Through beach asparagus, place-based writing exercises and excursions to Goddard Hot Springs, authors Amy Butcher and Brendan Jones led the first Sitka Writers Retreat with an eye for translating experience into inspiration.
The inaugural retreat took place May 29 to June 2, with three participants. It was hosted in conjunction with Ruth Underhill of Tongass Mist Writing LLC, a separate organization that offers retreats, online workshops and other writing resources.
Butcher and Jones are experienced authors and writing instructors who have taught individually for several decades and together in Sitka for more than a decade. Butcher is a non-fiction author whose most recent book, "Mothertrucker," documents female truck drivers in the Alaska wilderness. Jones is known for novels "The Alaskan Laundry" and "Whispering Alaska" — winner of the 2022 Green Earth Book Award.
In five action-packed days, participants in the first Sitka Writers Retreat began every morning at 7 a.m. with breakfast delivered from the WildFlour Café, followed by writing classes with Butcher and Jones. The rest of the day was reserved for conversations and wilderness excursions, from a Mosquito Cove hike to a talk about Tlingit culture by Mary Goddard, a Tlingit artist and culture bearer.
Those events “shook loose some of that creative energy,” Jones said.
“What’s unique about this writing retreat is that it brought people from all over not only to engage with their own creative process, but also to engage with the Tongass,” he said. “Taking in everything around us and using the forest and the mountains as a backdrop, is a truly unique thing.”
Butcher and Jones integrated this sense of connectedness into their instruction. Their students wrote in the woods as often as they did in the classroom.
“Writing retreats generally operate [by] bringing writers somewhere they’re away from their normal distractions. But as someone who’s been living in Sitka for 13 summers, I feel a great responsibility to share Sitka’s cultural and historical past,” Butcher said.
Butcher said that she tried to cultivate “immersiveness” throughout the program.
“It wasn’t uncommon where we would have a conversation on a technique or a reading in class, and then come back to talking about it more at lunch and dinner. A lot of the conversations had the freedom to build on each other through the sheer amount of time we were together in such an intimate environment,” she said.
Jones says immersion is the only way to be a writer.
“I really like to stress that writing is not something that you do on the side. Writing is a way of being in the world — always noticing and always being open to sensuous and emotional renewal,” Jones said. “It’s like a new type of awareness.”
The retreat culminated in a community reading Saturday in Yaw Chapel on the SJ campus, where writers from the community joined the retreat group in sharing their writing.
“It was really rewarding for us to hear what they were working on and, more importantly, just seeing them take ownership of their work and stand up in front of an audience [to] share their work out loud,” Butcher said.
Butcher and Jones are hoping to offer the retreat again next year with an additional day and scholarships available for local writers. The sense of place they introduced to the participants, though, will remain integral.
“Most places where people are on Earth, it’s right angles — and there are no right angles in nature. There’s so much to engage with; it’s multidimensional,” Jones said. “The forest brings a real metaphysical aspect to the creative process and really forces people to engage with why we continue to be on this Earth and why we continue to exist, which is the essential question behind creativity.”
