Restoring creative confidence on a writing and Pilates week with Shine Retreats in Italy

Constance Allfrey attends a writing and Pilates week in Umbria, where - with delicious Italian morsels, exercise to stretch the spine, tuition from Polish author Aga Lesiewicz and excellent company - she reconnects with her writing and herself 

I had just taken a month off my psychotherapy clients to write, so it felt divinely timed to be able to kickstart it with a writing retreat.  Disconnected, exhausted, recovering from a chest infection, and unable to face myself or the page, I felt the perfect candidate for transformation.   

‘I need to write my way out of this hole,’ I thought on the plane, a point confirmed by our tutor for the week, Polish author Aga Lesiewicz, who told us, quoting Margaret Atwood: ‘To become a writer you have to write.’  

And where better to write than Shine Retreats’ base on the Tuscan borders of Umbria, Siliano Alto, a beautiful, high-windowed house with structural Agave plants, pebble-coloured cats and forest paths through the vast woodland estate?  House owner and our host for the week Carla Octagon picked me up at the train station in Cici, her vintage white Peugeot 205 and we drove through silent, dusky, rolling hills, umbrella pines and roads flanked by needling male cypresses - the females are more rotund and wavier, I learnt.   

Carla’s perennial smile and enthusiasm for slow-cooked garlic, fine wine, baking  late-night sourdough for our breakfast or nipping to the village for local coffee and to see an ancient tree warmly underpinned our week together.  She showed me to my room - brick floor, a single bed, simple, clean and on the quiet side of the house with a magnificent view. Within a day it was home. Next door was the spacious second salon with sofas and a kitchen for filling up the hot water bottle kindly provided and making tea. 

The group was six fantastic women, mostly American, apart from Sybill from Germany, who now lives in Panama with five sheep. They varied in age - from crime-writing Peggy, 74, to me, unsure of my genre, at 43.  Former dancer Michelle, who pulled some jaw-dropping moves in the 80s classic A Chorus Line, was writing a screenplay, and Stacey, from LA, was evoking vivid scenes of Ghana and her deep connection with the place.   

“Writing takes place in a vacuum where doubts can germinate (‘What the hell am I writing? Is this mad?’) so it felt precious and encouraging to get some answers”

We began our day with Pilates with Georgie Chester. This involved lengthening and considered moves in a characterful studio - my spine felt happy, though usually I prefer a more vigorous flow.  Breakfast was at 9.30am - eggs or overnight oats with yoghurt, caramelised pear, pecans and home-made almond butter. And of course, coffee - Americans drink a lot of it, I discovered.  ‘What is the earliest we can make coffee?’ was enquired anxiously the first night. ‘Dawn’ was the answer.   

Anna Stasiuk, our angelic chef, was a miracle of patience and creativity - only 27 years old, but soon soothing us with her bone broths, pici all’aglione, buckwheat pancakes, courgette frittatas or braised chicken and fennel with mini roast potatoes.  Meals were wholesome and delightfully balanced, with the odd nectarine tart for the sweet teeth. 

Our tutor Aga hosted two-hour daily classes on the kitchen’s red painted table.  Each day had a theme - plot, dialogue, character, finishing off - and involved a short lecture with inspiring quotations and illustrative videos, on-the-spot writing exercises and crisp feedback from Aga. One day we were given the first line from a novel and had to continue - I could feel my left brain firing up again from its dormancy. It felt so gratifying to just do it, to make something from nothing.   

If we weren’t out for lunch in Cettano - wolfing down Luca’s ‘best sandwich in Italy’ according to the  LA Times - we had free time to walk, write, rest or enjoy a treatment in the afternoon.  Most days I headed out down the lane without my phone, occasionally getting lost, but always feeling that elation of meeting new nature and noticing all the sweet little seed burs, also ready for change, stuck to me afterwards. Magic-handed Georgie scooped me off for a lymphatic drainage massage one day, which involved the lightest touch but miraculously sent me to that curious, throat-catching place beyond sleep. Relaxation is so integral to writing - it allows something else to live through us. 

Over the course of the week Peggy undoubtedly wrote the most, as she was finishing a novel, but everyone seemed to get in the flow at some point.  My preferred writing window was before the reward of a meal, or late in a sleepless night. 

There were also invaluable one-to-one writing sessions with Aga. Mine helped me see that I am really writing a play, which I hope to take to Edinburgh fringe when I’ve got over the terror - please come!  Aga really listens and cares. She would drop in a tip for Peggy’s thriller at breakfast or tell me: ‘If you get stuck, it’s because you’ve tripped up earlier.’ In general, this was quite true. 

I discovered the real value of a writer’s retreat is the community and the sharing. Lined up in a strip of Apple Macs, we read some of our words on ‘story night’. Such different worlds, I thought, while listening rapt to Michelle’s vivid and amusingly relayed drama or Laila’s adrenalised account of marital tension.  Writing takes place in a vacuum where doubts can germinate (‘What the hell am I writing? Is this mad?’) so it felt precious and encouraging to get some answers.  I discovered I shouldn’t worry if I didn’t write as much as I planned – some people wrote furiously, while others gathered material, ideas and feedback in preparation for a later attack.

On the last evening Carla drove us to Pienza, pecorino capital of Italy, for shopping, a pennant spell in the cathedral, followed by carpaccio, wild boar tagliatelle and five pecorinos with truffle honey at the delightful restaurant Il Rossellino.  It absolutely bucketed down - ‘Perfect writing weather,’ as Laila said. But, heart-warmed by the company and my potent Campari, I felt a flicker of writer’s hope.   

On the train back to Rome, my heart and writing drawer felt full, mostly from the extraordinary women I had the honour of meeting. ‘One goes into a retreat to understand who one truly is and what the situation truly is,’ said Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo, and this Italian writing spell certainly helped in my unfolding.