The Freedom to Create with Shannon Vesely

In this first episode of 2026, I interview Shannon Vesely, a poet, writer, and educator. This is the first half of our interview, where we discuss Shannon's writing process and her experience with writing retreats. 

Show Links:

• Shannon's blog Sanctuaries
• Shannon's book The Way of Things
• Shannon's book Keeping Watch on Soap Creek
• Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat application portal

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• On my website: lauraswalker.com
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Transcript

Ep. 85 - Shannon Vesely, Part 1

Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Laura Walker: Hi everyone, and thanks for listening to episode 85 of Writing Connections, formerly known as Your Writing Retreat Connection. 

First off, quick acknowledgement of how much time has passed since my last episode. I meant to get this out in December, but my teaching schedule and holiday planning got the better of me, and here we are in January.

So, welcome to 2026 and to this new episode where I talk with my dear friend, poet and blogger Shannon Besley. Shannon and I first connected in rural Pennsylvania while on a writing residency in the late summer of 2022. This was a tumultuous time in my life, and my friendship with her provided the kind of grounding I so desperately needed.

There's something incredibly validating about connecting with a person who's just a few steps ahead of you on a journey. Shannon ended up being not just a source of companionship for a difficult moment, but also a reflection of who and where I wanted to be.

During what's turning out to be a dry and bleak winter here in the Intermountain West, Shannon continues to be a beacon of light for me, and I'm excited to share her wisdom and insight with listeners.

In this first part of our interview, Shannon talks about her identity and process as a writer and her own history with writing residencies.

Part One

[00:01:18] Laura Walker: Shannon, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and talk about the kind of writing that you do?

[00:01:24] Shannon Vesely: My name is Shannon Vesely, and I am 70 years old, which is hard to believe now, but for 41 of those 70 years, I was an educator, mostly an English teacher, with the first half of my career being on the college/university level, and then I moved to the K-12 system. I used to brag to my best friend that I'd written millions of words, but they were all in the margins of student essays.

I grew up in a family with a dad who was a poet and an English teacher and was mentored from an early age and grew up with his worldview that the world was populated with all these, you know, ordinary things which held extraordinary value if you looked at them in a particular way. And so I began writing as a child and then did my master's work and had a creative thesis in poetry.

But then, as I said, when I moved into the world of education, I largely had to put a lot of those writing dreams aside. Then, I became a mother of four, and so the combination of mothering four children and teaching sometimes during the day and at night left very little time for writing.

But I carried a lot of that, the poems and the ideas of poems, in my head for years. So, when I retired, that afforded me, for the first time in my life, uninterrupted time to write. For me, being able to have that time, I published my first collection, called The Way of Things, and I was blessed to win the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry for that debut collection, which again, I think I'd been carrying a lot of that work with me for years and years, so it wasn't entirely just new work since retirement but the work I'd been developing over the years.

Two years later, I published the second collection, Keeping Watch on Soap Creek. There were poems in that collection that were very similar to the book I first published, but also, I took different directions and had different sections in the book, so I was exploring new forms.

I've also, as a writer and of course as a teacher of writing and literature, I'm been very interested in the work of other writers. My dad, in particular, but also many of the women writers who have shaped my life as a literature teacher and, I think, shaped my life as a writer, both in their content and in their craft.

I've continued to study that and have written a series of poems to the female writers I wish were my friends. I wish I could just call up or text and say, "Hey, could you come over and, you know, have a cup of tea, and let's talk about writing."

[00:04:04] Laura Walker: I've had the privilege of reading some of those poems, and I think they're magnificent. I love this idea, too, of carrying around poems and ideas of poems through those periods when you weren't able to sort of like devote yourself full time to writing. 

[00:04:19] Shannon Vesely: I tend to write as I walk and compose in my head. My dad used to carry little tiny pocket notebooks, and he would stop and write. I tend to just carry the words in my head and recite them over and over again, so I'm composing as I'm walking. So, I think I had developed that, carrying that around with me, naturally for years. It didn't seem foreign to me to carry those words in my head for a long time before they were birthed on paper.

In the weeks after my father passed away, I started a blog that I called Sanctuaries because everything in the world to me is a sanctuary of sorts when you see the small and sometimes very large things that create a sense of wonder in the people who have eyes to see them, I guess.

I do creative nonfiction for the most part, and the nice thing for me about this is that I can write about whatever tickles my fancy. I write about cultural things. I write about sometimes educational or political things. I write about spiritual things. I've been able to chronicle, I think, some of the best moments in my life as a grandmother in writing about my grandchildren. I don't have any set schedule of how often I write, but it seems to be pretty natural now that it's about every other week I'm working on something like that. All my years of teaching the essay culminated in structure of an essay that's taken on sort of an organic shape as I've reformatted that into blog posts. I enjoyed that kind of writing as well. 

[00:05:48] Laura Walker: That's wonderful, and that is actually a lovely segue into my next question because the idea of sanctuaries folds really nicely into the idea of writing retreats and retreats of all kinds, actually. So, what is your history with writing retreats or other kinds of retreats?

[00:06:07] Shannon Vesely: After I retired and I became aware that there were writing retreats and some of these were funded retreats, I was pretty naive. I applied for three, I think, in the second year after my retirement. I was afforded with two, which I understand now, with my experience, was really a miracle.

My first retreat was Brush Creek Artist Residency, which is now no longer a foundation, and they no longer run this retreat, but it was at one of the nation's premier dude ranches in the Sierra Madre Mountains in southern Wyoming near Saratoga, Wyoming, I think it is.

Because I was open to going at any point, I ended up going in the winter in February in a blizzard and was lucky to get there and then was lucky to get out of there. It was just a magical experience. It was the one winter retreat that I've done where we were, you know, the dude ranch was not operational at the time, with the exception for the, of the staff. But we had incredibly beautiful lodgings; I had a writing cabin. I remember looking out one day and seeing a herd of elk just coming down the road right outside my window. The snow was like waist-high deep. We had these little paths carved to get from our sleeping quarters to our writing cabins.

The dude ranch chefs cooked for us every day. It was quite an experience the first time because the food was exceptional. It was delivered right to our little lodge kitchen where we did tend to share communal meals.

That experience was three weeks. I remember, going into it as a teacher, I thought, well, it would be good if I had some sort of schedule. I had two writing projects I was working on, and I decided I'll devote the morning to one. I'll go eat lunch with my fellow residents and maybe hang out for a while with them, come back in the afternoon, work on my second project. Then, for the most part, I didn't write a whole lot after supper at night.

A lot of the poems that ended up in my first book came from that experience. Or the seeds of them came from that experience. And I made, as I have with all retreats, I made some friends, some of whom I still correspond with.

It was a very life-changing experience. I went into it naively, not really knowing what this was about, and came out a big fan. I couldn't wait for my second one, which got postponed because of COVID. Fortunately, they were able to reopen, and I didn't lose my spot.

This one was very different. It was a small town in Nebraska, Nebraska City, the home of Arbor Day and Arbor Lodge, and this was an old apartment building that they had refurbished and had a beautiful gallery space in it. Because of COVID, they still were a little bit wary of having too many people there at one time, so there were just three of us—a composer, an artist, and a writer—and we all had our own apartment. There was less together time and less opportunity to really forge many relationships unless you happen to run into one of your other residents in the laundry room or walking through the hallway or something.

We did make a couple attempts, which were wonderful to meet together in the local park and have a picnic. I probably knew my fellow residents less in that experience, but also, it was national poetry month, so I got to meet the local librarian who had me on her radio show and went to coffee with her.

So, I had some very different experiences in the community. I walked every day in the park, the Arbor Lodge Park, which was incredible. The apartment building was close enough to the town that you could walk to museums and restaurants, and it was a very different experience, but I enjoyed it a lot and hope to go back someday.

Interlude

Laura Walker: That very much sums up my experience, too, with each of the residencies and retreats I've been on: this hope that I can one day go back. And what's interesting too about writing in such disparate locations is how the specifics of season and place create their own sort of temporal topography, so when and what and how much I wrote.

For example, at Dolan Mountain Arts Colony in the middle of the summer was different from the way I wrote at the Pink House in Flagstaff in the depths of the snowiest winter in recent history.

And likewise, when I was at Soaring Gardens with Shannon, my writing schedule was molded by time and space. This was late August/early September in the Eastern U.S.. So, think warm, muggy days getting shorter and shorter. I spent mornings in my room writing, meditating, and of course, as always, drinking a lot of tea.

Afternoons were for more writing, lots of walking, making sure to be back before dark because this was rural Pennsylvania and when it got dark, it really got dark. Sometimes after dinner, the four of us residents would informally meet in the living room to hang out and chat, but mostly evenings were long and lonely affairs that stretched until I could finally go to sleep and start again the next day.

The schedule I fell into wasn't always easy or transcendent, but it gave my writing a shape during those three weeks. If you're lucky, you can find a geography that matches your own writing rhythms like Shannon talks about next.

Part Two

[00:11:30] Laura Walker: How was your schedule set up in that second retreat experience? 

[00:11:36] Shannon Vesely: I followed the same format that I did at Brush Creek, beginning with one project I was working on in the morning. Then, I would generally break late morning and go for a walk in the afternoon.

I always would bring a book or two with me, something I wanted to read or something I had read but wanted to review. I have found, from my own work, being able to look at some of the best writing and the best thinking that's ever been done is often a great springboard into those times when I'm just sitting there thinking, either trying to draft or revise and just hitting that wall where I don't really know what to do next.

At those times, I had decided, rather than try to force it, I would just take a break and sometimes read. Between the walking and the reading, that was a nice way to break up the day and then come back at it with either a different project or sometimes I would draft in the morning and try to revise in the afternoon. It just depends on what I was working on.

Again, I find I'm not as productive after supper unless I'm really motivated or something is really rolling and I revisit it then, but I rarely would ever draft after supper, so it was the same schedule I followed at Brush Creek.

Then, you know, I met you when I went to Soaring Gardens in rural Pennsylvania, so all my settings were very geographically different, which I found really wonderful. I had never been to northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was amazed at how beautiful it was, how green it was. This was a rural farmhouse, which was a marvelous setting, I thought. Again, was able to walk every day. I can still—I think I've told you this before—I can still, in my head, walk that same path that we walked together and see some of those same things I could see in my head. 

And I had two projects. Again, I was working on my own poetry, but I'd also begun to work on a book that was a collaboration with my father, where I was going through my father's papers and unpublished poetry, some published poetry lectures and addresses that he'd given. I'm trying to write a book in which I pair our poetry together but also highlight some of, I think, the things about my father that made him the man that he was, certainly the teacher and the writer that he was.

So, I had part of the day, generally in the morning, when I would work on that, and then in the afternoon I would shift and worked on some of my own poetry. At Soaring Gardens, we just tended to congregate in the kitchen sometimes, and it was pretty organic. Nobody planned, “We're all gonna meet there.”

I think the nice thing about the writing retreats I've been on is clearly they tell you, you need to be somebody who can work independently and can work without getting in the way of other residents' work. But it also is nice when there are times when you can come together and just talk about writing or art or personally share things and have that time to break up the day where you're not in solitude 24/7.

We shared many times when we walked together, which was also great. The weather was beautiful for the most part. Where I couldn't get out and do as much active walking in the winter at Brush Creek, I could at Soaring Gardens, which I really appreciated.

In each one of these settings, I think the geographical setting for me was different enough that it just evoked different reactions in my poetry, as well.

I was looking for something where I knew that I could get out and enjoy the natural world. I was less, probably just personally, less attracted to an urban setting and more attracted to settings in a small town or village or in the countryside or in the mountains where I could be a part of the natural world. The natural world was different from the geography that I currently live in, so that I was experiencing something new.

[00:15:28] Laura Walker: That absolutely makes sense. When I look back on Soaring Gardens, that lushness, this tangled up wildness, is what comes to mind for me visually in a really beautiful and profound way because it also mirrored a lot of what was happening in my life at that time.

[00:15:45] Shannon Vesely: Yeah. And then we met up again at Journey into Awe, a guided writing retreat—three-day instead of three weeks—outside of Loveland. That was a very different experience to beautiful natural setting, of course. But also, we had those guided times when we came together and we're working from a shared writing prompt and had the opportunities to share with other participants there. There was more of a sense of community and more together time. That retreat also afforded us times of independent work and quiet time, which I appreciated a lot.

And then every year for the last six years, I've gone to a retreat center outside of Gretna, Nebraska, which is right outside of Omaha. It's called Cloisters on the Plat. This is not an artist retreat. It's a spiritual retreat, and it's founded primarily on the Ignatian spiritual exercises, but it's primarily a three-day silent retreat. From the moment you check in until the moment you check out, like Sunday at noon, you are not speaking, and so there is a sense of community and that you're there with other women, and you're there in this incredibly beautiful setting.

They spared no expense in creating a setting where you could be outside walking on these beautiful trails. They have a couple swans now. The lodges are beautiful. You have that, and inside, the only sound you generally hear are Gregorian chants that play constantly as this white noise background as you're inside the retreat center and the chapel. Even though it's not a writing retreat, I think it has afforded me the silence, the space, emotionally and spiritually, to write, and so I've used my quiet time in a number of ways, and writing has been one of those ways.

I look forward to that every year. I'm always prepared 'cause I take my notebook with me, and they have a beautiful library, and I've spent a lot of time just sitting in the library either reading or praying or writing. I've had some poetry that's come out of that experience that I appreciate very much. So far, that's been my retreat experience. 

[00:17:57] Laura Walker: That silent retreat sounds like it must be really regenerative, almost like a sort of soul spring for yourself.

[00:18:04] Shannon Vesely: Yes. Yeah. Because the actual retreat facility is just so incredibly beautiful, it just is even more restorative because it feels like you're in a totally different world. You're not speaking, but you're in this beautiful place with beautiful art around you and a wonderful, natural setting. I go in November every year, and so sometimes the weather is incredible, and sometimes it's not. But I've been there through when it's been snowing, and it's beautiful then. And when it's been 60 degrees, and you're out in shirt sleeves, whether you're inside or outside, it's just a wonderful place, I think. Very restorative spiritually but also creatively. 

[00:18:45] Laura Walker: It sounds like an incredible experience.

With all of these different kinds of retreats that you have been on, what kinds of surprises or challenges have come out of those?

[00:19:00] Shannon Vesely: I'm a person who has a particular affinity for place. I've just been so pleasantly surprised at the beauty of each place in different ways and how quickly I felt at home in each one of those places. I also, especially during the first one, was surprised at the relationships you made rather quickly because you were all sharing this space, and we were eating together at Brush Creek, and that one, there were the most participants. I think there were three writers, two photographers, an artist, and a composer.

I guess I just didn't anticipate the diversity of art genres that would be represented and the kinds of conversations that you would have. I still communicate with the composer, and it was just interesting to hear a musician and a composer talk about their craft. So that surprised me, I think. By the time I went to the second one and there was one composer and one artist, I was probably less surprised but equally pleased that it was a mix of us, that we all shared different art genres, but we were all happy to be able to talk about what we were doing.

I think I was surprised too at how much I needed, enjoyed, just being away because, even though I was retired and my children are grown and I have a quieter house than I had for many years—I don't know. It just goes without saying. When you're at home, I think you just look around like, "Oh, I should be doing this." Being separated from that and in this new setting where you didn't have any responsibilities but to be there and to write, I was surprised at the kind of freedom that gave. With that freedom came that responsibility. I wanted to be productive, but also it was just like, I can be productive and I can do what I want to do, stop when I need to stop, do something else when I need to. And everybody else at the retreats respected that. So that was surprising and very pleasing.

There were times when I admit, especially because my grandchildren were younger at the time, you would get those pangs, just kind of homesickness like, “I wonder what they're doing. I wonder what's happening in my community.” But honestly, those times were fleeting, so the challenge was not all that great. I think it was just working through "Yes, but you only have three weeks here."

[00:21:19] Laura Walker: There's something magical about that compressed time and something really compelling about knowing that you have this moment where you can really focus on your writing without feeling, like you said, the sort of domestic guilt or relational guilt that otherwise might be disruptive to that. 

[00:21:37] Shannon Vesely: Yes. Yeah. When I share with people on a daily basis, I'm not sharing with writers or artists. I'm sort of an anomaly, and so to be in a situation at a retreat where everyone is there for the same reason was also surprising and wonderful because everybody was there to create something.

Outro

Laura Walker: That act of creation is exactly what writing retreats and residencies are all about. Thanks so much for joining us for this episode, and please tune in next time for the second half of my interview with Shannon, where we talk about our own experience planning a retreat and how to respond to failure in the writing world.

And before we wrap up, I just wanna mention that Soaring Gardens, the residency where Shannon and I first met, is open for applications for the 2026 season through February 1st. You can Google them or visit their website linked in the show notes where you can also find a link to Shannon's blog sanctuaries and to her two poetry collections, The Way of Things and Keeping Watch on Soap Creek. Thanks so much.