Vanessa McKay

I remember what they wrote.

That’s the thing nobody knows — not Kate, not Wendy, not the Consumer Affairs officer I eventually called to understand my legal position. In the middle of an exchange that became increasingly painful, increasingly formal, increasingly about rights and refunds and what had or hadn’t been promised, I held something privately that I never used: I remembered exactly what had come out of them during those hours we spent together.

The farm boy. The tea-maid. The doors of Guatemala. The old man. And the one that stopped me — a woman walking through the door of her daughter’s rented house, and a baby on the floor who looked up and knew her. His grandma.

I had forgotten about that, she said, more than once. To herself as much as to me.

That’s the workshop nobody wrote a complaint about.

I’ve been thinking about that gap — the one between what happened and what was experienced — for weeks now. It’s an uncomfortable place to sit. Because both things are true. The women left disappointed, and something real and irretrievable happened in that room. A woman remembered that her infant grandson recognised her the moment she walked in. She had forgotten. And then, for a moment, she hadn’t.

I didn’t give her that. She gave it to herself. I just created the conditions.

But here’s where I have to be honest: I assumed she would know that. I assumed she’d understand that this is the work — the slow, pressured, sometimes confronting act of writing toward what you didn’t know you remembered. I assumed she’d looked at my website. I assumed the word retreat would signal something contemplative rather than instructional. I assumed that a bag of materials and a room and someone who’d read her words carefully was enough.

Assumption is such a quiet way to fail someone.

I know this now in the way you know things after — with a clarity that arrives too late and costs nothing, which is perhaps why it arrives so clearly.

I have been doing this long enough that it lives in my body. The rhythm of a writing day, the particular silence that falls when someone moves from performing to actually writing, the moment when the room shifts — I feel these things without naming them. And I forgot, entirely, that for two women who had driven a long way and spent real money, the room was simply a room. Unknown. Slightly unnerving. Full of possibility they couldn’t yet see.

The emails became difficult. I won’t pretend otherwise. There were accusations I found hurtful, and a word — scam — that landed somewhere tender and stayed there for a while. I wrote responses I didn’t send. Long ones, detailed ones, ones in which I described exactly what I remembered of their writing as a way of proving something.

Proving what, exactly? That I had been present? That I had paid attention? That whatever they’d felt, it wasn’t nothing?

I deleted them all. Because the proof wasn’t the point. The proof was for me — a way of defending myself to myself in a dispute where no one was watching. What they needed was different. And what I needed was to understand why it had gone wrong before I decided what to do next.

There’s a version of this story where I am simply wronged. Where two women attended a workshop they hadn’t researched, formed expectations the advertising couldn’t have promised, left before the second day had a chance to be anything, and then demanded a refund on the basis of disappointment rather than breach.

That version is also true.

But I’ve written enough to know that the most honest stories hold more than one truth at once. The one I keep returning to is simpler than any of the others: two women came a long way to find something. They didn’t find it. And I bear some responsibility for that, not because my workshop is inadequate, but because I did not make it legible to them before they arrived.

You cannot transform an experience you don’t yet understand you’re in.

One of them is coming back. Not Kate — another participant from the same weekend, returning for the next retreat and bringing a friend. She wrote to tell me, and I read her message several times. I’m not sure entirely why. Perhaps because it offered what the other correspondence hadn’t: evidence that the thing I believe I’m doing is, sometimes, the thing that lands.

I teach writing because I believe in what writing does to people. Not the finished product — the doing of it. The act of pressing language against memory and seeing what holds. The surprise of your own sentences. The infant on the floor, arms going, and a woman saying I had forgotten about that with a voice full of something she didn’t have words for yet.

That’s still what I’m here for.