The orientation was just that. Ground rules were laid once we were all introduced. We went over housekeeping things like, “ be respectful of the creative space of others”, especially when offering up opinions or critiques. I sat there thinking that most of these housekeeping rules should be a given and then anecdotes began to unfurl about past participants who’d violated the code of honor between creatives from past retreats. The anticipation had begun to subside yet I admit there were still butterflies. I’d been accepted, but had I really proven myself? I’d often been on stages an unassuming teen in a room full of poets and rappers commanding the microphone and flexing my lyrical capability to skeptics. Demonstration wasn’t anything I was shy about, but this was a forum I was unaccustomed to. My writing had gotten me here, but would these scholars embrace me once they met me in person? We are talking Harvard graduates here - Harvard graduates with multiple degrees among them, award-winning wordsmiths and world travelers that believe in creative writing as a veritable art form so worthy of study and meticulous refinement that they’d developed this amazing opportunity for fellow writers to come to this remarkable enclave in the world to expound upon our craft. I felt humbled and grateful and blessed. I was beside myself with nerdy merriment.
As I previously mentioned, there were two retreats to choose from — one in Paris, the other here in Spain. Unsurprisingly, Granada doesn’t receive the wealth of applicants that Paris does. It’s Paris, after all. Moreover, Paris always reaches its capacity in participants, but Granada not so much. Add to that, extenuating circumstances that prevented the others that were chosen from coming; Nadia and I ended up being the only two to show up. Although, it would have been nice to meet more writers, I must say the personal attention that was paid to us and our work was all the more felt with only us there. I just keep winning.
As a rapper and poet, I’ve been around flocks of performers of all types. So, I generally know what to expect from comrades in these circles. It was the same with visual artists. We are all different, but there are similarities inherent within each of us as members of these creative communities that compose the whole of who we are. For instance, when in the company of other visual artists, I may lament with a fellow painter over the closing of Pearl Paint on Canal St. in New York’s Chinatown as easily as I would get caught up in heated discourse over which song - Ether or Takeover was a better battle record with another rapper (it’s Ether for me, btw, you can fight me on this). I didn’t really know what to expect from these writers. What did writers talk about amongst themselves? I was eager to find it all out.
The champions of the Cambridge Writer’s Retreat are Rita Banerjee, Tim Horvath and Diana Norma Szokolyai - all accomplished authors and each a force in their own right.
It was a great introductory conversation with great food. I was exhausted and headed back to my hotel room. The first workshop began at 10am. Breakfast began at 7am — and it was free.
I woke up bright and early to avail myself of the continental breakfast. Yes, food motivates me. A lot. There was salami, ham and pepperoni to choose from to go along with fresh baked breads and eggs swimming in olive oil. The caffeine was overflowing. I was charged and ready to get started.
Class in session:
When it comes to learning, I need to be as prepared as possible in order to feel comfortable. The retreat organizers had created a dropbox for all the participants full of readings and music for us to get into before we got there. I printed all my readings and put them in a binder for the classes. It was about 100 pages worth of text. I’d skimmed through everything and took notes where I could prior to the first class.
Each workshop had a particular focus specific to the teacher’s area of expertise and area of interest. The first of the sessions was facilitated by both Norma and Rita. The focus of this workshop established the tone of the retreat. The focal point of the first workshop was CREDO. Credo would be explained as the stance an artist takes and creates by, the spirit inherent in our work that we articulate for the world to observe. The credo is the statement that defines our individual voice separating us from one another. What do you stand for? Say what it is and start from there. Diana Norma and Rita are co-editors and writing contributors to their book, Credo: An Anthology of Manifestos & Sourcebook for Creative Writing. I bought a copy from them during the retreat. I’m still getting through it. For one, I’m a slow reader. I re-read pages sometimes. I have a huge fear of reading a book and not being able to speak strongly and intelligently about it afterwards, which has happened to me before after speeding through a text. Like I just sped through all them pages and don’t remember what happened? Nah. Plus, I take my time ingesting the information. I hope those are good excuses for reading slowly. I’m working on this, striving to improve. The other reason it’s taking so long is because I’m getting so much out of it. I’ve never read a “tips for writers” book. Writers writing about how to write. I am learning so much. It’s one of those books that you get halfway through and get mad with yourself because you realize you should’ve had a highlighter with you so you can slide it across all the goodies you uncover on each page. I’m almost done.
After the first session concluded, Nadia and I were given keys to the room that we would come to know as our classroom. We were invited to make use of the room whenever there wasn’t a workshop. This room had a terrace. Over the next five days, this room became my safe space and one of my greatest lessons learned there — I am extremely productive writing in dedicated and beautiful spaces.
Rita would later explain that they were highly selective with who they chose to participate. Once participants started to notify them they couldn’t attend, they didn’t rush to then fill in spots just for the sake of having more people on the retreat when the writing wasn’t up to snuff with their standards. They chose writers for the retreat whose voices really spoke to them. Highly selective?
And you chose me?
There was a Tapas Tour scheduled for later that evening — the first of many scheduled touristy things on our agenda. Tim’s daughter, Ella, is a vegan, so looking for vegan options became an adventure all its own for Tim and his wife Mary Ellen, an adventure the rest of us joined them on for some meals. They’d discovered a restaurant a decent stroll from the hotel and we all decided to join them as a group after our first session.
After a hearty meal and discussion, our group decided to part ways. I was in dire need of replenishing toiletries and Rita graciously offered to take me to the pharmacy. We New Yorkers are accustomed to seeing Duane Reades, Walgreens and Rite-Aids on every other block in the city, even the outer boroughs are flooded with them — a convenience I would learn is unique to the United States because in the old world, yeah, not so much. The pharmacy was a little walk away and she knew the way. I happily accepted her guidance and we were off. We were off in the middle of the day. In Spain. During the siesta. In the middle of a heatwave.
Americans we always hear about the siesta. It’s this ideally magical time in the day in Spain when the world stands still. All the townspeople shut down their old world shops and commerce comes to a halt. The streets are silent as the workforce powers down for a nap only to return rejuvenated and charged to finish out the slightly longer workweek. It was my first siesta. I didn’t know that the siesta became a thing in Spain because of how hot it gets. It’s so hot that working outdoors is downright impossible. Laborers would pass out or even die. That’s how the siesta was born — out of heat so hot one could die being in it. The streets were desolate. And this was the heat we found ourselves in milling about the cobblestone streets of the Albaycin looking for a pharmacy.
There was something captivating at every turn.
We marveled at how beautiful it all was. It was like being on a movie set.
An empty movie set. We began to become really conscious of our aloneness. We’d hear a moped sputtering in the distance. None of the shops were open and we’d been walking a little while. Suddenly it appeared though. The oasis in this desert that had come to be our existence in the middle of the Albaicín.
“Is that what I think that is?”
“What’s that?”
“Well where I’m from, that’s what a 99cent store looks like. Yeah, I think that’s what that is.”
We got ready to walk past it, Rita said, “I think we should go there.”
Thank God for Rita.
“¿Como esta?!” I greeted the Asian shop owner like I knew him my whole life. He laughed. Yes, this is JUST like the 99cent stores at home. I’m gagging. We are like two kids in Toys-R-Us, well, for us writers, two kids in Staples. We shared stories of our love for stationery aisles. We ran up and down each section of the store gleefully picking up way more than we had intended. Women.
Women who write.
Women who write shopping. We must have looked a complete mess to the owner and his family. I would pop my head out, every so often, hold an item out and ask “¿Cuanto?” To which he’d respond with the amount in euro. Euro was more than the dollar, yes, but you could get way more for your euro than you can for your dollar. I had so many things in my hands, I felt like I needed a cart. The two of us definitely could have filled up a cart. We made it to the cashier and thanked the shop owner for his patience and help as he watched us decipher our tender. We walked out of there like Julia Roberts after she got to shop in Pretty Woman.
I wonder still what they call that type of store there. My entire trip, I never made it to the pharmacy.
Satiated by our unexpected discount shopping spree, we made our way through the town looking for a bus to catch back to the hotel. Granada is a majestic web of peaks and valleys. Walking from the hotel down to the town was all downhill, going back that way? Not so much. A walk all the way uphill was not something either of us were willing to do in this scorching heat.
A little fun fact about me: my Spanish sounds much better than it actually is. I also do really well giving the impression that I have a greater comprehension of the language than I really do. I didn’t realize this until finding myself in Spain with other intellectuals that speak less Spanish than I do.
We asked a gentleman for directions. I listened intently, catching a few phrases here and there, presuming that once he left, Rita and I could compare notes and make sense of it all. Once he left, I said, “did you get anything from that?” She said, “Oh, I figured you knew everything he was saying” and so Rita paid little mind to the conversation. I replayed what he said in my mind and then suggested we follow traffic, it had to be going somewhere that would lead to something. I was right. We made it to the bus stop and headed back safely, full of knick-knacks and fond memories. It was time to enjoy the rest of the siesta and get ready for tapas that evening.
We all convened in the hotel lobby and walked down la Cuesta de Gomérez, which is a sloping pathway from outside our hotel that leads down into the Albaicín. This majestic outdoor corridor is at once a park and forest that conveniently puts travelers in the marketplace and Granada’s city.
The winding road led into the heart of the Albaicín replete with shops and tapas restaurants. Granada is known for its tapas, and more specifically here, in the Andalucia. We were meandering the pathways, leaning into the curves of the streets. I admired everything.
Once you purchase a drink, alcoholic or otherwise, you are eligible for free tapas. I was awestruck. Hot dogs, hamburgers, nachos, taquitos, all qualified as tapas. They consider these to be small meals, but the portions are much larger than I expected them to be. It’s really easy to get full. After the third restaurant, we were all stuffed and ready to call it quits. It was getting late, yet the marketplace was wide awake. It’s the siesta effect, I think.
Shopping is a pastime that rejuvenates women. The mere prospect of gathering goods triggers some irresistibly primal urge we’re unable to ignore. And when two or more of us convene at the same time under said conditions? Fuggedaboutit. We walked about the marketplace revived and back in full-on shopping mode. We must have looked like madness to Tim, the poor sole man so unfortunate enough to be in a shopping center in the middle of the night with women.
We went HAM in the streets of the marketplace I tell you. I had to tell myself at every turn, “ummm…put that down, you have no money, broke down Liz, your sad excuse for a suitcase, you remember her? Yeah you have no room for all that extra stuff”, but at the same time I was having this entirely opposite conversation with myself that was more like, “omg, I can’t believe how cheap this is. This would cost a grip back home! I need two of those.”
I spent lots of money I hadn’t intended on, picking up more souvenirs and just enjoying the beauty of this cosmopolitan marketplace. I complain about spending money because I had so little of it, but everything was priced really low, so low that the difference in euro still didn’t make a dent compared to what something of the same quality would’ve been priced in the U.S. The streets were alive — heavily populated. It reminded me of New York’s Chinatown, a cleaner rendition. Granada, in general, is so clean. I made mention of the lack of rats and how taken aback I was by their absence. “Where are the rats?” I asked. It still doesn’t fully compute. How could a place so much older be so clean? New Yorkers — we gotta do better. I was having the time of my life. I bargained with a shopkeeper, in Spanish, and got him down by 5 euro on a set of arm bracelets. I gathered business cards from others, excited to look up their websites once I got home.
We got some gelato on our way back to the hotel. It was past midnight. Someone on the street offered me some marijuana asking if he could be my boyfriend, and all in Spanish, of course.
It was definitely an interesting night. The marketplace wasn’t foreign to me at all. It was eerily familiar. I was miles away and right at home.
Back in class:
I began to learn the ways of the writer. By nature what is true of all of us is our love of telling stories, our unapologetic obsessions with stationery and our unwavering love for words. We collect them in our own ritualistic ways. We write them into the margins of our notebooks, type them into the memo apps installed on our phones and jot them down on post-its. We place them carefully on our pages and in our minds for safekeeping, for later use.
Diana Norma’s class focused on the poetry of Granada, the art of flamenco, the artist and poet, Federico García Lorca and el duende. I really appreciated that the sessions were geared towards the Spanish habitat of this retreat. Being informed about the area while moving through it was special. There was so much to absorb about this place. Granada isn’t some accidental location we’d flown to for tapas and to shop. The region is entrenched in a rich heritage and melding of Christian, Islam, Moorish, Arab, African and European influence. It was in this session that we began to get the true grasp of the footprint Granada had on the world. The airport we’d landed in was named for Federico García Lorca, the prominent and premier poet, playwright and theatre director was native to this region. He’s the man there like Rihanna in Barbados or Lebron in Cleveland so we had to get into his legacy, it was only right.
In our lesson on flamenco, Norma shared with us one of the more personal reasons why Granada is a part of the world she holds dearly. It was revealed to her some years ago that she comes from a long line of Gypsy women. There is a large Romani, or, Gypsy population in Granada. Their community takes residence in the mountainside where they carve their homes out of dwelling in caves. Norma learned later in life, and after asking uncomfortable questions, whether she was part Gypsy. Her family wasn’t necessarily eager to reveal this part of her ethnic background to her because Gypsies get a bad rap as a people. The stereotypes that surround this ethnic group are that they are swindlers and transient vagabonds that aren’t to be trusted. They face discrimination even though their presence in Spain dates back to 1000 A.D. Gypsies descend from the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. They have a large population in Granada, many of their communities residing in the cavernous mountainside of the Albaicín. As a black woman born in America, I know all about marginalization and being discriminated against so learning about their heritage and treatment in Spain resonated. Being placed on the periphery by stereotypes in society in a way that diminishes your socioeconomic existence is a daily reality the world over. Hmm.
We went over el duende. El duende has no literal translation in English. It is a word used to describe that which is impossible to describe. It is the performer at her most vulnerable radiating from within and expelling it from her loins for her audience to consume. It is the emotional zenith at which she delivers her most immersive performance. It is the pain of the Gypsies’ persecution melded with their resilience to survive. I was here for all of it. It was more than the passion exhibited by the dancer; it was the aura that would form around them keeping its audience members so captivated. They open their homes up to tourists, the Gypsies, and put on flamenco performances in their living rooms. We would be going to one of these Saturday night.
Tonight, we would attend a more formal flamenco exhibition in the Alhambra garden, the Generalife, which was conveniently located just downstairs from our hotel. Norma explained the difference in the two shows and her preference of the more intimate experience of the el duende in the homes of the Gypsies. I was excited for all of it. There is contention and dispute among ethnic groups of the region as to the origin of the exquisite art of flamenco. When something is dope, everyone wants to claim it. You know how that go.
That night, we all met up in the lobby to head over to Generalife, the majestic park, garden and footprint to the palace of the Alhambra.
The show, entitled, “Lorca y Granada: En Los Jardines del Generalife” was the annual tribute put on by el Instituto Andaluz del Flamenco and the Ballet Flamenco de Andalucia. The show’s program paints the experience as the following:
A fantasy which blends several Federicos: from the surreal and experimental Federico to the Moorish, black, Jewish, Gypsy and Christian Federico…races Federico was kindly fond of and which would lay part of the foundations of the rhythm, harmony and melody of flamenco.
Just as Norma had described, there was a grandiose performance, almost two hours in length exhibiting all that was flamenco in its most dramatic form.
It was dramatic and spirited. There were long overtures, dance solos, guitar solos, theatrics, and more songs and dances, until our heads spun. By the end of the seven part production, we were flamenco’d out. It was amazing — all of it, but it was a lot. We were outdoors and sitting on folding chairs. I kept thinking about how different it would be to experience flamenco in the home of the Gypsies who’d indelibly etched themselves into the Andalucian mountainside. There were drinkings and conversation to be had after the show in the garden, but I retired early — eager for my bed and the rest I’d need to get up early and write.
The Flamenco show is a huge tourist attraction, and therefore, profitable hustle for the Gypsy community. There are companies that procure buses that load up with travelers eager for the experience and drive them into the cavernous landscape of the Albaicín to be entranced and amused by the art of Flamenco. On this eve, I was one of these travelers. The ride wasn’t long and the route goes along the most scenic parts of the city. I tried not to have any expectations for what I was about to encounter. The Gypsies live in caves. I had no idea what I was in for.
Cozy and captivating, the home of the Gypsies that hosted our flamenco experience, was the perfect temperature without air-conditioning and long like a railroad apartment. Seats were set up for us in the living room and filled up quickly with all of us that had just gotten off the bus. Three busloads of travelers filled up the living room. Then out she came. It was the matriarch — spunky and witty, wishing i could understand more of what she was saying, speaking in a most articulate Castillean tongue that I squinted to barely understand but still getting the gist from the verve in her delivery, came out before her progenies to introduce the show.
It began. There was guitar playing and singing. Siguientas sung a cappela. The daughters were all expert castañuelas players. Each family member had a role, knew their roles to a tee. The mother took her seat at the home’s entrance and at the head of what would be the stage for our purposes. The daughters sat to her right and began to clap in thunderous syncopation. The beat was hypnotic. The grandfather played guitar. The mother gave us witty interludes and clapped keeping tempos and ad-libbing whatever the main player delivered. The son danced feverishly, his long hair slapping him in the face as he jumped about to his family’s musical accompaniment. They each leaned on the other at different times creating rhythmic waves among them in their performance. It was mesmerizing and enchanting and passionate and mystical.
There was much to take in. My mind and heart were full. I replayed my night until I fell asleep. It was hard sleeping in Spain. I was tired from the long days, but I didn’t want to miss anything. There were just two days left to my journey. I anticipated all that was left to explore. I tried with all my might to continue to be in every moment and not begin to lament that my journey was now more than half over and it would be time to go home.
