Sukie Wilson’s Time at Civitella

What was it like to write in a 15th century castle in Italy?

It was hard to believe I was actually there. I was given a tour of the grounds on my first day there, but I was so overwhelmed by the place that I didn’t take any of it in, and ended up going on the tour again the next day. The space I was given for my residency was a wheelchair accessible studio named Upupa, after the Hoopoe bird which once made its nest there. The castle is so old, each room has seen very different uses through the ages – I think they mentioned that Upupa had once served as a small school. While the castle was quiet and still during the daytime, it was hard not to also feel the presence of its past lives, layering over one another. I set up my writing desk to look out over the castle’s lawn, with the castle-proper on my right, the headless statue of the castle’s founder on my left, and the hills of Umbria peeking up over the terracotta roofs of other studios ahead. I was aware that on the spot where I sat, many previous generations had been and gone. I suppose this is true for almost everywhere in the world – rarely are we ever alone in the timespan of a place – but I felt it keenly in the castle. To say it was inspiring feels like a dull way to describe the experience. I managed to write two short stories while I was there, neither of which would have been written if I hadn’t been at Civitella. If my collection ever does get published, I wonder if you’d be able to tell which ones were written at the castle.

You mentioned that you were stretching the residency into a month-long trip through Italy, France, Germany, and Austria. What was that experience like for you?

I was away from home for about 3 and a half weeks in total, but it felt like 6 months. I hadn’t actually left the UK since I was a teenager, and all the times I’d travelled internationally back then had been by plane. I had no frame of reference for what spending the better part of a month in a campervan would be like, and I think I was braver for being ignorant of the difficult bits. My body coped better with the constant travelling than I thought it would, even on days when we drove for ten hours. You see more from the road than you do from the sky, so I think I’ve come out of this preferring road trips to flying.

I did so much, saw so much, I think I can only share snapshots of the trip before I get too long winded. I snapped off one of my wheelchair casters on the third day of travelling, in the middle of nowhere Alsace, trying to get over a cut-curb that barely qualified as ‘cut’. Thankfully the next stop was Munich, and I managed to get a repair done there. Munich was a place I spent a lot of time in as a child, and my father’s ashes are scattered there, so going back was both essential and unmooring. It was strange to see how little it had changed since I was there to scatter my Dad, almost two decades ago. In many ways it felt like stepping back into my childhood bedroom, to find everything just as I left it.

Travelling through the Alps was very special. I loved the sense of spatial context the mountains gave me, and it was humbling to see them change from blue lumps distantly marking a point on the compass, to enormous piles of rock and tree up-close and under-foot. I was later told that our stop on the Adriatic coast is apparently one of the worst beaches in Italy, and I do see what they meant. It was a pebble beach, too sharp to go barefoot, not the kind of fine sand that people usually love. There was an oil refinery a little way along the shore, and out at sea, an oil rig. But because of all that, there was almost no one else there. I got to swim in the warm sea by myself, with just the sound of water rushing to find its path between pebbles, and the noises made by some sort of stork picking tiny black crabs from between boulders, and the rocking of the waves against my eardrums. Time alone with the sea was all I wanted, and I got it. There were lakes, too, and hot springs, rivers, more mountains, freshwater pools – maybe you can tell by now that I love to swim. Every day I had to remind myself that it was real, and that it was for me.

What things did you notice about your writing while you were at Civitella?

I arrived at Civitella with a serious case of writer’s block, months in the making. Some say writer’s block isn’t real, but I believe in the phenomenon, whatever you call it. Every time I set out to write, I would hear critical voices (not my own, not even voices or opinions I cared about) picking my ideas to shreds before I could even start writing. The stories were over before I could begin them. At Civitella I got the chance to change that. While I was only at Civitella for a week, there was a cohort of artists, musicians, and writers who would be there for a month and a half. All of them were much further along in their careers than me, and I expected that they would all feel like they deserved to be there. It wasn’t true, though. No one I remember speaking to felt completely assured of their place in their discipline, or at the castle. It made me realise how much of my creative brain I had been dedicating to fear, to what other people might think about me and my work. My internal editor was working hard to protect me from making art that people might hate, at the expense of creating anything at all.

The environment at Civitella – the heat, the routines of unfamiliar insects and birds, the imposing presence of the castle itself and all the years it held – was just what I needed to get right with myself. I wrote because I had nothing else I wanted or needed to do, and because it was quiet enough to hear myself think. I wrote for fun. I didn’t ask myself whether anyone else would enjoy what I was writing. I let myself experiment, get weirder. I plotted the two stories by writing plot points on sticky notes that I stuck to the glass doors of my studio, and one of the notes simply said “Inscrutability”. It felt alright that people might not enjoy what I was doing, or even understand it – it became something I could incorporate into the work deliberately. I accepted that I can’t do anything to affect anyone’s reaction to my writing. There’s nothing quite like travelling through five countries in a row that you don’t speak the languages of, for coming to terms with being misunderstood!

You mentioned the Civitella team being accommodating of your access needs. Please tell us more about that experience and any impact that had on your writing.

The team at Civitella were wonderful – they made me feel welcome, and not just with words. Upupa was everything I needed it to be, in terms of access, and the team were quick to respond to additional requests. Communal meals are a big part of the culture at Civitella, but with my immune system being how it is, I wouldn’t have been able to join in. To protect me from infections, my partner and I were invited to eat at a separate table than the fellows, out on the lawn. It was close enough to the main table to feel included, but far enough away to be safe. Everyone had taken a covid test upon arriving, which was a big weight off my mind. The chefs (their food was one of the best parts of my time there) wore masks to bring over our meals. I didn’t catch anything during the whole trip, so I would say the precautions worked perfectly. Feeling safe like that definitely contributed to my writing while I was at the castle – it’s hard for me to access creative thought if I’m not relaxed. It felt like it mattered to them that I was welcomed and included.

What else would you like us to know about your experience at Civitella? What surprised you?

Before this residency, I didn’t see why you couldn’t just do a writing retreat in your own home. You definitely can do that, and get lots of useful work done – the writing group I belong to, The Remote Body, does a yearly week-long remote writing retreat, and I’ve loved it every time. I understand now, though, that you can gain a great deal of insight from recontextualising yourself. Being in a different physical environment makes you think differently, see differently. You make connections you wouldn’t otherwise have made. Even aside from how that can help generate ideas, my prose also benefitted from hearing new voices, ways of seeing that I hadn’t encountered before. I think, or at least I hope, that the residency made me a better writer.