sat down to respond to a new prompt, I found myself penning lines instead of paragraphs, my mind free to assemble phrases as I wished, without worrying about how they’d come across. The result was a collection of rhythmic prose-poems that I feel proud of, even though most of them will only ever be heard by those who were in the room where it happened.

My words were taken, and treasured, and reflected back to me. The value of that gift is unappraisable.

And then there was Paris.

After my last visit in December, I wrote about rediscovering the beauty of that exquisite city in winter instead of summer. (I also wrote about learning what the blue hour is, and how it happens both at twilight and at dawn.) This time I got to soak it up in springtime…and reader, it did not disappoint. (All the photos in this post are mine.)

Yet even with the luxury of an entire week there—with visits to museums and churches, gardens and cemeteries, markets and department stores; with the consumption of crepes and cream puffs and chocolate (O, the chocolate!) and cakes and cappuccinos—I have a longish list of places I didn’t go, things I didn’t see, delicacies I didn’t have time to eat. It is a city of infinite possibility, one I now want to keep returning to as often as time and budget will allow.

I have felt, this week, the way I often do the week after closing a show: a kind of creeping melancholy, untethered to specific thoughts. It’s the aftermath of a creative journey that turned me inside-out. It’s the dissolving of a community that only existed for a heartbeat, in a specific time and place, and will never exist again. It is, I suppose, a natural response to the ephemeral quality of lived experience. Moments that can’t be captured in images. Hours redolent with meaning. Days that flew.

As a writer, I’ve taken more than a step forward. I feel like I’ve been flung into some new territory, like I’ve awoken in a landscape I don’t yet recognize. Something transformative has happened—I just don’t quite know what it is. I have assignments of a sort, goals to work toward, ideas to explore. I’m not ready to do any of it yet, but I trust that I soon will be.

I think my favorite blue hour is dawn. And I can’t wait to return to Paris, as soon as possible, to experience it again.

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