Steve Glines and The Wilderness House Literary Retreat

by Doug Holder dougholder.post.harvard.edu

One of the exciting new literary projects I have become involved with is The Wilderness House Literary Retreat. Located in Littleton, Massachusetts, Wilderness House comprises seven bedroom cabins situated deep in several hundred acres of forest. The house is owned and managed by the New England Forestry Foundation in cooperation with the Littleton Rotary Club, and it sits on the town's highest point, with a view of the Worcester Hills, and on a clear day, Mt. Monadnock. The retreat offers a series of intense literary workshops and talks with acknowledged literary masters of their genre; Robert Creeley stopped by in December.

I sat down recently with Wilderness House Literary Retreat founder Steve Glines. Our conversation follows.

Some Other Magazine: Steve, you have a technical background. What aroused your interest in a literary retreat?

Steve Glines: Actually, I think of myself as a writer first and an engineer second. I am the product of two very strong traditions in my family. My father's side of the family were all engineers and entrepreneurs. My dad lived in the era of great civil engineering projects. He built shipyards, railroads, dams and bridges all over China in the 1920s and 1930s, was a founder of The Bank of China, and met Sun Yet-Sen, Chiang Kai-Shek, and even Mao (he thought Mao was a bit vulgar). I've followed that tradition by working on many of the great software projects of the last 30 years.

My mother’s side of the family were all college professors and writers for generations. The Covenanter, a weekly hellfire-and-brimstone broadside of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, was a family business for seven generations. My great grandfather broke that tradition by becoming a famous geologist. He still managed to write a bunch of technical books on geology. He made his fortune surveying the Ural Mountains for the Czar.

My grandfather spent that money while trying to write such great political polemics as “States’ Rights and National Prohibition” and “Revolutionary Radicalism in New York State between 1900 and 1920,” in three volumes. The last was a pretty good history of the labor movement in New York. My mother was a stringer for the New York Times off and on for many years.

When I was about 12 I announced to my mother that I wanted to be a writer. She smiled and said, “Well you come by it naturally. You come from a long line of failed and petty literati.” Indeed, my grandfather’s mantra, and I heard him repeat this more than once, was, “If all else fails you can always write a book.” He wrote about 20 of them. I’ve written four—about computers of course. I'm not sure if that makes us failed or just petty literati.

Since I spend most of my time (and earn most of my living) working on or writing about software, I don’t get to practice the real craft of writing very much. Technical editors don’t give style points, and there are no Pulitzer Prizes (or any other prizes for that matter) for what I do. Since I love to write, I’ve often thought about going to a writers’ retreat just so that I could really practice the craft of writing on fiction or poetry. When I was asked what could be done with Wilderness House as a Rotary project, a literary retreat was the first thing I thought of.

SOM: With so many retreats, workshops, etc. in the area, what does Wilderness House offer that the others don’t have?

SG: First of all, the house and its location are priceless. The house is buried deep in the woods atop a hill with a breathtaking view. The place is magic. It has a calming and inspiring effect on all who see it. It’s also easy to get to. Littleton is at the corner of Rt. 495 and Rt. 2, and there is a commuter rail station less than a mile from Wilderness House, a pleasant and easy walk. It’s just amazing to have such a wonderful location within reach of public transportation.

We have tried to structure the retreat a little differently from other workshops and retreats. First of all, we limit participation in most of the events to only 10 or 12 people so the experience will be intense.

We are blessed, in this part of New England, with a great literary tradition that has attracted both masters and students for generations. We plan to capitalize on that tradition by inviting some of the many fantastic writers living nearby to be a part of our faculty. For example, Frantz Wright, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning poet, has expressed an interest in hosting one of our workshops. The retreat will not be as structured as a formal workshop; rather, it will be an opportunity to talk shop with an acknowledged master for a week.

Finally, since the retreat is a residential experience for most participants, we plan on making the week a culinary treat for all. We hope and expect that some great works may germinate from the experience and that on the whole it will be memorable to all involved.

SOM: What literary disciplines do you hope to have represented there?

SG: I am hoping that we will be able to offer retreats in almost all literary genres: Mystery, Romance, Biography, History, screenwriting and playwriting, as well as the many forms of poetry. Our hope is to offer a different genre each week. At the moment our board is heavy with poets, because I happen to know a lot of poets, so many of our initial offerings will be poetic in nature.

SOM: There is going to be a nature component to the retreat. Can you talk about that?

SG: The house is in the middle of several hundred acres of forest, and there are trails to a secluded part of Littleton’s Long Lake, so nature is going to be very hard to avoid or ignore. For the retreat, Nature is just a theme to start the creative process flowing, just as Thoreau used the experience of Walden Pond to expostulate about his philosophy.

SOM: The town of Littleton, where the retreat is located, has a history of hosting writers and literary events. Can you talk about that?

SG: Littleton is far enough away from Boston that it’s more in the orbit of Lowell than Boston. More people there read the Lowell Sun than the Globe or Herald. That’s hard for most people in Boston, Cambridge or Somerville to believe. A 100+ years ago you could take the train to Boston, Lowell, or Worcester, or you could take a daylong coach ride into Boston. Back then Boston was very far away. Go back another 50 years, and Littleton was just a small farming community on the stagecoach line between Lowell and Worcester.

It’s remarkable how literate the rural population was one hundred years or more ago. Books and newspapers were the radio and TV of today, and authors were the rock stars of the era. When the church stopped being the primary source of education in America, all sorts of educational societies sprung up to offer continuing education to a hungry public. The essence of the Lyceum movement was an intellectual and literary vaudeville, a traveling circuit of literati. Mark Twain stopped in Littleton while promoting his books.

By the turn of the 20th century, the Lyceum movement had run its course as the new mass media began to replace the old-fashioned lecture as the primary source of intellectual stimulation. For some magical reason, the Littleton Lyceum continued and prospered. We hope that we can combine the Retreat with public events in cooperation with the Littleton Lyceum. We have no formal arrangement at the moment however.

SOM: When do you hope to have your first program/workshop, and how would one apply?

SG: We hope to announce our first programs shortly. We will announce them on the the www.wildernesshouse.org Website or those interested can subscribe to our announcements list by sending a blank e-mail to sglines.is-cs.com.

Douglas Holder is a writer in Somerville. For more about him and his work, please visit his homepage, www.authorsden.com/douglasholder.