A weekend in Asheville not writing
I spent a long weekend in Asheville, North Carolina with the hopes of making my own writing retreat, but ended up writing nothing.
To be fair, I was with my partner and his family, and the days were long, warm, and filled with lots of food. A heaping bowl of spaghetti with mussels and shrimp, plates of Spanish tapas, a thick slice of chocolate cake. We had late nights drinking champagne on the porch and doing puzzles. By the end of the night I was so exhausted, I had nothing to give to the page.
I felt bad about not writing. I intended to write, I was excited about writing, but it didn’t happen. The most writing I got was 500 words in my notes app, paragraphs of run-on sentences because that’s what happens when I try to type with only my thumbs.
In the mornings, I watched sun come up over the mountains. I sat outside with a cup of wild blueberry green tea, a blanket, and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, which I picked up at Malaprop’s Bookstore. I read a few pages but mostly I just stared at the trees, the flowers, the blue line of the mountains. As a person who has lived in a large city for the last few years, I’d forgotten how loud birds can be on a spring morning, how serene it is to be surrounded by greenery instead of skyscrapers.
The trees and grass were that bright verdant green, the color of new growth in spring, and I kept looking at the sun touching the leaves and I thought stupid things like, I’ve never seen leaves glow like that. The birds created this great symphony of sound and the morning smelled like damp earth. I wrote about these observations in my notes app and then wrote the following fragments:
One day I won’t be able to remember the pink and violet flower bushes towards the bottom of the hill, the way the branches part around the mountains to frame them. One day all I’ll remember is that I visited Asheville at some point, at some Airbnb, or maybe, like many other things and experiences, I won’t remember the trip at all. It will just have become a part of me, a fragment of a thing that has made up my life but can’t be recognized as its own distinct moment anymore. Time will have eroded it. So the best possible thing would be to enjoy the way the trees arch towards the sun, the far-off blue outline of the mountains, right now, while I’m experiencing it. I will never have this moment again, not completely, never in the same way.
I wish I were a photographer or a painter or another kind of artist so I could preserve the way things looked. Sometimes I think that’s all I really try to do with my words, capture images and feelings of a particular moment as truthfully as I can, though its attempt at written replication always falls woefully short and can never be interpreted as exactly as it was. The words themselves get in the way.
I’m always grieving things before they’re over.
Melodramatic run-ons, as I’m prone to writing when I type in my phone. But I like the notes app for pulsating moments, when I’m in the heat of an emotion or thought, and I need to write it down quickly before it gets lost in the rest of the garbage of my brain. The paragraphs aren’t part of the novel I wanted to work on, but bits of my life, bits of me for a future me to have later.
I didn’t write what I wanted to, but I rested. I ate. I filled my cup up with quality time with my partner and his family. I felt gratitude and grief for long weekends like this. I came back to the page this morning, refreshed and nourished.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying it was probably good for me to separate myself from the story for a few days, to be with people I love and to just stare stupidly in wonder at the magnificence of this world. To touch grass, literally. To not listen to any music except for the birdsong in the morning.
Happy Earth Day. I hope wherever you are, you can take a moment to ground yourself, to really look at the trees, to breathe in and feel your lungs fill up.
Chat soon,
Megan
I’d be remiss to write about Asheville and not ask you to support the community after Hurricane Helene. It’s been 7 months since the hurricane devastated Western North Carolina, and so many folks are still rebuilding what was lost. If you’re able, take a few days to visit the area and support the local businesses.
Here are just a few I visited:
Food & Dessert
Cúrate, a Spanish tapas bar
Strada, an Italian restaurant
French Broad Chocolate, a chocolate and dessert shop
Asheville Chocolate, a chocolate and dessert shop
Books & Shopping
To donate and help the community, please check out:
BeLoved Asheville, which helps provide essential aid and shelter
MANNA, a food bank
River Arts District, an Asheville neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Helene flooding
Thanks for supporting Asheville and Western North Carolina. <3
love that you let yourself just enjoy! :) that’s so important, too!
this is lovely! especially appreciate the vulnerability of the notes app thoughts. some of the best writing seems to come after a “failed” writing retreat—once the pressure is off :)