As writers we know the practice takes time. Ten weeks, ten months, ten years. Today happens to be all three for me.
Ten years ago I closed the Washington Writer’s Retreat. After a wonderful five-year run hosting 31 artists, scientists, historians, anthropologists, poets, novelists, and grandmas, the retreat closed in 2014. I traded the marginal magic of the house on Bunker Hill for the rich intimacy of life next to Louise in a quiet condo. I knew my proof of concept would keep, and the need to become my next me was calling.
Ten months ago, we did the Completing and Creating Circle, a pretty great exchange all around. I came away with a drive to go deep into research on a couple of writing projects. Ironically, the time together informed an incubation period that had to be solo, and I committed to a full writing practice. I embody the moniker ‘erstwhile essayist’ here on annelecuyer.com, a space that often functions as R&D for other projects.
Ten weeks ago (or so) I started writing one essay each Wednesday for The Posted Past. This new enterprise draws on Dad’s very old postcard collection. It fills our time together, tipping the mind marbles every day to start a fun game of sorting, selecting, and detecting. Fortunately, artistic practice thrives in these crumpled corners of life. Centenarian postcards make for writing magic.
I see all this as evidence of the ripple effect in my own life, a lovely looping quality that allows for time travel.
Back to WWI and the Golden Age of Postcards, and an extraordinary time of personal engagement town-to-town and around the globe.
Forward to a time when I finish a novel thirty years in the making using AI to crush the blocks I faced in my early writing days. Forthcoming, Night Reading.
Back again through our family history to develop the draft of Crazy Creative, a social memoir on powerful women in the margins. Still so muted at this moment, it only leaks out when I’m not looking.
Slowly, my confidence grows that these efforts are all toward many more comfortable places for humans to love and writers to work. Always, I practice on myself.
Anne L'Ecuyer 