I write best in lonesome places.
In the fall of 2022, Amherst College granted me three months of research leave from my day job running The Common. My first-ever sabbatical! I hadn’t taken any substantive breaks from the magazine since it launched in 2011. I needed some expansive, uninterrupted time to think through the contours of a new novel.
To get approval for the sabbatical, I had to write a letter to the president of the college describing what I’d work on during my absence. Looking back, I see that I outlined a long-running memoir and family history project—Surrender was not yet fully formed enough to put into words, to be convincing. This is usually the case for me. Fiction needs light and air and space to germinate.
And then, on September 1, I put on my out-of-office message and headed north with only the foggiest notion of a novel in mind.
The family cabin, built by my grandparents in 1940 on the shore of a lake in rural Maine, has always been a refuge. My siblings and cousins and I spent July and August on the water and in the woods, swimming, canoeing, fishing, logging, and picking blueberries. Because I grew up nearby, I spent extra time at the cabin with G&G. When I wasn’t immersed in the lake or doing little jobs for one of them, I was reading. From an early age, then, the cabin was linked to the beautiful solitude of imagination.
I knew that at the cabin I’d have no distractions, and therefore no excuses. I set up my computer at the dining room table and wrote every morning. In the quiet of September, when the summer houses that ring the lake are largely empty, the drama of the environment takes center stage. Sometimes it was hard to stay inside, to not sit out on the dock all day watching uneasily as the eagles hunted overhead and the stately, vulnerable loons worked to escape their beaks and talons. Even a simple butterfly, or a layer of undulating mist on the water, could capture my attention for minutes at a time.
Still, I kept my butt largely in the chair from nine until noon, taking quick dock breaks every hour. Lunch on the screened-in porch was my reward for reaching my 2,000-word goal for the day. Early in the month, I’d interviewed the goat farmer who’d bought our family’s farm after my father died, and in the afternoons I reviewed what she told me and dove into research by reading Goat Journal and animal husbandry articles. The end of the writing day was always a head-clearing walk.
View down the lake on a misty morning in September.
But I couldn’t stay at the lake for three months. For one thing, the cabin doesn’t belong solely to me but is shared among a network of family members, who also wanted to stay there during the glorious fall. For another, the cabin isn’t winterized, so once late October rolls around, you have to shut off the water so the pipes don’t freeze. My grandparents used to camp in the fireplace-heated cabin with no running water, skiing or skating across the lake to hike into town for supplies, but, well, that was a long time ago and everyone knows people were heartier back then.
After some time at home in Western Massachusetts in October, I headed southwest for the month of November. I had the good fortune to secure a writing residency at the San Ysidro Ranch Writers’ Residency way down near the Texas/Mexico border. Founded by the late Alston Beinhorn on his family’s working ranch, and now run by his widow Holly Tupper, San Ysidro hosts one writer at a time in a refurbished hunting cabin.
South Texas was an entirely new landscape for me. The flat, open roads punctuated by oil derricks; the howling coyotes and menacing javelinas; the black and white crested caracaras flitting from ground to bush; and of course the ranch’s beautiful Brahmin cattle. It’s a place both wild and domesticated where you can always see the horizon. I was warned not to stray off the beaten paths to avoid anything that might bite, sting, or spike me. Sometimes in the afternoons, the coyotoes would creep up close to the cabin and eye me hungrily as I swung meditatively on the back porch.
Like at the Maine cabin, the closest town was more than 30 minutes away, and while I was friendly with Juan, the ranch foreman, he was more than occupied with his own duties and not there to entertain. I spent my days gloriously alone. It was here at the ranch that the story I’d begun in Maine, in which a middle-aged woman returns home to save the family farm by raising goats and falls unexpectedly, perilously in love, took shape.
Writer’s cabin at San Ysidro Ranch in South Texas
It’s a funny thing how real places can give rise to fictional ones. Neither of the environments where I wrote Surrender factor into the novel explicitly—there is no Maine lake, no Texas ranch. But I needed the quiet and distinctiveness of those landscapes to feed my imagination, to allow my mind to conjure and weave all the elements needed to write a convincing story.
Today is four months exactly until publication day (April 14!). I’m so excited to share Surrender with all of you, and am so grateful to the people and places who have helped it come into being.
Thank you to those who have preordered. If you haven’t, please consider! You can order through Amazon, Bookshop (which supports local, independent bookstores), or Barnes & Noble. Your purchase is a vote of confidence and helps my publisher know how many copies to print and distribute.
Can’t wait to see you on book tour! If you’d like me to visit your community, just give a shout and we’ll try to make it happen 🙂
Yours,
Jen
@jen_acker