Read, write, create
Otherwise known as a whole lot of poetry on a magical island called Iona
The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind, mostly due to travel that took me 5,088 miles to a tiny island off the southwestern coast of Scotland.
It started nearly a year ago when my long-time writing buddy and friend Micha Boyett and I decided to cast our bets on a poetry retreat with Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of Poetry Unbound and poet extraordinaire.
The initial conversation went something like this:
Cara: Let’s do this poetry retreat with Padraig O’ Tuama!
Micha: Yes! But are you sure? You’re not a poet.
Cara: I don’t care. It’s Padraig! I shall become a poet!
However the conversation went, nearly a year ago, Micha and her husband set the clocks extra-early when registrations opened to secure us a couple of spots. For months, we didn’t think much of it, or I should say, I didn’t think much of it.
My passport was still valid, even though I hadn’t used it since 2009. Gulp.1 I reasoned that Micha, who is a legitimate poet, and I would trek across seas to hole up to read and write a good bit of poetry. But the farther I got from the that initial sign-up day last April, the more “poetry” got replaced by “writing,” got replaced by goals and dreams and desires to finish the middle grade novel I’ve been tinkering away at for far too long already.
Reader, it was definitely a poetry retreat.2
We read poetry, and we picked apart bits of poetry, and then we put our poetic hats on and wrote poems of our own — poems I doubt you’ll ever see, at least not in any public sense of the word, but poems that welled up from words and stories buried deep inside our elegiac bones.
We also ate well and clinked glasses with some of the finest humans you’ll ever meet; we traced miles on craggy cliffs and slopped through boggy moors and held nine million-year-old rocks in our hands. We soaked up the deep spirituality that is Iona, as we traversed the roads that St. Columba, an Irishman that brought Christianity to Scotland 1,500 years ago, also walked down. We sat in the restored and hallowed halls of the abbey he established with 12 of his monkish companions, soaking up the prayers and songs of an ecumenical community committed to justice, peace, and the rebuilding of community.
It was the dreamiest, even if our time was encompassed by poetry — because poetry, it turns out, was exactly what I needed to gulp down during my time on Iona.
Poetry, of course, is not the first place I turn.
Give me a good mystery or a laugh-out loud middle grade novel. Give me some nonfiction I can really sink my teeth into or let me nerd out on a bit of theology that’ll make its way into every subsequent sermon. But poetry? I don’t get it.
I don’t always get the feelings and the deep meanings, the truncated sentences and the invitation to simply let it simmer on the insides of your soul. Irony of ironies, you say, because didn’t you teach high school English back in the day? Didn’t you spend an entire month (the month of April, no less)3 digging into the stuff of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then of modern artists whose songs from the poetic landscapes we nod our heads and tap our fingers and sing along to too? Yes, yes, I did.
Maybe poetry got lost somewhere along the way — which is why I’m so glad that that which was lost has now been found.4
For me, the finding was in the creativity re-found and discovered through the poems we read and wrote and discussed along the way. And that refinding5 is something I’ve taken home with me, that’s here to stay.
Cheers!
c.
I could write an entire book on all the reasons why I haven’t traveled outside the U.S. for a long, long while, but that is neither here nor there.
Also reader, I still haven’t finished that middle grade novel.
National Poetry Month, of course
Can’t stop, won’t stop.
Substack disagrees with my word choice, but Merriam-Webster seems to think it’s okay.
Love this. And couldn't be more thankful we got to share this experience together!
So glad for this. I bet words can't describe it all. Or even poems.