Forest City Philosophy Club goes abroad!
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On August 14, 2026, members and friends of the Forest City Philosophy Club (FCPC) took a trip to Indianapolis, IN for our first ever Creative Focus Retreat. The goal was simple: have space and time to focus on our creative projects while sharing and collaborating on them with others. Shared inspiration, shared questing, feedback and engagement. There was very little organization to the whole thing. There were seven of us total and we rented a house for a week and a half. A whole platter of creative media were at work at the retreat: we had dance, songwriting, creative writing, culinary arts, illustration, and of course, philosophy! Here is a collage of the retreat, chronologically.
We began the retreat off with heavy flooding. The original place we booked had been flooded out. One of us even had to be rescued by some firefighters! We spent the evening sitting outside a closed coffee shop eating pizza and figuring out our next move. It is said shared experiences of difficulty bring us closer together; so this was not a bad way to start off. But my heart goes to those whose homes were affected.
photo courtesy of Miranda Leach
The next few days were spent at a hotel and an assortment of bookstores and cafes. We claimed the hotel conference room for ourselves more than once, and the second night, we had our first ‘creative gathering’ of sorts. Around the table, pens and paper in hand, we asked ourselves a few questions, which emerged through discussion:
What do you hope to work on during this retreat?
What do you find fulfilling in your creative practice?
What do you find difficult?
What kind of support do you want from others during this time?
What kind of support can you give others during this time?
How would you like to be kept accountable?
The idea was to set an air of togetherness, in a way. Never mind that all creation is inherently relational, it still does us well to establish our word with one another explicitly. My own favorites were the last three questions. We had responses as varied as: “I want to be held to writing 5,000 words a day”, “I want to be called out if I am not making space for rest”, and more. These hopes for one another then sprung up throughout the following week in different ways. They served as gentle springboards for informal, organic checkins: how was your writing today? or here's a nudge to sleep instead of joining the bonfire, can we hold you to that?
my original hopes of a fire every night did not come to fruition. but we did have a few, where we got bitten by mosquitos, shared writing with one another, and drank wine.
On Monday we settled into the place we'd call home for the next week, booked last minute through VRBO after many long hours on the phone. Over the next week, lives were lived in parallel, with fluid crossovers and meetups, intersections and interactions. There were few, if any, planned outcomes or activities for the retreat, and structure was minimal. Some of us worked our day jobs, others had taken vacations and could dedicate the whole day to their projects, leisure, or otherwise. Organicness was a theme in more than one sense of the word: through natural flows, there emerged organization, in fluent synthesis, where organs arose into being on this collective/plural body. They, furthermore, dissolved as they arose, some practices sticking around, while others came and went.
We had the luck, for example, of having a chef amidst our group, one who sees their work with food as a creative and life practice to be stewarded. Needless to say, we ate pretty damn good. Our dinners became such a point of coming-together, of natural organization, where among exclamations of “mmmm” and “ahhh”, we shared a time and space over well-crafted meals.
chef Sne at work on a risotto and probably six other things
Matt, proud bearer of a bright green LAMY fountain pen, said “just sitting around in the common area before or after dinner, or at the bonfire, seemed like an important part of [the retreat], i.e., we were often busy with different things during the day but as soon as we got together to talk about them it seemed like the distinct goals and mediums didn't matter that much.” The different mediums represented were, indeed, quite different from one another, like I said in the introduction. Perhaps in a future iteration of this retreat (of which there will certainly be many) we'll have more structured activities, disciplinary crossovers, or whatever the case may be. I do not think I am in a rush to make that happen, though. What fruited over the week and a half was lovely in its own right.
I am tempted to write here the ‘outcomes’ of the retreat – what was produed, created, generated. I want to resist that urge. What was created was time and space, I think, to specifically not care about production and generation. On the other hand I do see a different truth arise: that space to be nonproductive often results inadvertanly, or perhaps owingly, in the production of beauty and goodness. I, for one, would have had a much harder time starting on the paper I will be presenting at the NW Philosophy Conference if it were not for the support of those around me at the retreat. Or, in Miranda's case, she was allowed the “time, space, and company to sink into [her] creative self and start producing songs [she's] proud of”. I do often think that the antidote to the capitalist fetishization to produce isn't to sink into non-production, but to acknowledge that Being is already creative, that there is not much need to force it, that a lazy day is still the creation of 24 hrs of human and ecological activity. The already-creative, the already-relational, the already-heterogeneous… such are concepts I hoped to explore in my paper, but the 3,000 word limit really cramped my style. I do plan to expand upon it and splice in a section on the Already, which will be posted on my writings page. But I digress.
Where does this all leave us? Flying and driving out from Indianapolis, we went back to our corners of Turtle Island: Rockford, IL, Cleveland, OH, Allentown, PA, Rhode Island… And Forest City Philosophy Club goes on with its monthly meetings in Rockford. I hope to organize more of these. Maybe one day we'll actually go abroad? When E and I were originally planning a writers’ retreat, the seed of which became this ‘creative focus retreat’, we floated a bunch of different ideas: the Pacific Northwest, Iceland, the Rockies, Mexico City. If you're interested in planning a future iteration of this with me, reach out! I'd love to make it happen.
