It occurred to me this past weekend during my Writers Retreat at the UCLA Conference Center in Lake Arrowhead that this is how I’d like to live. Surrounded by other writers, working every day in a cosy room with a fireplace and a view of trees, coffee delivered all day, three amazing meals you don’t have to cook or buy the food for, and at 5:30 every evening it’s happy hour. (Maybe this could work in real life with a big coffee pot, take-out food, gathering together to write, and popping a bottle of wine at 5:30 every evening?)

In any event, such wonderful writers showed up for the retreat, and I miss them today. All of them brave and generous and honest and ready to laugh. And what good writing! We were a bit taken back by the cold (if you live in a part of this country with brisker weather please don’t laugh, but if it goes below 52 degrees in southern California some of us turn blue). Though we were all thrilled with the rain.

My Extension Writers’ Program class at UCLA started last week – “Writing Out the Storm”. And we’re just warming up so to speak.  Here’s the difference between taking a course or going on a retreat – If you’re in a course you need goals, you have homework, you have a project due – an essay or a chapter or poems. There’s pressure, there are grades (though I think grades are ridiculous for creative writing so all my students have to write me a letter about what grade they deserve and why and then they get that grade), plus I try to teach something about craft as well as get everybody inspired about their own writing.

At a retreat you’re on kind of a literary holiday. You write, you read your work and get feedback, I get on my little inspirational soap box and tell everybody why their writing matters, and we do some exercises. And if someone wants to go off and just contemplate the lake, that’s fine too. And oh yeah – there’s lots of food, coffee and wine.

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Another workshop in Los Angeles this weekend – one day only:  Saturday, October 10th from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm with Anne Perry and Victoria Zackheim.  For more info please go to www.WriteTeachers.com.  This is for both fiction and non-fiction writers and is held at Los Angeles Valley College in Valley Glen.  (and Nelson will be there.)