The Writer’s Retreat at Good Contrivance Farm, located in Reisterstown, has taken on the mission of offering a home for writers in search of space and time to work. In the warmer months, visiting writers offer a workshop (for a fee) and a craft talk for the public. The current occupant of the barn loft apartment is poet and essayist Ross Gay, known for his poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and The Book of Delights.
Soon, you’ll be taking up residence in the Barn Loft at Good Contrivance Farm for a week that includes teaching a workshop, giving a craft talk for the public, and working on your own writing. Can you share a little about the value of stepping away from your usual environment for writers?
I like changing my scene for a number of reasons, but one of them is that I do find that being in places less familiar to me kind of reminds me (how) to pay attention. Obviously (I guess…for me anyway!) the goal is to pay attention all the time, no matter where you are, maybe where you mostly are especially. But for me I do often find that I notice a little more, or at least differently, when I’m kind of away. Also, though I really love doing laundry and cooking meals and stuff, it’s nice when that’s just not what we’re doing for a few days because we’re working on (in this case, I think) essays.
Anyone who has spent time with your poems and many delights knows you have a special connection to the natural world. In what ways might the setting of a working farm shape the work you will do throughout your retreat?
I have no idea! We’ll see! I’m excited to see!
Writing is such a solitary endeavor yet a big part of the Good Contrivance mission, so to speak, is public outreach. What role does community play in your own writing practice?
It’s sort of all about community one way or another. I write with (and for) dear friends, sharing work, sharing ideas, wondering on stuff together. That’s always a part of my little process. Also I like giving readings, and feel like the interactions at readings, and the conversations that happen around readings, are often really important for me, and generative. More than once a conversation after a reading has led to an essay or a turn in an essay or something. Also, I’m always reading, and reading almost necessarily slams you into community with other readers, in addition to who/what you’re reading, and maybe who/what they read too, etc. I teach, too, so think a lot about writing and community that way, how a classroom is a community of writers, etc. Anyway, big role. Etc.
As part of your stay at Good Contrivance, you’ll be offering a craft talk on “Writing the Garden,” and naturally, when I hear someone speak about gardening, my thoughts immediately turn to the idea of growth. As a teacher, how do you help the writers in your care cultivate growth in their own writing practice?
Oh, I just try to encourage us to consider what we love, what we want to read, what we want to make, stuff like that. I hope I can share my enthusiasm for stuff such that, even if the stuff I’m enthused about doesn’t interest them, the enthusiasm does.
After he answered the questions I sent to him last week, Ross Gay went out to his garden to harvest some potatoes, and so it feels especially fitting that he has come to Maryland, to Good Contrivance Farm, for a writing retreat.
Ross’ time at Good Contrivance will culminate in a craft talk, open to the public, complete with a buffet dinner under a gazebo next to a refinished barn where writers and readers alike have come to be part of the community Ron Tanner, Good Contrivance’s steward, has so lovingly created.
