May. A beautiful month. Here in Florida the flowering trees are in full bloom, the male birds are in full breeding plumage, and the winter crowds have dispersed to points north. This is also the time of year my writing group held our annual retreats. We started the ritual of a yearly retreat within the first few months of our inception. While we’d met and connected in a writing class at Wesleyan University, we didn’t know anything about each other except that we all had a passion for writing.
Having spent decades as a therapist running groups, I pulled out my old, trusty team-building/trust-building exercises, and we cobbled together a plan for the day. On a beautiful spring day in May, we met on the back deck of a member’s home. I remember the day well. I thought, and I’m sure we all thought, was this group going to work? We didn’t have any idea where we were going, just that we wanted to go somewhere. What if we didn’t jibe?
Sidebar—because a lot of people confuse jibe, jive, gibe, and gybe:
Jive means
either a type of music or loose, meaningless chatter. Jibe means
to be in accord; agree. To confuse matters, jibe also means
to shift your sail from one side of the vessel to the other (sometimes spelled gybe). And gibe, which means
to make taunting, heckling remarks, can also be spelled jibe. (Spell-checker busters - Chicago Tribune)
After some initial getting-to-know-each-other conversation, we started our first exercise, which we subsequently named “Pass-Around-Story.” (This exercise and many others are included in my book, All Write.) Everyone’s done some version of this, either written or orally, I’m sure. Someone writes the first line to a story, then passes it to the next person who writes the next line, and so on. All I can say is that by time we finished that exercise, a bond had begun to form.
For All Write, I asked my group members to reflect on our retreats. Here are some recollections:
I remember feeling a new lightness of friendship that made me comfortable from then on with getting and giving feedback. Weekly meetings can be intense, and this retreat broke that pattern.
Our retreat is like the Fourth of July. We come together to celebrate our friendship, strengthen our bonds, and share in the excitement of learning new writing techniques.
The annual retreat nurtures growth. A lively vibe of anticipation sets the mood—we are eager. An ambitious agenda sets the schedule—we are focused. A format of group participation fosters collaboration—we bond. We work and we learn and we grow.
That’s the power of a writing group in a nutshell. And I wouldn’t gibe you.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-tribu-words-work-spellcheck-11101020101110-story.html
Photo: D. Mandel