Writing Life – Write on the World

Sometimes the best way to get more writing done is to stop trying to write at home. I know that sounds strange. After all, home is where most of us write. But home is also where the laundry needs to be folded, the dishes need to be washed, the dog needs to go outside, and the cat has decided that whatever you’re doing is less important than paying attention to them while they rest their behinds on your keyboard. Even when those things aren’t urgent, they’re always there in the back of your mind.

A ramshackle gray barn, rolling hills, and fog settling over the mountains—the perfect backdrop for my most recent creative writing retreat.

That’s one reason I’ve become such a fan of getting away for writing retreats. I’ve been taking long weekend writing getaways for several months now, and I’m amazed at how much work I can accomplish when I remove myself from my everyday environment. The trick is that these don’t have to be expensive, organized writing retreats. You can create your own.

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Some people change your life by opening doors. Others change it by convincing you that you can never walk through those doors without them. Julie Buntin’s Famous Men is an incisive and unsettling literary novel about ambition, mentorship, class, and the complicated ways young women are often forced to navigate systems built by powerful men. Following Will Miles from a struggling Michigan teenager to an aspiring writer entangled with a celebrated author, Buntin crafts a story that is as much about artistic aspiration as it is about the dangers of mistaking access for opportunity.

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Will lives in Greening, Michigan, where a damaging rumor has left her isolated and desperate for a future beyond her small town. When she discovers the work of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer who also grew up in Greening, she becomes convinced that he may be the father she has never known. That possibility sends her to New York City, where she manages to gain entry into Nathaniel’s world and eventually becomes his assistant. What follows is a complicated relationship built on admiration, dependence, power imbalance, and mutual need.