Outside of the summertime, I rarely get decent stretches of time to write. During the school year, I feel lucky when I can squeeze in 20 minutes to write at the beginning of the day. For me, that kind of time is maybe enough to work on revisions, especially of short pieces, but I’ve had no luck writing novels in those tiny dribs and drabs.

A couple of years ago, after my bitching about that state of affairs for the 6,813th time, my wife wisely proposed that I take a few writing retreats throughout the year–little two-day stints where I can write for hours at a time.

Right after new year’s day, I had my first retreat of the year: over two days, I wrote in a swath across the central Willamette Valley–Corvallis, Monmouth, Salem. I knocked out about 4,000 words of a short story I have been working on and allowed myself to feel, briefly, like writing is the main thing I do.

I spent a good part of the retreat in the Hamersly Library of Western Oregon University. I hadn’t been to Monmouth since I was a little fellow, when my dad taught English at Western Oregon (back when the place was still called the Oregon College of Education). Classes hadn’t started at WOU yet, so I was able to walk around this campus which I would have been too young to remember, listening for my dad’s ghost lingering around the older buildings.

No librarians challenged me when I walked in to the Hamersly (why would they? Librarians are the most welcoming bureaucrats on Earth), and I was able to find the perfect nook to write in. It’s worth giving thanks for libraries: like the DNA of our culture, libraries are both the metaphor for the entire human enterprise as well as the literal encoder of that enterprise. The Hamersly wasn’t built until 2000, long after my dad stopped teaching in Monmouth, but I may as well have seen my dad’s shade there, walking among the stacks. I was reminded of one of my favorite poems from Philip Larkin, my favorite librarian poet:

New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books, too,
Old eyes renew;
So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin.