The End of the Group

by Diana Wurn

My writing group gasped its final breath in a cold log cabin on Mount Rainier. This cabin didn't have any electricity, and frankly, neither did the group. But what does a cold log cabin have to do with writing, you might wonder. I wondered the same thing.

"There'll be so much time to write!" "No electricity and a fire sounds so lovely!" "We'll go for walks!" we gushed, the three of us gathered around a table in a downtown Seattle café with our half-finished essays marked with red pen and an overturned thesaurus. Our lives were busy. We struggled to find the time to sit down and just write.

The cabin in the woods would be the answer. The question, as always, is sometimes more difficult to identify.

I remember the cadre of black spiders contrasted starkly by the white of porcelain basin. I remember the interior of the cabin that was colder than the outside October air. I remember a lack of food and lack of toilet paper. But mostly I remember the hours that stretched out endlessly and turned time into an inverted opportunity that seemed all too similar to a curse.

The first sign of trouble was the collection of books fanned across the dirty wooden table in the living room as we unpacked: "The Artist's Way," "Writing for Dummies," "Write!" The books themselves were not the problem, it was the eerie portent of forced discussions involving the Way to Write that worried me. The group would invariably have good comments to share, but sometimes analyzing the creative process feels too much like dissecting a butterfly because it is beautiful. In the end, all you are left with is a bunch of small ugly bug parts.

The morning of day two I woke to the sound of tiny claws tearing at the log cabin roof and dreams of spiders seeking out my body for heat. I put on another three sweaters before I could get out of the sleeping bag and crept by the sleeping writer girls and past new trails of mouse poo that had fallen on the carpet and tables like a light snowfall overnight. I was able to bring my dog on the trip and she looked up at me as I carefully stepped into the stinky outhouse. The expression on her canine face was one I shared with her for the last 24 hours: "Why are we here?"

In the early morning light, it was clear that the cabin had been decorated by ambitious vermin. Creative mice had shat in every conceivable corner of the structure. Even the coffee pot on the counter had been attacked by the creatures that had pooped not only on the top of the coffee pot, but had made the middle of the glass karafe the bullseye of their fecal target.

I put my new crisp notebook into a plastic container and tried to figure out how to obtain coffee before my head would explode. Luckily, I travel with an emergency coffee cup and ground beans and only needed hot water from the wood burning stove.

The other group members awoke and, as we ate breakfast, their soft breathy voices started in with questions they had been asking at a relentless clip throughout the weekend: "When do you read?" "What do you read?" "How often do you read?" "Do you go out to dinner often?" "Do you brush your teeth after lunch?" The questions were not bad or hard to answer but, for me, had the effect of breaking up any spontaneous or enjoyable discourse.

We were allowed some "alone time" so I escaped to the little river downhill from the cabin. I took my notebook out and began to write disparaging exaggerated journal entries about being stranded at the base of a Northwest mountain without electricity and only a bad pot of chili for breakfast lunch and dinner. I was leading up to the crux of the story, where I would have to kill and possibly eat my two companions.

The sun came out and warmed my frozen body and the sound of the water hitting the rocks in the river made me feel relaxed, like everything would be fine. That is, until the dog lifted a log twice her size from the river, which came out with a tug and sprung from her mouth, hitting me squarely in my jaw.

My screech was heard by the other writer girls and they suddenly appeared. I immediately tossed my journal under a bush as I held my jaw and called out that I was fine and just enjoying nature. No need to come down!

It was then that I realized I write best in a heated room with a hot cup of coffee, a cell phone with reception, and a soft carpet under my bare feet. It turns out this is the least distracting environment of all. I realized that the writing retreat, like many things, is more romantic imagined than implemented.

Finding time to write and calling myself a writer did not have anything to do with scheduling time with other people for discussions or secluding myself in a prison-like cabin for a weekend with people I barely knew. It had to do with setting my own goals and incorporating writing time into my schedule. I realized I could do that. I could be a writer.

My walks during "alone time" got longer and my writing more abbreviated, until I wrote things like this: "Eighteen hours until I get home. What is that smell? I must remain calm." Writing is a solitary activity that cannot always be improved with such things a good writing chair, or spending time with other people who talk about writing, or a trip to an isolated Unibomber type cabin in the woods.

When I realized this I was able to enjoy the rest of the weekend and I didn't need to write another word—not even "help."

Congratulations to Diana Wurn, winner of the first ever Seattle Writergrrls Writing Competition. The theme of the competition was "your transformational moment as a writer," judged by fellow Writergrrls Kat Richardson and Amanda Castleman. Each piece was judged on consistency, adherence to theme, innovative thought, grammar and style, and emotional impact.