Nerissa Nields emailed me the other day. I’d given her a copy of my new CD at a Nields show (in part because The Friends that I Need was inspired by a Nields (duo) show at Passim after a I had a really bad week), and she’d finally had a chance to listen to it. She said nice things about my songwriting, and invited me to join a writing retreat she was running at the end of the month. I hesitated – Nerissa is a great songwriter (just wait for the next Nields CD, some of which was being recorded as I was recording mine so I got a sneak preview; honestly, these are some of the best songs she’s ever written). But this isn’t a songwriting workshop, and most of the people who will be there aren’t songwriters. I couldn’t – and I still can’t, quite – imagine how a songwriter would fit into a writing retreat that features people writing memoirs, short stories, or novels. Some of that is practical – when I write songs I make noise. I need to sing and play to see where the song goes, both musically and lyrically. A quiet house full of people with pen and paper (or even computers) can’t easily accommodate the noise of a songwriter. Some of it relates to feedback (although I don’t have a clue how that’s handled in this kind of retreat) – I care about things as a songwriter that I’d guess people doing other kinds of writing are paying less attention to (especially when it comes to music and how the music and the lyrics fit together). I understand how to think about and discuss those things in a room full of songwriters; it’s less obvious to me how one does it (in either direction) in a room full of people writing in many different formats. But in some ways, writing is writing. I write little tiny novels (or, perhaps more accurately, short stories) when I write. I create characters. And poetry, I hope, although it’s much more likely to be the kind that rhymes than is usually practiced by poets these days. In fact, I suspect that there are ways that what I do might be more like what a poet does (will there be poets there?) than even poets share with novelists. Who knows? I eventually – after several emails back and forth and a hard sell from Nerissa – decided to go for it. The scheduled weekend was one of the only weekends in my whole spring that wasn’t allocated to anything else yet, and I took that as a sign. And I do like to be challenged, so maybe putting myself in an entirely different writing context will give me new kinds of inspiration. And committing an entire weekend to focusing on my (musical) writing is an exciting thing to do.