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This newsletter was drafted on a Thursday from Lubec, Maine. The Common Room at the Heartwood Lodge was filled with the patter of raindrops and bird songs from outside, mixed with the clicking of laptop keys. You could almost see the words making their way from writers’ minds to their laptop screens. Over my week at the Quoddy Writing Retreat, the pages of my notebook filled with questions for myself and with revision and craft moves from our daily whole-group gatherings. Georgia Heard and Ralph Fletcher began each day with a mini-lesson that invited us to reimagine our writing. Lessons from my notes apply to life beyond this retreat too. • Every writer has their own process. Maybe they begin with a collection of moments, hoping to discover their big idea by finding patterns within their stories; or maybe they begin with a big idea and follow the snail shell's outer spiral inward to reveal smaller details that align with it for their readers along the way. • Feedback isn’t about fixing. Feedback is about being curious, not rewriting someone else’s writing. Sometimes writers know what kind of feedback they’d like. When they don’t, you could use feedback lenses like: “Your piece seems to be about…” “I really connected to the part…” “I wanted to know more about…” It was extraordinary to revise my book draft through one-on-one writing conferences with Georgia and Ralph, alongside feedback from my response group. This experience pushed me to be clear about the feedback I sought and to be open to feedback I didn’t know I needed. How do you invite others to give you feedback? How do you offer feedback from a curiosity stance rather than a fixing stance?
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