You may well wonder: Michael Jarmer, Writer Guy, why haven’t you been working on new fiction? And the answer to that question, in short, is that, since October of 2025, I have been somewhat distracted by another project, the one in which I write a poem-like-thing almost daily in response to the self-imposed challenge of listening to every record in my collection from A to Z. About half way through at the letter M, I’m loving this project and I plan to continue and finish, but the whole time I’ve been slogging away at listening, listening, listening, and dedicating my writing time almost exclusively to writing about listening, I’m sitting on three different long-form works of fiction in various stages of incomplete. For some time now, the idea that these three projects have been languishing in the proverbial manuscript drawer has been gnawing at me. It was time to do something about it.
Over the last couple of years, I have learned about a writing retreat series called WriteAways founded by writer friends of mine, Mimi Herman and John Yewell, and in this last year I decided to attend. While the retreats they offer overseas in France or Italy seemed a lot sexier, the more affordable travel led me to the one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So, I have been silent on the blog and have not spun a single record album for an entire week because I was in Santa Fe, in the lovely high dessert of New Mexico, trying to finish a draft of a novel I started in 2023. Good news: as a result of attending the WriteAways retreat last week, I am close, super close to a complete draft of a new long-form work of fiction, a short novel, or maybe another novella.
WriteAways is a retreat experience for writers of all experience levels. Many attendees are adults who have dreamed about writing their entire lives, or who have discovered recently an urge or inspiration to write after working in other fields or careers, and other attendees are experienced writers, writers who may even have degrees in writing or publishing credits, who are simply looking for an opportunity for solitude and community in which to get some work done. Happily, despite the differences in experience levels, there is no discernible hierarchy; each participant is treated with the same level of respect and receives the same level of rigorous critique or support from facilitators and participants alike. The WriteAway retreat offers a perfect balance between open-ended time for writing, opportunities in workshop to get feedback on a current project, and time in community for meals and frivolity. The group of attendees is small and thus introvert-friendly, the opposite of a writing conference that attracts dozens if not hundreds of strangers for days upon days of awkwardness. WriteAways also offer a degree of flexibility to suit their participants. Typically, these retreats are designed as generative experiences where individuals work on drafting brand new material to share each day in workshop. However, on this occasion, at least a couple of us were working on projects very much already in progress and were immersed in the messiness around revision, rearranging, removing, replacing, and rewriting.
It felt to me that the WriteAway experience worked just as well for generating new material as it did for the difficult work of revision.
So, here I am, back home in my little writing studio, surrounded by my record collection, the listening challenge calling out to me, and I’m deciding this morning to take one more day off from writing about music to pen this little missive about my experience of the last week. It felt good to get back to fiction. I feel confident that I have gained some momentum toward finishing a draft of one of my incomplete projects. And I think I am committed now to finding a good balance between the listening project poem-like-thing composition and this more immediate and achievable goal of getting this novel drafted and ready for readers.
A big thanks to Mimi and John for their hospitality and generosity. Here’s a link to their website for further information.
Writeaways Workshops and Retreats
michael jarmer 