La Muse: Day 1

I arrived at La Muse writers and artists retreat at midnight last night, so this could still be counted as day one. My journey took rather longer than expected, do to trains being stuck in tunnels between Spain and France, and then more trains not arriving, leaving me sitting for 3 hours on the floor of Narbonne Station, watching the last episode of Mad Men season two on my laptop!

I was a little distressed about it all, not used to being a lone traveller any more, especially not a long traveller with a stupidly heavy case on wheels, when French railway stations seem to pride themselves on their many and steep flights of stairs to get from Platform A to Platform B. Disabled access? A little lacking. But I was assisted by helping hands from behind on every staircase, kind French men who insisted on heaving up my stupidly heavy case for me! That made it all much more bearable. (I gave a free copy of my book to a lovely Austrian guy who went far beyond the call of duty and carried my bag up many many steps when we were forced, because of the stuck train, to get a lift by car from a wonderful French couple from Spain over the border to France to get to the next station. Thank you, A, if you are out there!)

OK. La Muse. Wow. Pictures (taken with new digital camera purchased specially for this purpose):

This is La Muse.

The view.
My living room - just one of the three rooms that are all mine - bathroom (with bath and shower), bedroom and enormous living room with a view of the wooded hills from four windows.

The bed. Large, and with what appears to be the fleece of several sheep to guard against the cold.

I met my fellow retreaters this morning, Susan Pogorzetski, a writer, and Cynthia Morris, writer and artist. (there is also Shahnaz, who was here for October and decided to stay on through La Muse's barter system). We have only met briefly, more later I hope.) We had a get-together with John, who runs La Muse together with his wife Kerry (who will appear tomorrow). Did we have any questions about the ten pages of "guidelines" we had been giving? Reading them at midnight last night was a little nerve-wracking, but ultimately they are about protecting us and making sure we can get as much work done, in peace and quiet, as possible, and that we respect the place and each other.

I do hope it's a productive, inspiring month for all of us. I am nervous I won't make the most of it, but those nerves, obviously, are completely self-destructive. Whatever I do, it's already good. I feel relaxed, the twitch under my eye that has been bugging me for two weeks has gone overnight. (So it wasn't the coffee, yippee!).

I will blog when I feel like it, which might be daily, might not. Not committing to anything!

I just stopped typing for a second and...

complete silence.

Yes.

Lovely news: a retreat fellowship!

A few months ago I applied for the wildcard fellowship for a month's paid retreat at the gorgeous-looking La Muse Writers and Artists Retreat in southern France. La Muse offers one unaffiliated fellowship a year, during November. I had my fingers crossed and crossed again, the place looks amazing and is set up for writers to be able to focus on their projects without too many other distractions (apart from French food, French wine and every other French delight!). I put together what I thought was an interesting application: how many other ex-British former science journalists living in Israel and working on a series of linked stories about a young Irish girl in the 1950s and a flash fiction collection would there be??


Well, I got this lovely email this morning from La Muse:

We've selected you as the Runner-Up to the Wildcard Fellowship. It was a very tough selection process. Your application was really great, so congratulations.

As a runner-up, we'd be very happy to welcome you to come to La Muse at a 50% discount for the month of October. Just so you know, there is only one runner-up, and it's something we decided to offer specifically because of the quality of your work. If you're able to come in October let me know! Otherwise, we can take a look at other months in the near future.

So excited. So so so excited. Sadly, October doesn't work for me, it is chock full of Jewish holidays which require that I be around here. I am hoping that it will work out for me to go soon, I feel this urgent need, especially with the book coming out, that I get on with the next projects, and I just haven't quite got the space and headspace here to focus. I know I can get so much done on retreat - my two one-week stints at Anam Cara have shown me that. I only hope I'll be able to still play Scrabulous online! (see previous post).