Lessons Learned From a Creative Writing Retreat
The most important thing is to never stop creating
In March 2022 I reached out to Meryanne Loum-Martin, the owner of Jnane Tamsna, a luxury boutique hotel in Marrakech, and the only female Black hotelier in Morocco. Her property had been written about in countless publications, and she herself had written a book about the beautiful interiors and gardens in Marrakech. I was looking for another “Escape” category author for Parea Books and I knew she was a woman with many stories. I asked if she’d be interested in working together on a book and to my great surprise, she responded to me and said we should talk about it. One month later in April 2022 I was at the London Book Fair for the first time and saw her book at the Rizzoli booth. A few weeks later I was on the plane to Marrakech, going to stay at her property and meet her in-person.
We sat down for lunch and began talking about the book, but the conversation quickly evolved into one of business, vision, and values. We realized we were both passionate about the same things and envisioned a better, more diverse, cross-cultural literary world so we put our two talents together and decided that week to form a company called Philoxenia. It’s a Greek word that represents their approach to hospitality: come as strangers, leave as friends.
Fast forward to January 2023 and our first retreat was happening. We had award-winning and bestselling authors Cleyvis Natera, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Camille Dungy, and Tanaïs. They held writing workshops, and we arranged cultural activities such as Medina tours and a day trip to the Atlas Mountains. We also partnered with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Global Diversity Foundation to sponsor fellows from HBCUs. We sold out the retreat and had a waiting list going, so we announced the second retreat for two months later, at the end of March.
Admittedly, I went into this second retreat a bit nervous. We had sold out again, and sponsored fellows again, and we had a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Tyehimba Jess, as one of our hosts, but I was worried that it wouldn’t feel as magical or as inspirational as the first one. I was wrong.
I can’t begin to describe the feeling I get during these retreats. To see a group of writers who are at various stages of their writing careers—we had NYT bestsellers, many people with publishing deals with the Big 5 publishers, academics and editors who want to get into personal writing, MFA students who are soon to be published and also creating their own MFA programs at HBCUs, and people who have always been interested in writing as a hobby but who have pursued other professional interests—come together and immediately form a foundation of support, creative inspiration, vulnerability, and safety is both wholly fulfilling and also rare.
To learn from Pulitzer Prize winners, Senior Editors at Big 5 publishers who are also on the boards of prestigious literary awards, and other bestselling authors and influential figures in publishing was invaluable. The writers surely learned a lot, but I learned a lot as an editor and publisher as well. I gained perspective—did you know that, for example, it took 17 years of writing before Toni Morrison had a bestseller with Beloved? And did you also know that Beloved was Oprah’s very first pick for her just-launched Oprah’s Book Club? And that it took five more years after that for her to win a Nobel Prize? Or that James Baldwin was out of print by the time he died, meaning no one was buying his books?
It reminded me that to build something great, you have to do it over time and you have to dedicate yourself to it relentlessly every single minute of every day. It takes a while for you to realize your own personal vision, even more so for others to see it. If there’s something hard that you’re doing and you can stop doing it, you should. But if it’s something you can’t stop doing, can’t stop working on, you have to carry on even if it’s difficult. I never thought I’d be in the presence of a Pulitzer Prize winning poet reading his poetry out loud (much less be the one who organized the experience that brought him there), but he never thought he’d be asked to come to Marrakech and lead creative writing sessions.
As I always say, you have to be confident in yourself because your confidence is the only thing that will inspire others’ confidence in you. You have to believe in yourself because if you don’t, why would anyone else? You have to realize that there are no gatekeepers of your career, there’s no one standing in the way of what you want besides yourself. You don’t need a publisher to get a book in the world and you don’t need to make the NYT Bestseller list to have written a great story.
We’ve got big plans to develop this Philoxenia community. We’re going to host another retreat in July (email me if you’d like to be on the list of the first people to find out about it!), we’re thinking about how to create a global digital community, and how to ensure the work that’s created and shared at the retreat has the biggest impact and reach possible. I can’t wait to see where we are a year from now, and five years, and ten years.
Thank you for your continued support of Parea, authors, great writing, and the work that we, as the greater community of writers, artists, publishers, editors, and marketers, are doing to further culture through storytelling.