Smart Retreats

ANNA LEAHY and DOUGLAS R. DECHOW coauthored the nonfiction book Generation Space: A Love Story, forthcoming in April from Stillhouse Press. Leahy is also the author of the poetry collection Aperture (Shearsman Books) and the nonfiction book Tumor (Bloomsbury), both forthcoming this year. They teach at Chapman University in Orange, California.

WHETHER you are a parent or a professor, hold a nine-to-five job or spend most days doing something else entirely, there are many reasons for just about any writer to attend a writers residency. One of the most valuable among them is the chance to shift your schedule and your mind-set so that, for a week or a month or even just a few days, you can prioritize writing above all else in your life. In The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results (Bard Press, 2013), Gary Keller and Jay Papasan suggest posing one driving question in order to focus on what’s most important: “What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” For writers, a residency or retreat may be that one thing, offering an uninterrupted period of time during which writing is the most important thing each day, so that the rest of what we usually do becomes, at least temporarily, less necessary.

In addition to the practical usefulness of extended time devoted