SO while I was in California for the workshop, I took the opportunity to go on a field trip to the most excellently spooky Winchester Mystery House! And what better opportunity to report back on it over a pint of cider than the Midnight Society's #SpookyAllYear?

The Winchester Mystery House is the rambling, deeply bizarre turn-of-the-century mansion built over 40 years by Sarah Winchester, widowed heiress to the fortune resulting from the Winchester rifle. She had an architect for all of one day, apparently, before firing him and taking over the job herself. The result was a famously sinister and incoherent mishmash of 160 rooms – more before the 1906 earthquake damaged an additional three storeys beyond repair and they had to be torn down – full of breathtakingly opulent stained glass, lavish materials and Arts and Crafts details. It’s widely reputed to be cursed and/or haunted.

Today its first impression screams tacky tourist trap. Enter through the gift shop, get your picture taken with replica Winchester rifles (um, no thanks), get a computerized fortune told by a machine with an animatronic witch whose eyes light up. An intercom system in the courtyard announces when your tour is leaving (every 20 minutes, for the low, low price of $30-something a head). The house is full of other murmuring voices as various groups wind their way through it. Our guide was a theatrical teenager who projected her spiel at merciless volume, complete with dramatic gestures.

But for all that, it was genuinely creepy.

It was a cumulative creepiness, one that sneaks up on you without you even noticing. At first the details are just eccentric (spiderweb motifs in the stained glass) or accidents or mistakes (the most expensive window in the house never gets direct sunlight) or understandable, if uncomfortable, accommodations (the claustrophobically narrow stairways with the bizarrely shallow steps were apparently easier on Mrs.  Winchester’s arthritic joints).

But there’s only so many times you can say WTF before it starts to wear on you. The room with five fireplaces. The room with three ways in and only one way out. The staircase that ends at the ceiling. The door that opens onto lath and plaster. The stairs that go down seven steps and then, three feet later, go up eleven more, so that you end up only three feet higher than you started. The windows in the floor. The windows into other rooms. The cupboards that open onto hallways.

You’re constantly coming across features you’ve seen before from another angle, or windows you’ve been on the other side of, or glimpses of rooms you were just in a few minutes ago. But it’s always a surprise, because you’ve lost all sense of where you are in relation to anyplace you’ve been. And while natural light penetrates surprisingly far into the house, given all the plunging window wells and connected spaces, a lot of it is dark, lamplit, and the opulent details quickly become oppressive.

I’d never given much thought to the logical, intuitive layout of a house. You find your way around a house so easily that its common sense is invisible. But by the end of an hour, its absence was becoming actively unpleasant. The effect reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, whose walls just don’t meet at the right angle somehow, whose every room is subtly offensive to the senses.

And then there’s the earthquake-damaged section. I recall this coming in the middle of the tour, although I could be misremembering. During the 1906 quake, fireplaces collapsed and the walls shifted, making a door impossible to open, and Mrs. Winchester was trapped in a single room until the servants came to pry it open. She ordered the whole section of the house boarded up, and it was never repaired. I’m thinking PTSD is probably a better explanation for that than the “curse” our guide said she may have feared to call down by finishing her renovations, but either way, that part of the house is crumbling: the plaster is cracked, coming down in chunks, the ceiling a patchy mess.

I’ve had nightmares about an opulent house that dissolves into something less and less houselike – and more and more horrible – the further in you go. Peak creepiness in the whole tour was the moment I turned to look down a dark, roped-off corridor up there and a cold draft sighed down towards me, smelling powerfully of old wood and decaying paper.

​You can look up the story about the “curse” on the house. I don’t care for it. It’s one of those sort of flat, shiny, moral stories that ties up every mystery and doesn’t leave any interesting questions hanging. But the house has a spookiness that endures; it defies the attempt at an explanation.

Let me say one thing – the most important thing – right up front. People considering this workshop or some other opportunity to work with Nova Ren Suma: DO IT. Risk it. Take the leap of faith. You will never regret it.

I spent March 6 to 12 in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California at a writing workshop hosted by the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. The experience reminds me of nothing so much as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. What struck me most about that movie was how much I identified with its portrait of Bilbo. He’s comfortable, complacent, a risk-averse homebody – but deep down he’s longing for adventure, for something new and different and exciting. It’s something he doesn’t quite have the courage to go looking for, but all it takes is the nudge out the door to send him running after it.

I’ve had an adventure or two in my time, but when I saw that movie in 2012, they felt like an awfully long time ago. I remember saying to my husband, as we grabbed a hurried bite at a diner after the movie before heading home to the kids, that I didn’t know what adventure would even look like for me now. And if somehow it presented itself on my doorstep, how could I possibly answer its call?

Last summer I watched enviously as people tweeted about Nova Ren Suma’s Books with Bite workshop with the Highlights foundation. If this ever comes up again, I vowed, I am SO THERE. So when Nova’s newsletter mentioned an upcoming YA workshop at Djerassi – and that she’d be teaching less after this, given her new position at VCFA – I applied. I hemmed and hawed and read tarot cards and made anxious social media posts and spent about 24 hours panicking afterwards, but still, in the end, I applied.

And I was accepted.

My friend and critique partner Amazon responded to one of my nervous night-before-the-workshop posts with her usual keen insight: “Amazing and a little scary: That's the definition of adventure, right? You're going on an adventure!”

​Getting to Djerassi is a little like stepping into a portal fantasy. Something like Spirited Away. We drove up the mountain, through mysterious, shaggy woods and on hair-raisingly winding roads, to finally arrive here, about 45 minutes from the airport.

You could tell you were in a whole new world from the second you stepped out of the car. The air smelled different in a way that struck me every time I stepped outside all week: pine forest with a faint, zingy freshness underneath, like spearmint. It was spring-chilly and green and foggy, threatening to rain.
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I was staying in the bewilderingly gorgeous choreographer’s studio, whose vast expanse of hardwood floor ended at a wall of windows facing into the woods; a staircase led up to a loft bedroom.

My first impulse, having escaped the deep freeze in Ottawa, was to snatch my notebook and run outside to the listening bench, a seat carved out of a tree stump looking out towards the ocean. I sat there and wrote until my fingers went numb and then retreated to my fancy studio to keep scribbling until dinner.

I was feeling a little shy and nervous about the hanging out with people part, but I could not have asked for a warmer, kinder, or more open crew to spend a week on the mountain with. I’ve mentioned here before how I’d long been missing the sense of connection and community with other writers, and this was the brightest that wonderful spark has been for me since attending workshops as a teenager. We were all writing YA, despite our vastly different projects; we were all fans of Nova’s, so we were all interested in fiction with a magical twist; and we were all thrilled and a little terrified to find ourselves there among our people.

Most days I was the first one up, thanks to the jump between time zones. I was showered and ensconced in one of the comfy couches overlooking the sunrise with a cup of tea and a ridiculously healthy breakfast by 6:30 or 7 every morning, and our two-hour workshop wasn’t even until 10.
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​There was so much time. There was acres of time. And all for writing. Everything else was taken care of: there was plenty of food in the cupboard, a sumptuous gourmet dinner every night, no chores to do beyond 15 minutes of after-dinner washing up. It rained most of the week, so even the gorgeous outdoors was a backdrop and never a distraction. Nothing to do but wrap up cozily in a blanket, keep the hot tea flowing, and pour my brain out onto the page, surrounded by people who were busy doing the same, with occasional breaks to chat and some prompt-writing sessions to shake things up and get you thinking in new directions. One big long epic productivity party, complete with occasional wine. I got as much done this week as I would usually expect to produce over the course of a productive month.

​And then there was the workshop. Imagine spending an hour talking intensely about your work with ten brilliant people whose work you admire and whose opinion you trust, all of whom love your vision and want to see you succeed. You could take a deep breath and share the work of your heart and – as a classmate put it – trust the group to catch you. The same dynamic was at work in the evening readings. Reading aloud is hard for me when it involves an audience other than my kids, but I knew I could do it here. There was laughing and crying and cheering. And there was even a dance class, courtesy of the boundless energy and generosity of one of our classmates. It was magical.

Our leader was every bit as wise, supportive, and judicious as her previous students have enthused, always open to questions and discussions, thoughtfully guiding workshop critiques, and offering generous, in-depth comments on the pages we submitted. She was so enthusiastic and encouraging. I came out of my private conference with her feeling more optimistic and more legit as a writer than I think I ever have before. And we got to share and celebrate a bit of her success as well when she hit #1 on the NYT bestseller lists in the middle of the week!

It was so hard to leave. I’m not totally sure how to settle back into the groove of the day to day grind, but I am so very grateful for the opportunity to recharge the creative batteries. It was the best kind of break. Instead of burnt out and exhausted I feel energized, excited, and eager to keep writing. I cannot tell you how liberating and inspiring this week has been and how thoroughly, subtly different the landscape looks on the other side of it.
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I’ve been on my adventure, and now I’m heading back again. And everything has changed.