Lessons I learned in Tuscany

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Storylines. This is the first one since I came home from Italy.

For a week I was at Villa Le Buche, in the hills of southern Tuscany, with eleven writers who had come to work on their family history. We wrote in the mornings. We walked in the afternoons — Cortona’s stone streets, Montepulciano, a day in Siena. On the last day, each of them read her work aloud.

I have run retreats before. I have watched writers find their way into a story before. But I came home this time with something I want to say plainly, because I think it changes where you put your hands.

Not one of those eleven stories began in the folder.

Every one of them began somewhere else. In a photograph the writer could not put down. In a single afternoon she already knew by heart. In a reason she had never said out loud. The research told them where to look. It did not tell them where the story was.

That is what I want to show you today. Three things eleven writers taught me in a stone house in Tuscany, about where a family history story actually begins.