Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

My short answer to this question is “No, absolutely not.” In fact, I’ve specifically designed the Azores Writing Retreat to meet you where you are as a participant, whether you consider yourself a writer or not. We all have stories we need to tell. Whether we consider ourselves writers is beside the point.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion began her famous essay “The White Album.” I would further argue that we tell stories because it is an essential act of being human. Indeed, some scientists believe we may be hard-wired to tell stories.

As I wrote in my essay, “Telling Stories to Change the World,” which appeared in Terrain.org in 2006, “a story is a narrative account of a real or imagined event or events. Stories build worlds and define worldviews. Sharing experience through stories, we pass on accumulated wisdom, beliefs, and values. Through stories we explain how and why things are, and we define our role and purpose.”

In that essay, I also quote the National Storytelling Network, which says that “Stories are the building blocks of knowledge, the foundation of memory and learning.” They “connect us with our humanness and link past, present, and future.”

From our earliest time as a species, when we were hunter-gatherers, we told stories about the best hunting places or where plentiful berries could be found. Later, we told each other stories about planting crops and which crops grew best in what climate, soil, or aspect of the sun. We evolved as a species through stories, and we are grounded in stories. Storytelling may be a tradition as old as human communication itself.

Stories connect people to other people and to place, to the land and sea. That’s what I’m trying to do with the Azores Writing Retreat. We’ll spend five days getting connected to the land and sea of my ancestral island, São Miguel. We’ll connect with the nature, culture, food, and people of the island. And we’ll connect with each other as a cohort, listening to the stories we have within us that are yearning to be told.

At the end of the Azores Writing Retreat, whether you consider yourself a writer or not, my hope is you will come away with a deeper appreciation of the stories you have to write and a sense that your stories are important, whether you write them for yourself, your friends and family, or for possible publication. I hope you’ll join me on this remarkable journey.

For more information and to Register for the retreat: Azores Writing Retreat