The inaugural Valley Society writing retreat took place October 10-12, 2025, at the Film Shack on Tully Lake in Orange, Massachusetts. We gathered in a space built by Black filmmakers for Black artists, and the posters watching over us all weekend told their own story.
Robert Patton-Spruill and Patti Moreno’s Welcome to the Terrordome and Turntables hung on the walls—documentaries about Public Enemy and the culture of hip-hop DJ competition. Spruill built Film Shack in Roxbury in 2000 specifically to create infrastructure for independent Black filmmakers who couldn’t access traditional production resources. Twenty-five years later, their space on Tully Lake hosted our attempt to build similar infrastructure for Black writers.
Chuck D and Flavor Flav stared down at us as we practiced field notation and generative writing. What better witnesses for a retreat about attention, observation, and rigorous practice?
Three Days, Two Methods
The retreat combined field notation methodology with Amherst Writers & Artists generative writing practice. Mornings and evenings, we walked the trails around Tully Lake, recording observations in the Anansi field notation system—an enhancement of the Grinnell scientific method that adds emotional and physical state tracking to standard sensory observation.
Between walks, we wrote. Three AWA sessions over the weekend, each sparked by a poem from a Black writer:
Saturday afternoon: Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me”—that invitation to witness survival, to honor the life shaped without models, made up “here on this bridge between / starshine and clay.”
Saturday night: Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact”—the gentle reminder that Eric Garner worked for the Parks Department, that his large hands put plants into the earth, plants that continue to grow, continue to make it easier for us to breathe.
Sunday morning: Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)”—that glorious catalog of power and creation: “I was born in the congo / I walked to the fertile crescent and built / the sphinx.”
The poems did their work. Field notes became raw material. Writing emerged.
Obligatory October
Here’s what I wrote Sunday morning, responding to Giovanni’s ego trip with my own October meditation:
The smell of Autumn leaves leads me into trance, memory echo of senses begin to pour in, through eyes and skin, from wells of worn leather and first hard frosts. Blazing hot days stirs shadows to stretch out, dragging the night down, and winds up, from rocky depths. And in that subterranean castle, that chills lakes and turns morning grass into glass-laden spider legs, Jack O’ Lantern’s gleeful grin and a forlorn streetlamp’s light washes down wet black roads, which weave, wind and then, vanish in the dark wood, where pines, everlasting, bed the earth with dry needles, mixing with the sweet musk of fallen maple leaves and dreams of gentle ruins marooned in seas of fog.
What We Learned
This first retreat taught us what works and what needs refining. The combination of field observation and generative writing proved strong. Walking in morning fog, documenting what we noticed, then transforming those observations into creative work—the rhythm held.
We also learned logistical lessons. Next time: consolidated materials in a single booklet instead of loose sheets. Better meal planning. Clearer pre-retreat communication about what to bring. A review process to capture participant feedback while the experience is still fresh.
But the core methodology validated itself. Field notes sharpen attention. AWA sessions create space for authentic voice. And holding both practices together in the particular light of October, in a space built by Black artists for Black artists, felt exactly right.
Looking Forward
Valley Society (soon to be renamed Autumn Society) will return to this weekend format. October. Columbus Day weekend. Field notes and generative writing. Each year refining the practice, building the infrastructure, creating space for Black writers to deepen their craft through rigorous attention.
Robert Patton-Spruill built Film Shack because independent Black filmmakers needed infrastructure that didn’t exist. We’re building the same thing for writers—not your first step, but your next step. Not learning to write, but learning to observe with the precision that transforms craft into art.
The posters of Chuck D and Flavor Flav will be waiting when we return next October.
The Autumn Society runs on small funding and serious work. If this matters to you, please consider supporting our next retreat.
