Julia Flynn Siler

Was it the scent of wood smoke drifting through the ground floor of the castle from the open fireplace in the massive country kitchen? Or the vases of olive branches and wildflowers we’d picked from the surrounding hills. Or perhaps the workshops held in a grand library, all of us seated around a long wooden table, discussing Marcel Proust’s decision to switch from third person to the more intimate first-person in his novel, Remembrance of Things Past.

These memories of Tuscany are still fresh as I ride the airport bus on from Heathrow back on an overcast English day. I was invited to join this year’s Oxford Writing Mentors retreat in Tuscany this month led by my tutor at Oxford University, Kate Kennedy. The experience unfolded like a dream. Less a holiday and more like a working trip in a beautiful setting, our schedules were full – with morning workshops and trips to the nearby hill towns in the afternoon, dinner around the kitchen table, and “Campari Conversations” afterwards between some of the writers leading or attending the retreat.

Now in its fourth year, the retreat took place at Castello di Galbino, a small castle near the hill town of Anghiari. It was led by Kate, who is the director of Oxford University’s Life Writing Centre and the author, most recently, of Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound, and by Tony Gray, a DPhil from Oxford who runs a small publishing business called Words by Design. Our third tutor for the week was Lucasta Miller, the Oxford-educated literary critic and author of The Bronte Myth, a biography of the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems.

Kate, Lucasta, and Tony led discussions of some of the big questions around life writing (which, in the U.S. and elsewhere, spans biography or memoir.) We talked about voice, structure, the ethical issues of writing this retreat different from some of the other writing gatherings I’ve attended over the years was the high level of experience of the participants. One who I loved meeting was the two-time Emmy-award winning graduate school professor at the City University of New York,  Vanessa Botelho, a visiting scholar this spring at the Centre for Life Writing this spring, who’s working on a memoir about her family and Anglo-Indian identity. Another was Marina Perez de Arcos, a historian and DPhil from Oxford who has published widely in the field of international relations and is writing a biography of a Spanish president.

I had spent the past few months in Oxford as a visiting academic with the Oxford Next Horizons Program and that’s how I’d gotten to know Kate, who led our group of 18 people in two life writing workshops. She also was my tutor in one-on-one sessions, helping me hone down my Next Horizons writing project and reframe a book project I’d been struggling with. Perhaps the sweetest moment of the retreat for me was travelling ahead of the larger group with Kate, Emilia, and Tony – and having a few hours in the castle to ourselves (which we used to pick and arrange the wildflowers that we put in everyone’s bedrooms.)

Another sweet moment took place on a field trip to the town of Arezzo. Vanessa and I discovered a mutual love of pistachio gelato. And I’ll confess that I do regret eating so much pasta (it was delicious!)  I also managed to make some progress on my new book project – grappling with the thorny question of “So what?” (in other words, what’s so special about your story that will make people want to read it?)

But it’s the small moments I’ll remember most – the kindness of Marina’s husband in sending our group French macarons, a conversation with the Oxford-based  psychologist Rosemary Napper about how unusual pronunciation of names (Magdalen College is pronounced Maudlin) as a form of linguistic elitism, since “you only know if you know,” making a white chocolate cheesecake with Kate’s delightful daughter Emilia, the fireflies at night, and opening the heavy wooden shutters and glass panes each morning, to a glorious dawn chorus of birds.

Il canto degli uccelli era così bello!

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Julia Flynn Siler is an academic visitor at Oxford University. She is the author of three nonfiction books and a regular contributor to National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal. www.juliaflynnsiler.com