Filling My Creative Cup

Highlights from the San Miguel Allende Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival

Have you ever had an immersive experience that took you out of your comfort zone and helped you discover a new side of yourself? Maybe you attended a baseball camp, built houses with Habitat for Humanity, walked the Camino, or participated in a professional development retreat. If you have, you know that these intensive experiences offer amazing opportunities for personal growth and community building. They're often filled with inspiration, challenges, insights, reflection, new friends, and lots of fun. This was exactly my experience at the San Miguel Allende Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival last week. Here are some highlights.

In my interpersonal communication class, we discuss the importance of meaning-making because humans are meaning-making machines. As a teacher once told me, "Coffee pots make coffee, and humans make meaning." We understand our world through these processes, doing it automatically and perpetually. If you've taken an interpersonal communication class, you know that two key terms related to language are phenomenology and hermeneutics. Phenomenology deals with the appearance of things based on experience, while hermeneutics focuses on the meaning of the message. So, what did the San Miguel Allende Writers’ Conference look like and mean to me?

San Miguel: A Phenomenological Feast

If you get the chance to visit San Miguel de Allende, say yes! Here's a snippet from its Wikipedia description:

San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-era city in Mexico’s central highlands, is known for its baroque Spanish architecture, thriving arts scene, and cultural festivals. In the city’s historic, cobblestoned center lies the neo-Gothic church Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, whose dramatic pink towers rise above the main plaza, El Jardín.

This place is like something out of a fairy tale, but what you might not know is that it's a hotbed of creativity, attracting artists and writers from all over the world. The air in this town hums with artistic energy.

The conference was an A-list event for book lovers. You know that game where you imagine which famous people you'd invite to dinner? My dream dinner guests were at this conference! Keynote speakers included Margaret Atwood (Handmaid’s Tale), John Irving (The World According to Garp), Percival Everett (James), Ruth Reichl (Tender at the Bone), Kaveh Akbar (Martyr!), John Vaillant (Fire Weather), Jennifer Clement (The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat, and Me), and more. These writers are not only brilliant but also generous. They shared their creative journeys and engaged with the audience, inspiring me with their wit and wisdom (and they all have a standing invite to dinner at my house!).

But the best selling authors were just the beginning. Each day was packed with workshops taught by amazing faculty. I won't list all the workshops I attended, but here are my favorites (each gets a blue ribbon from me):

1. Jennifer Leigh Selig's Craft Classes: I took two classes from Jennifer Leigh Selig, whose book Deep Memoir has been crucial to my writing journey. If you write narrative nonfiction, I highly recommend this book on craft.

2. Brooke Warner's Publishing Class: Brooke Warner, owner of She Writes Press and COO of Stable Books, is a wealth of information on all things publishing. She produces one of my favorite weekly podcasts, write-minded, with Grant Faulkner, and writes a Substack about publishing called Writerly Things. Plus, Brooke took a group of us writers out to lunch, so it's safe to add "big-hearted" to her list of impressive qualities!

   

   (Lunch with Brooke Warner, Casey O’Connell, Lisa Cheek, and other writers in San Miguel Allende)

3. Courtney Maum's Newsletter Writing Class: Courtney Maum, whose Substack is titled Before and After the Book Deal, has real marketing and publicity talent. Her ability to help authors workshop their book titles and log lines was impressive. She has a knack for pitching products and makes the business of writing fun. If you need help with a query letter or ideas for getting your writing into the marketplace, I highly recommend Courtney Maum.

Creative Saturation: Hermeneutic Gold

The term hermeneutics is most often applied to textual analysis, but my week in San Miguel was so meaningful that I’m going to apply it here. Experiences like the one I had last week—filled with instruction, new friends, excellent speakers, meetings with consultants, and agent pitches—also have hermeneutic meanings. There were many moments when I felt connected to much more than my writing projects and pitch ideas; I was part of a collective, a creative community concerned with more than individual agendas.

In his book, Mysticism, Simon Critchley notes,

To write is to get oneself out of the way as much as possible, in order to see the things themselves and not just our ideas about things, our own reflection staring back at us. It is to allow the possibility that in the experience of art there is an experience of the sacred where things come alive and we come alive in the process of observing, attending, watching, listening, or reading.

Filling my creative cup at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival was a time of aliveness and a reminder that making art transcends individual desire and personal effort. Just as Critchley suggests, time spent in San Miguel de Allende was an opportunity to get out of my own way. Have you had stand-out immersive experiences that made you feel more alive? What were they, and what did you learn? I’d love to hear from you!