This was a life-changing retreat. At AROHO 2011 I discovered my capacity for focus. This year I brought clarity and focus with me, along with two years of growth as a writer. I knew the week would bring surprises. I just didn’t know how those surprises would manifest or how powerful they would be. All week one hundred brilliant, creative AROHO women talked, walked, observed, studied, laughed, counseled, wrote, read our work aloud, cheered each other on, made new friends, cherished old friends, and on the last night, danced in jubilation.

The first surprise came three days before the retreat, when I lucked into a sudden open slot in Janet Fitch’s small group, a master class called “The Art of the Senses” that has transformed me. I’ve known about and have sometimes practiced writing from the senses since I took my first writing class as an undergraduate, but it’s been a long time since I’ve written fiction and I’ve felt rusty in this aspect of craft. I’ve felt dull, strapped to my desk and my computer, working hard day in and day out, losing myself in my work on the nonfiction book, hunched over my keyboard. Janet Fitch woke me up. She offered our small group a graduate-level class in four sessions, with insights, ideas, exercises, and practices to spark a lifetime of discovery and enliven our writing.

In future posts I’ll write more about the retreat and the new practices I’m developing as a result of what I learned there. The first new practice has been to take a little time every day to tune into my senses. In “The Art of the Senses” Janet taught us how to be children again in a curious, engaged, unselfconscious way, to go into the world with love and interest, with senses heightened, and to describe our impressions. I’ve taken to touching plants to get a feel for their texture, smelling leaves of eucalyptus and lemon verbena, looking at the way light shines on objects, and lugging my camera with me on evening walks so that later, when I review the photos, I can see how much I didn’t see when I took the shots and can train myself to look more closely. My evening walks have been transformed into sense adventures.

As soon as I got home from Ghost Ranch I went into the garden to water, prune, and harvest. The corn I was worried about before I left for the retreat had come in while I was gone. I had not been sure that it would come in, because the tassels had emerged before I saw any sign of ears, and the silk and the tassels must be present together for the corn to be fertile. I was surprised to find that this corn, which I had grown from seed, had produced. The color of its silk surprised me too, a rhubarb blush that reminded me of the hair of a doll I possessed when I was young, a doll whose hair could grow and was somehow—maybe as in the tale of Rapunzel—a key to her being. I realized that I had a complex relationship with this doll and many questions about her, so I went straight from the corn silk to my computer, to a morning of research and writing that brought me memories and story lines I’m eager to explore.

It is good to go to an AROHO retreat and bask in the wisdom, generosity, and creative work of the women there and to dance with them in the moonlight. It is good to come home again and to wake up the morning after, more yourself than you used to be.

• Here’s an interview with Janet Fitch that will give you a sense of her wisdom.
• Right now I’m reading her novel White Oleander. Wow! What a great book! Next I’ll read Painted Black.
• Read Janet Fitch’s “Ten Writing Tips that Can Help Almost Anyone.”
• One of Janet’s tips is to write in scenes; here’s a scene-writing exercise I recently posted.
• In “Writing from the Neck Down—Advice from Janet Fitch,” Mona AlvaradoFrazier describes her AROHO experience with Janet and shares some of the insights Janet offered in her presentation to the whole group.
• Read my other posts about the 2013 AROHO Retreat.

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