A Dispatch from Disquiet
It's only a small disruption
I’m going to warn you up front: If you’re a literary purist, if you worship at the altars of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Twain, Salinger, Hemingway, Dickens, Orwell, and the like, this post might piss you off.
I am not the sort, writer or reader, who ever pledged fealty to The Classic Greats. It’s akin to sacrilege to say it, but Shakespeare always bored me. I never acquired the taste, not even for more modern so-called Greats like Franzen, Vonnegut, McCarthy. I just can’t get it up for them.
If you find yourself clutching at your pearls or heart valves, let me back off a bit and clarify: I do not begrudge you your darlings. I am not here to yuck your yums. I am simply stating a personal preference much in the way I prefer tea to coffee but do not pass judgment on those who cannot utter a word before downing a cup of the darker stuff. I am not saying tea is better than coffee. I am just saying coffee is not my cup of.
You feel me?
What this bit of heresy has to do with anything is as follows: For the last week, I have been attending the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. It’s a two-week enterprise, so I’m halfway through.
Disquiet (the program) draws its name from The Book of Disquiet, a collection of writings by Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, published 47 years after his death.
Pessoa is a beloved figure in Portugal. Streets all over the country are named in his honor. In Lisbon, his hometown, you can share a café table with his likeness at A Brasileira coffeehouse in Chiado. You can visit the house he lived in for the last 15 years of his life. You can take a walking tour past all his favorite spots. You can buy his books in nearly every bookstore and souvenir shop. He’s kind of a big deal.
But I (you must whisper this part:) am not a Pessoa fangirl.
I don’t actively dislike him as a man or a writer. I understand his importance in the larger literary scheme of things. I am absolutely sure that plenty of the things he had to say were/are worthwhile. But as a personal preference, he’s not my cup of.
Men have been writ so large for so long. The older I get, the more I find I’m simply not interested in what they have to say. On the page. On the screen. In history books. In Presidential debates. To my face. Men (#notallmen and all that) have been telling their own stories—and everyone else’s—for eternity. I don’t want to hear them anymore.
What I do want to hear is new voices. What I do want to hear is my own.
Hence Disquiet.
I applied to the program last fall, as soon as they opened the window. In February, I received notice that I’d been accepted to the program, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting these two weeks ever since.
Disquiet runs workshops for writers of poetry, fiction, nonfiction/memoir, and “writing the Luso experience.” That last workshop is for writers “with roots in the Portuguese diaspora.”
I was accepted into the nonfiction/memoir workshop and showed up with a couple of chapters from my memoir-in-progress for feedback and discussion. My particular cohort of the nonfiction workshop has 12 other writers, and we’ve been reading and dissecting each others’ work with the goal of sharpening our skills and our drafts.
Like any program for which you pay an entrance fee, Disquiet has parts that are prosaic, parts that are disappointing, and parts that illuminate and enliven. My “Flash & Furious” workshop with writer Annie Liontas will likely go down as the high point of this whole literary interlude.
Annie has written a novel, Let Me Explain You, and a memoir, Sex with a Brain Injury, which came out this past January. They also teach creative writing at George Washington University in DC. So, you know, definitely qualified for workshop leadership.
They are also the sort of person who sets a room on fire… in the best sort of way. At Disquiet, their workshop focused on Creative Nonfiction pieces of 2,000 words or less, a “burst,” if you will.
In the current literary world, short pieces like this fall into four categories:
Flash=1500 words max; Sudden=750 words max; Micro=100 words max; and Dribble=50 words.
Annie’s workshop had us reading (phenomenal) short pieces from writers like Diane Seuss, bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Anna Vodicka, Deesha Philyaw, Thao Thai. We wrote six words memoirs and read them aloud to the room. (Mine was: “Goth girl adopts a sad donkey.”) We paired up in groups of three and asked each other questions like, “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?”
It was all very much my jam.
On the second day of the workshop, we ventured out into Lisbon on a writing marathon. In groups of four or five, we wandered in search of shade and a seat, then set a timer for 10 minutes and wrote like our lives depended on it. When the minutes ran down, we read each other a line or two of our still-wet ink, then set out in search of a new spot to write in.
It was everything I’ve ever wanted in a writing workshop.
Tomorrow I dive back in with three more core nonfiction/memoir workshops, several readings from international authors, an open mic or two, and lunch with my writer friend Flavia—the one who told me about this program in the first place.
No experience requires perfection to be worthwhile. I learned that a long time ago. So what I take away from Disquiet will be entirely my own. It doesn’t have to be some homage to a long-dead man with a pen.
If you depend on the dictionary definition, “disquiet” refers to a feeling of unease or anxiety.
For me, disquiet means a disruption of isolation.
I have been sequestered within the high walls of my countryside quinta for quite some time now. Hiding. Hibernating. Hermiting.
All of the above.
I have been tired. Tired of this spinning blue ball. Of the people who inhabit it. Of the bombs we drop and the names we call. Of the babble and the clickbait. Of the same old capitalist and colonial arguments all strung out like beads on some fanatical supremacist rosary, rubbed all up in our faces again and again.
I have stayed within my walls so long because it’s safer there with my beloveds, human and beast and book-shaped.
But now and then it’s good to get out. Now and then it’s good to disrupt the hush and discover that I’m not as insane as I thought I was.
One week ago, with only a thimbleful of trepidation, I entered a bougainvillea-draped garden filled with all manner of milling writers. Some clutched a sweating wine glass with two hands like it might save their souls. Some juggled multiple tote bags and a rising air of panic. Introverts nearly to the last of us, we had yet to exchange names and word counts. Had yet to sit in semicircles and deliberate on paragraphs of prose.
I had promised myself on the drive into Lisbon that I would mingle. That I would make good use of all my hard-earned socializing muscles and extrovert several degrees more than I usually do.
After a few minutes of disjointed forays into the fray of sign-up sheets—a Pessoa walk on Tuesday! a meeting with a magazine editor on Friday!—I noticed a woman standing alone near a blossom-hung pillar.
She carried neither sweaty glass nor panicky vibe, though she did shoulder a Shakespeare and Company tote bag. Something about her stopped me. Before I could think too hard, I launched myself at her.
“I promised myself I would talk to people,” I said by way of introduction, “and try my best not to introvert into a corner.”
Her whole face lit up when she laughed. “Oh yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”
Turns out Nicole is not only a fellow nonfiction writer and poet, but she’s also in my particular troop of 12. Same workshop, same age(ish), same bullshit detector. We keep sharing an orbit, all week long.
If I were to take nothing else away from this experience, I would take a new friend.
But I already have so much more—pages full of ideas and inspiration. And I still have a week to go, and an open mic to read at. Wish me luck.
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Copyright © 2024 LaDonna Witmer
Your Disquiet grabbed me, like a lifeline. What I've been feeling, for what seems like fore ever. Am I a traitor to my own DNA? I am tired of listening to men too. Some men are tired of listening to men too. Wise two X, rise up. More like you LaDonna. We need you. Now - more than ever. (Thank you for the lifeline this morning. Thank you.)
I loved this.