In February, I spent five days at our friends’ cabin in the Snowy Range near Centennial, Wyoming for a self-designed writing retreat. It was the second time I’ve stayed there for some immersive creative time. These trips have been different than my retreat to my family’s Red Desert cabin, but no less meaningful. 

For one thing, the Snowy Range cabin is accessible during the winter months, whereas the Red Desert is decidedly unwelcoming (if not completely impossible to reach) from roughly November until late May. Also, the Snowy Range cabin boasts electricity and indoor plumbing, which are also quite nice when it’s snowing sideways.  Finally, it is part of a little community of fellow cabin-dwellers, some of whom live there year round and others who visit regularly. 

In all honesty, I greatly enjoy and even crave complete solitude, which the Red Desert cabin offers (or maybe insists on if you don’t take your companions with you). But I also value connection and solidarity, and my trip to the Snowies reminded me of that fact.

My friends’ generosity in gifting me the space to use as my own means more than I can I say — they are lovely, warm people who have created a lovely, warm cabin. They also have lovely, warm neighbors who checked in on me occasionally and who also charitably plowed the driveway twice during my stay.

Which was instrumental, because the “accessible” cabin was barely so in February. The areas residents arrange for the main road to be plowed, but, after a week of snow and wind, the driveway was drifted knee high. Luckily, my very smart husband suggested I take our son’s plastic sled to toboggan my bags and cooler down if needed. 

And that’s what I did upon arrival, making four trips to pack my things forty-five yards or so to the front door. The snow was soft, the sled narrow, and the cooler heavy and prone to tipping, but it wasn’t all bad. The dogs especially seemed to enjoy bounding back and forth.

But the driveway is on a relatively steep slope, and towing my supplies back uphill would have been considerably harder, especially since the wind continued to rip for my entire stay and the drifts would have only grown deeper. There was also great comfort in knowing that, if the weather got even more Western, they would be there to pull me out. Thus, having, as Rodney Atkins put it in a song, “friends with tractors” was priceless and much appreciated. 

For a majority of my trip, I stayed indoors. In the mornings, I read poems by James Galvin while heating water for tea. (See how writerly I am?) The weather and a nagging heel injury prevented longer sojourns, and so I went for a short walks down the plowed road. Sometimes I worked on a puzzle or sketched in my notebook. Mostly, I opened my laptop and disappeared into—it turns out—the Red Desert, where my novel is set. 

But my time there has me thinking not only about creativity and art, but about connection and kindness, which, in my mind, are all one and the same. Writing, it’s said, is a solitary practice. True enough—as I type this, I type it alone at my desk. The words come from somewhere inside myself. 

But the work requires a collective effort. I couldn’t have written and revised my novel (or poems or blog posts) without community—my friends who invited me to use the Snowy Range cabin; their neighbors, who didn’t know me but gave their time and effort anyway; my family, who makes sure I can “reserve” the Red Desert cabin for solo treks; my writing partners who have read and given thoughtful feedback on my work; my writing coach, who helped me re-see my story’s structure and overarching theme as well as literary markets; ; everyone I know who isn’t offended when I skip social gatherings to write; my eight-year-old son, who accepts without question that I will spend two or three hours working on my novel on Saturday afternoons; my husband, who takes on the grocery shopping and most of the cleaning and insists I use that time to write; you, who are reading this and therefore giving my work meaning beyond my own mind.

When I’m asked why I write, my deepest answer is that I believe stories can help us navigate the tricky business of being human, provide a window into the lives and experiences of those who are like us and those who are not, and remind us we’re not alone in our joy, sorrow, and love. I’ve read novels and memoirs, essays and poetry and short stories, that made me feel less alone. That’s what I wish to create for others. And I believe that when someone reads my writing, that act creates connection between the reader and the characters and places on the page, between the reader and me, and, in the end, between the reader and all of the good, kind people who helped bring the story into the world. 

Update: Changing Website and Newsletter Providers

I wanted to give you a heads up that I am in the process of changing hosting services for my website and changing my newsletter and blog to Substack.

Substack is a platform that lets writers publish newsletters and other content directly to their audience. I hope that by moving my newsletter, I will be able to more easily connect with you and new readers by more nimbly posting my work, responding to comments, and sharing my work and the work of other authors.

The most important thing for you to know is that you will still receive my newsletter straight to your inbox. It will start coming from annstebnersteele@substack.com. Please add this address to contacts and/or safe-sender list to prevent emails getting caught in spam filters.

You will still be able to read the newsletter in your inbox, or you can read it on Substack. There is also a Substack app, which seems easy to use and like an interesting way to find other content you may enjoy.

I will also migrate my archived posts to Substack, so you’ll be able to find them there if you wish.

I plan to send an announcement from my current newsletter service when the new website and my Substack publication are ready to go.

Please do let me know if you have any questions! You can simply respond to this email.