From the Farmhouse Table: September 2022
Magical
A single word shows up in most every conversation at or about our island writing retreat, in every cottage journal entry and article, within every book acknowledgement. “Magic” is the go-to descriptor for Hedgebrook’s 48 acres, equal parts forest and fairy tale. At once accurate, aspirational, and also, controversial, the word feels most discordant on this long Labor Day weekend.
Hedgebrook staff have discretionary time off to use at will. They can take a random sunny day off in the middle of the week in February or take off the day in recognition of something specific, like International Women's Day, Juneteenth or Rosh Hashanah.
I’ll be taking Labor Day off and it’s mostly because of how the work of women-identified folks so often runs headlong into the notion of magic.
Last December, I remember coming across a series of graphic illustrations at The Audacity that captured how the term ‘magic’ served to erase the holiday-related labor of women. My favorite line from the stack: “There are no elves or flying reindeer to do the work of creating holiday memories.”
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research was more blunt: “Holiday ‘magic’ is care work.”
Hedgebrook’s magic is care work, too.
Illustration by Aubrey Hirsch
Nancy Nordhoff, who founded Hedgebrook with Sheryl Feldman in 1988, bristles when anyone calls this best-kept-secret on Whidbey Island ‘magic.’ So does our long-serving retreat manager, Cathy Bruemmer. It was the hands (and backs and knees and brains) of many team members that transformed a farm and forestland overlooking Useless Bay and a dream of Virginia Woolf into a Bambi-worthy landscape known the world over. Cozy timber-framed cottages, each stocked with a single, carefully curated, set of antique silverware? We’ve got them. Wood sheds stacked with precisely chopped and seasoned cedar and alder wood, sized to fit Lilliputian wood stoves? Check. A potager where farmer chefs grow beans for the chili, berries for summer pavlovas and trailing nasturtiums that top organic greens from Spring through Autumn? Yep. We have that, too.
Sweat, tears and heavy lifting make this place. Community and consideration for those who caretake make this place. Today, our team of farmer-chefs bring down trees, chop wood, clear brush, maintain six storybook cottages, nourish and harvest from the organic garden, and, full circle, create meals from the garden and forest. Our administrative teams schedule nearly 100 individual writing residencies, seek out and track grant funding, steward our circle of fierce donors with warmth and intention, create alongside our alumnae programs to serve writers around the world, and build partnerships with organizations sharing our vision of a world that listens to the voices of women writers.
All of our labor is in service of our mission. We work so women-identified writers can rest and imagine and write. They are worthy of a magical place. But I suspect they know, as do you, that there is nothing supernatural about radical hospitality, good food attentively prepared and beautiful spaces lovingly tended. Or solitude wrapped in community folded into grace.
Perhaps what Hedgebrookians call magic is simply the too rare invitation to accept the fruits of someone else’s labor.
Recently, a writer applied for a scholarship to Hedgebrook’s spring VorTEXT virtual writing workshop. Then she discovered her mother’s group had raised the funds for her to attend. The mothers also arranged child care and a writing space for her to participate in the daylong retreat.
No elves. No magic. Beautiful, rare, loving care work that only feels magical.
-Kimberly A.C. Wilson | Executive Director, Hedgebrook