I flew to WRICE from Metro Manila, Philippines, my adopted city and the homeland I’ve grown to adore. It has all the characteristics of an unruly, beloved family I refuse to give up on. I am an instructor at Ateneo de Manila University, where I happily assist students with the interpretation and understanding of writing and literature. I have a busy, chaotic  life, and it can be easy for me to forget to take care of my own writing. Writing so often requires an inner quiet that I refuse myself. So I left for WRiCE with a lot of noise in my head, and when I stopped over in Singapore, I decided to check my social media feeds to see what my students and friends in Manila were up to. I had only been gone four hours, but I am part of the country most tethered to social media in the world; in Manila, as in a family, interpersonal ties are everything.

I learned that my campus had been evacuated because of a bomb threat.

I toggled back and forth between checking my classes’ online groups, news feeds, rumors on Twitter, and expressions of bafflement, anger, and fatalistic jokes on Facebook. It was stomach-dropping to think of the bomb sweep and mass evacuation happening on my home campus, while I waited in the sky garden of the most palatial airport in the world. My writing was relegated, again, to somewhere just beyond my will to concentrate.

I arrived at Ren-I-Tang Hotel in Penang, one hand anxious hand on the browser of my smartphone. A group of Australian and Asian writers greeted me happily and served me platters of food I’d never tried before. I entered my hotel room later and felt, for the first time in a while, the necessary quiet, the healthy solitude. Of course, unused to this feeling, I anxiously checked on my students and my city again. The threat was over, no bomb was found, and no one knows who sent the warnings. I showered, then entered a sleep populated by uneasy dreams about violence.

When I woke on the second day of the retreat, I found that I had nothing to do but eat and write. It had been a long time since this was the case, and I nearly didn’t know what to do with myself. Outside there was the amiable crackle of motorbikes; downstairs, air and light flowed freely through a high-ceilinged cafe. The hotel was once a place of Traditional Chinese Medicine treatments, and had been renovated with respect for what had come before: recycled wood, exposed cement floors, sturdy old staircases. It was hard to resist a sense of calm and healing pervading the space. Slowly, I felt my resistance to my work recede.

I sat and wrote, feeling, for the first time in a while, the ability to steep myself in my own voice. The peace and rhythm of the days conquered my natural urge to flee my writing: I worked in the mornings, absorbing myself in the story of the northernmost archipelago of the Philippines, Batanes. I walked the streets of Penang looking for food midday; whatever I chose was always far more nourishing and delicious than I thought my pauper’s budget would allow me. In the afternoons, I gathered around a table to reflect on what is usually a painfully lonely process. I shared meals with other writers, learned about their own home countries, and listened to their maneuvering of identity, confusion, noise, and voice.

At home, it’s easy for me to allow intrusions to stop me instead of moving forward with my own work. Sometimes, writing well about your home requires you to leave your home. I’m grateful to WRICE for offering me the gift of a departure I could never have given myself.

– Laurel Fantauzzo