9 Lessons From a Writer's Retreat That Changed How I Write—and Live

Notes from a 30-something writer soaking up the sharp wit and quiet power of women over 40.

When I heard about a writer’s retreat hosted by two titans of media and publishing—in Paris(!)—I knew I had to go. There was one problem. According to the workshop’s website, it was “for femme-identifying writers over 40.”

Femme? Check. Forty? Well, if we’re judging by my wiry chin hairs and number of drapey linen sets, then yes, I’ve been happily, proudly, over 40 for years now. But on paper I’m a 35 year old (with 40 clearly in sight), but who still doesn’t know how many glasses of white wine she can handle to not feel it in the morning.

“Should we just do a bottle?” - shot on film by Kelsey Glennon

So I wrote the hosts, hoping they’d be down to take my money and let me in (they did!). I made the case that what united me to a group of 40+ women was a shared, poignant period of transition. A sense that the life I’m living just isn’t working; the work I do will not hold; the invisibility I feel isn’t unique; and the reservations I’m having around partnering and procreating at this specific juncture in time are perhaps worth putting down on the page.

I was drawn to the workshop because of the career-writer hosts, and a curiosity for what it’s like to be a female voice in media talking about more than just this' season’s “core” trending on TikTok, or summer’s hottest “undiscovered” destination.

But I was also drawn to the age qualifier too. See, I’ve spent most of my life in the safe, comforting shadow of older women. I grew up with two older sisters whom I watched, analyzed, and observed like a biologist. If I studied their mistakes and hopped carefully behind them, observing their missteps and making agile choices informed by those accounts, I’d leap gracefully from lily pad to lily pad—never falling into a murky unknown.

Of course, that’s not how life works. I didn’t avoid dating awful men just because I watched my sisters do it before me. Knowing about the uncertainty ahead doesn’t make it any more predictable.

But, I’ll probably never stop looking to older women for the secrets to a less opaque future. And I’ll never stop pocketing their lived wisdom and carrying it with me like weighted lucky charms.

Here are some of those charms.

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“You’re not escaping, you’re just looking for something you haven’t found yet.”

In my twenties, I traveled constantly. Both for work as a dancer, but also in the in-between time I had between contracts, unable to permit myself rest or be alone with my thoughts. When I’d boomerang back to my parents’ house for meals, my father would say to me, smugly, over dinner—“Wherever you go, there you are.” Or in the words of a different, also smug, man.

"You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another."
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

He (dad, and Hemingway too, I guess) wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t run away from my internal discourse and looming choices I needed to make (like, what to do with myself when I age out of being a dancer at the ancient age of 28). Running from decision-making was certainly what I was doing then.

But as I travel now in my 30s, as a writer and a single, self-supported woman, I’m not running away anymore. I’m comfortable being alone (lately, it feels fucking fantastic actually). But still, spontaneously booking travel and taking off for a week of novelty in a new city hits me with guilt—like I’m avoiding something that I should be confronting. Contributing to an IRA. Updating my LinkedIn. Feeling bad about the dusty, unused corners of my uterus. Sitting with past personal wreckage and improving myself from it.

Then, one of the women in this workshop said the above words to me. I wasn’t running away, I was running to. I used to hide behind my self-sabotoge by calling it self-discovery. But that’s not this. The reason I’m traveling now isn’t to escape, it’s to find the parts of me that still feel missing. And that’s always worth booking the ticket to do.

Your problems won’t disappear in a new place, but you can find and access different parts of yourself in new places, and those parts, and the version of you you become, will approach those problems in new ways.

The woman I become in Paris is not one I recognize. In Paris, she is a woman who drinks Coca-Cola (it tastes better out of a glass bottle, with sugar not corn syrup). She rides bicycles wearing long, flowy skirts and sheer shirts. She eats butter and bread three times a day and doesn’t feel bad about it. She sits still. She stops to analyze the scent of spring and how long afternoons smell like cigarettes, mineral water, and dry grass. In Paris she does not walk or trudge or march or tromp. She saunters. Her hips sink into each step with an unnecessary flourish. She reads more, looks at her phone less. She meets gazes and doesn’t look away. She takes up space (at tables alone at restaurants, and on multiple park chairs) and doesn’t apologize.

I can’t explain why I’ll never see this woman in New York or Florida or California. She does not step off the plane in these places. But the things this woman shows me about how to be with myself and what to prioritize, stay with me.

“Long Skirts, Sheer Shirts,” is going on the list of potential titles for forth-coming book.

Women have relationships with cities

Paris winks at me, makes me feel seen and stunning for just putting on pants and a bold lip. New York does not coddle; it challenges and cheers me on. It doesn’t mock or deride my big ideas or focused, frenzied energy. Florence pours me a glass of wine and tells me to ditch the to-do list—that I’m beautiful, and so are all the simplest things in life right in front of us.

Cities don’t take. They don’t ask you to be a long-distance girlfriend, or unpaid therapist, or life coach, or silent business partner. They don’t expect you to do the grocery shopping and meal prep, to change your name, to text them back immediately, to doctor their bruised feelings.

Cities give. They tease out secret parts of a woman’s personality like the world’s most curious partner. Some cities encourage us to lick gelato slowly with long tongues. Others celebrate us picking up the meat and gnawing it off the bone, grease up our elbows and all over our face. These women are the same woman. Cities get that, and ask for no explanation or defense when we deviate from character. You can not shock, disgust, or disappoint a city.

Cities have been some of the most supportive relationships of my adult life. And I’ll have many more.

You are going to be fed more in the long term doing nothing, than sitting at a desk writing an essay. Permit yourself to do nothing.

Despite all of the hard data showing us that hive mind, hustle culture, and obsessively refreshing our inbox won’t make us produce more, or produce better; the American in me still struggles to permit myself to sit still, be bored, waste time, wander, indulge, or putter.

As much as I wanted to hammer out an eloquent, poignant essay within the 5 day window I had to be in a beautiful bubble of safety, creativity, inspiration, and incubation; sometimes the more “productive” thing to do is to release your expectation to do anything.

The specific means the general if you’re honest enough

An audience can tell when you’re not telling them something, or not being truthful with yourself. Don’t worry about whether what you’re writing is going to be interesting. If you’ve felt it, someone else has too.

We are living in a world right now that is a direct backlash to how women are living in the world right now.

Women (historically/eventually/narratively et al) always end up being in service.

“There’s no template that doesn’t end with a woman falling in love, or owning a canning company, or going through a journey that ends with her being seen through a patriarchal lens.” — Glynnis MacNicol

Trying to put our story on the page without slipping into slick, available tropes that are statistically rewarded is not an easy task. Incel theory, manosphere, gamer-gate, the bro-vote, “America’s Crisis in Masculinity.” The rising fervor for a world where woman is less free is undeniably loud and getting louder.

Spotify tells me I can embed this podcast so it’ll play from 20:27, but Substack seems to have other ideas. So pick up around minute 20 for a few minutes on why “tariffs are worth it if we don’t have to deal with women in the workplace anymore.”

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Which brings me to the next nugget…

The world needs your stories

Women could write stories every day for the next century and still not match the amount of male-centered stories, and versions thereof, that exist in the written universe. Whenever I start to think that Substack doesn’t need another 30-something newsletter about a woman’s quest to live life well, free, solo, beautifully. I think about how ardently Glynnis MacNicol said these words.

“We are occupying a common space but not seeing our lives reflected back at us that doesn’t make us feel like any kind of community,” MacNicol said, making the case that putting pen to paper to document our lives is “a radical feminist act.”

She went on to describe how some of the most important, historic female writings we have today were once shoved into wall cavities and between beams—a desperate attempt to protect and preserve what it was like be a woman at that time, and a whispered dedication to the future women who might find it.

In today’s increasingly desperate times, where women’s rights, freedoms, voices, agency, and financial independence are visibly precarious, she begged the question “What book would you write for the future society of women that might be shoved in the walls, hidden in a closet somewhere? Something to say ‘this is who we were, what we thought—at this time, in this place.”

shot on film, by Kelsey Glennon

Female porn is freedom, not necessarily sex.

Throughout the week, there were writing prompts on hunger and desire, and what do you know—the essays often had nothing to do with sex.

Further reading….

Three Women on Why They Won’t Get Married

“We want understanding without taking the time to get there. We want to feel alive without being afraid to die.”

There’s not much to say about it that it doesn’t say itself.

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And on a light note, I’ll leave you with this, a video recommended to me by one of the workshop attendees. To all of the women who standing at a crossroads—let’s reframe it as a party, a celebration, a choice that in itself is a small act of freedom. A spritz of laughter on the patriarchal wildfire.