Getting Away

Writing Retreat in Portugal

I returned home a few days ago from a two-week sojourn in Portugal, a country that seems to be on everyone’s radar these days as a tourist destination or even as a haven in the event the situation in the US goes from bad to worse.

I’m not likely to move there, but I did enjoy my visit.

If I needed an excuse for the trip (I didn’t), it was the Devotion to Writing retreat being held at a gorgeous retreat center in the Alentejo region of Portugal, about two hours south of Lisbon.

The retreat wasn’t elaborately organized, but for me it was effective. We were eight writers in several genres (I was the only one regularly writing fiction). In our beautiful surroundings (more about that shortly), we mostly wrote during the day and then came together in the evenings to talk about and read from our work before dinner. We did this for seven days, although we also allowed ourselves to enjoy our location by visiting a beach nearby, two seaside towns, and a winery. I’m in a “final” revision stage of my work-in-progress, and I managed to get significant work done on it, so I declare the retreat a success.

The retreat center where this took place is a gorgeous property called Quinta Camarena near the little village of Cercal, owned by an engaging young couple. It is located on about nine acres in a beautiful hollow between two hills and is covered with fruit and nut trees, plus a large vegetable garden that grows produce for the center. Facilities include a pool, gym, sauna, and yoga studio, plus several outdoor platforms for just chilling and contemplating nature. That was all great, but the food put the experience over the top. We had a brunch each day that was loaded with fresh fruit, amazing breads and other baked goods, fresh eggs (the center has a flock of chickens), homemade jams, local cheeses, and more. And then there was dinner. QC has an amazingly inventive chef who came up with fantastic dinners every night and, like a chef at a five-star restaurant, would explain them to us one course at a time. Pretty spectacular.

Before I left for the trip, I asked friends for recommendations of novels set in Lisbon, because I really like to read books—even fiction—about a place I’m visiting. One recommendation was Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains, and I read that on the flight to Europe. It is a terrific short novel set in the 1930s, early in the reign of the dictator Salazar. Not only did it help me understand Portugal’s recent history, but it was also relevant to the book I’m writing because it deals with the resistance to authoritarianism. Several people recommended Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. I took it with me, but because I kept busy doing other things, it never left my suitcase. I’ll get to it eventually. Also, because neither Tabucchi nor Mercier is Portuguese (the former is Italian, the latter Swiss), I wanted to read something by José Saramago, the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer, so I read his novel The Cave. While the setting of that novel is unclear, the writing is powerful, and I’m very glad I read it.

One of the first places I visited in Lisbon was the Livraria Bertrand, supposedly the oldest operating bookstore in the world. Because of course I did. I browsed for a long time and finally bought two books by one of the most important Portuguese writers, Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet and I am the Size of Whatever I See, a collection of poems.

My week in Lisbon also included visits to important historical sites, lots of restaurants, wine bars, and interesting old neighborhoods, plus walking up and down hills.

This was not my first time in Portugal, but it might as well have been. I last visited Lisbon in 1986, and I have zero memories from that trip, although it must have been a stopover when I was taking my annual home leave to the US from Singapore. I still have a couple of things I bought on that visit—a tile, something the Portuguese are famous for, and a couple of gorgeous etchings. I couldn’t tell you where I stayed or what I did, however. Not for the first time, I wish I’d kept a journal back then.

Now that I’m home, I plan to finish my new book’s revisions by the end of the year, a goal that a December writing residency at VCCA should support.