Dispatch from a Writing Retreat

On the importance of defamiliarization for creativity, and some prompts.

Hello again—

I’ve been quiet here, but I didn’t mean to disappear! In fact, I tried to post last week but I didn’t do it correctly!

Here we are now: Hello from Paris, where I’ve been for two weeks on a writing retreat after the chaos of that strange end-of-school transition into summer. (Someone please tell me why this transition is always so hard.) On top of it all, my son came home from a playdate where he rolled around in the Connecticut grass with an odd bite and rash on his neck, leading to a Lyme disease scare. If you’ve read The Invisible Kingdom you’ll understand how alarming that was for me. (We desperately need more accurate diagnostics; the lingering uncertainty is its own kind of wound.)

Soon after, I boarded a plane to Paris to give a few talks at NYU’s Writers in Paris program. And the next thing I knew I was here, sweating through a sundress and jet-laggedly watching the old metal shutters outside my apartment swing in the very hot wind while I tried to remember what it was like to get deeply inside a book I’m writing. Here is some of what I realized while I was away.