There are no stories in this place.

“There are no stories in this place”. Edith had heard her husband Ralph say this an uncountable number of times ever since he retired. Part of his excitement of no longer working for a living was that he would have plenty of time to write short stories and maybe even write a novel or two. But that had not happened. She often saw him in the living room, sitting on a comfy chair, a pad of paper on the table before him, a pen in his right hand, while he stared at the fireplace. He might write down a title, but nothing or just a few sentences would follow.

Edith talked to some writers that she knew, and one of them suggested that Ralph go on a writer’s retreat in the north country. The woman claimed that it did wonders for her writing. It wasn’t so much what was taught by the instructors to the people who, like her, were trying to become more productive writers. It was the outdoor environment that had given her most of her ideas.

So Edith suggested this strategy to Ralph. He was silent for a few seconds, and then said “I have heard about people doing that with some success.” The next words were inside his head only and not spoken, “Won’t you miss me?” That seemed too much like reaching for a compliment to him, so he said nothing.

The Drive to the Writer’s Retreat

As he drove to the retreat he noticed that on one particular stretch of the road, most of the cottages were abandoned, with windows showing an empty blackness rather than signs of human life. And sometimes the windows were boarded up. A few times he could see other deteriorating signs of an abandoned house and property once enjoyed by the people who spent summers there. His imagination gave him views of what he thought the buildings may have been like when they were lived in. The word ‘happy’ appeared several times in his mind.

One shift from the past of a building no longer used as it had been made him laugh. It was an old church with the word “JUDO” on a large sign over the front door. He joked to himself that the minister must have been a really tough guy.

At the Writers’ Retreat

The writer’s retreat was a beautiful place. The building looked down upon a broad, glistening lake, and it was surrounded by several kinds of richly leafed trees both young and old. It served a variety of organizations throughout the year. There were tents in which writer retreat participants could sleep and possibly writer.

Ralph felt a little bad that he was there without his wife, who was not a writer, but an artist. Still, she went on similar events for artists, so there was some balance. So far, Edith was a much more successful artist than he was a writer. He hoped that this writing session might help change that inequality. She did too, but thought that telling him so might be interpreted as a criticism of his ability.

There was a mixture of relatively old and young participants in this retreat. Right at the beginning he sat at a table with people around his own age.

Ralph’s Early Phone Calls to Edith

First Call

“One of my fellow writers, a man called Sam, and I quickly became writing partners. That came as no surprise as he too is recently retired and looks like he is about my age. When the people attending the writers’ retreat were asked in the first meeting why they had picked a retreat to further their writing, like me, he said, ‘there are no stories in my house, I had to go somewhere else. I knew that we were quite alike, and could possibly help each other”.

Second Call

The first writing exercise was to create a short story between 100 – 200 words inspired by looking at the lake in front of us. I wrote such a story about the head of a dead man appearing on the surface of the water, his head bobbing up above the water. The people running the show did not appear to me to be impressed by this. All the other stories were much more positive. But my new friend told me that he liked what I wrote.

The third day that we were there I told him of the abandoned cottages that I had seen, and how I thought that they would be good places to write a story about. I also mentioned the judo church and my impression of the what the minister must have been like.

I could say that his eyes gleamed when I mentioned the cottages, and he said that the minister of that church was relatively big and strong, so judo would have been appropriate for him. As a child he had several times been intimidated by his powerful preaching.

One of those cottages used to be owned by his family. He spent every summer of his childhood there, and he almost cried as a young man when his parents sold the place to a business that did nothing with the place”.

The last writing exercise involved going somewhere not far away that could be a source of a good story. The two men knew where that place would be right away.

The Final Product

The two men pulled into the worn-down driveway – dirt, not paved – in two separate cars. Sam started talking about the place right away. Four broken windows faced the road. Someone clearly had thrown rocks. The building was red brick. Beside it was white painted wood extension with the same dark triangular roof. In front of both were ragged bushes that had once been deliberately planted and nurtured.

The two men wrote rapidly on the pads of paper that they brought with them. The stories were different, but both reflected what they saw and what they imagined . When they returned to the location of the Writers’ Retreat, and read their stories out loud to their fellow writers, they were told by the teachers that they were impressive stories.

After all the stories were read out, the teachers approached them rather secretly and asked if they could use those stories in later retreats. One of them said, “All places have stories. You certainly found some good ones from the abandoned cottage.”

This made Ralph think. When he returned home, he walked around his house, and imagined what a future writer would compose, after Ralph and Edith had left it years later.

He wrote it as a story. He learned that he had been wrong; there were stories in this place, and they could speak to him.