Life After Djerassi

I had, ridiculously, lost my voice on my first night in San Francisco, and had to croak my way through the critique sessions. So it seemed wise to volunteer to have my own critique and private session with Nova on the final day. This turned out to be the best thing I could have done, because when I did get my turn, I got such useful feedback I wanted to put it to good use immediately—which would have been a disaster earlier in the week, since I had planned to work on a different novel during my free writing sessions. Instead, by week’s end, I had not only added over 5,000 words to the novel that’s been dogging me for over a year now, I’d solved problems in my recently completed novel and am ready to revise it.

Writing-wise, the workshop and peaceful afternoon sessions did everything I hoped they would. Though I would have liked to get more words down, that’s really not an issue in the scheme of things. The workshopped novel pages were virtually unseen before the workshop, and I was afraid they were awful. They weren’t, but they did have some issues, which have largely been resolved by the advice I received. That alone would have made the trip worthwhile.

But…there was something so much less tangible that happened to me at Djerassi. I can’t even really put words to it, and as a writer that frustrates the hell out of me! I know my new friends understand it as perhaps no one else can; it’s too simple to say I left a piece of myself there, because that piece wasn’t even part of me before I got there—or, now that I think about it, it laid dormant inside me. Something awoke during my time there, but I couldn’t bring it home with me.

Now I’m back in the real world, and grieving—that part of me couldn’t leave Djerassi, but it calls to me, as if I wasn’t supposed to leave either. But I was. Life goes on—I missed my family, and they missed me too. The adjustment to coming home has been hardest, I suppose, because for that piece of me—the writer as a whole being—awoke and stretched herself just in time for me to stuff her back in my suitcase and tell her she needs to go back to fitting in around everything else in my life; she has to take her place in line among work and motherhood and all the other responsibilities. But she’s not responsible to anything but her art, and will not be caged. She is the one who chose to leave a part of herself behind.

Yet, there is some comfort in the fact that maybe all of us left something there, and those little somethings will always be together.