When Peter, Ishy and I arrive, it’s still light. The trees are in the background. The road begins to climb and twist in its approach to the village. First, I see woods, then tree branches trailing chains of small, familiar-looking white flowers. Then the individual saplings emerge into my attention. After that first sighting, the flowering trees are everywhere. They grow in groups, in hedgerows, fields, along the hill roads.

The morning pages I write each day at Villa Lugara feel like a countdown. Each begins with a number. On Day Zero a long table is set on the portico. Fiona and Jo top thick, circular sections of crimson watermelon with an unctuous salad of tomato, olives, and feta. There is the hopeful energy of dinner with people I don’t yet know. Time stretches out ahead. I am free to use my days as I please.

A cock crows early on the morning of Day One. Instead of writing morning pages, I sit in a wooden chair on the portico. I’m alone, in the beauty of the hills. There is a loud buzzing. Hens cluck, and a peacock calls. When I return to the kitchen, Fiona is cutting up oranges at the kitchen island. It’s eight o’ clock. The large room fills with voices and movement. Occasionally, there is a clatter of machinery in the distance. The morning noises layer on top of each other. The animal voices recede.

When the bullet points and checklists which organise my time threaten to take over the whole field of my life, I return to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. She writes about care and community as political imperatives for women artists. Even though I don’t completely understand her 1978 essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ at first or second reading, I persist with it. Lorde writes of using the deep feelings and fulfillment contained in the Erotic as a yardstick to measure other aspects of experience. The power of the Erotic is the ability to take in the world with the senses. During the residency I’d like to find out what that sort of attention looks like in a writing practice.

Eating at home in Scotland is the culmination of a chain of routine activities, followed by cleanup. To have been freed of thinking about, buying, and preparing food returns the aspect of surprise to the act of eating with others. I come to the table at Villa Lugara having had ample time alone. Mealtimes are animated. I can choose to withdraw at any time, but I usually stay with the group.

The three trees nearest to the portico are about eleven metres tall. All day, solitary wasps and honeybees dislodge a rain of petals from the branches. I hear the buzzing before the small bodies come into focus. The blooms only last a couple of weeks. In paying attention to how the flowers, leaves and insects experience each other, for a while I become one small part of the place.

I share my room with two hexagonal stink bugs. At night, a lone firefly falls into the dark field below the pool. On some nights there are two fireflies, but they’re separated by such a vast distance. How will they find each other? There are crimson rags of cloud across the moon. Once there are six winking lights. As a child I chased these ‘lost-lights.’ In the daylight the insects are unremarkable.

On Day Seven I call to the peacock, and he calls back. Some rhythms are beginning to repeat. The bees throng the trees. Migrating cuckoos make their way back from the Congo rainforests. The birds stop in northern Italy on their way to Britain. Fiona, Amanda, and Jo walk past on their way to the compost heap. They return with fat, red strawberries. At the summit of the highest hill a single tree is outlined against blue sky. Writing is often described as a lonely process. Here, we sit together. There are candles. Sometimes there’s a fire. We eat and talk.

I don’t try to identify the trees. I know how the leaves respond to the wind, how on dry days the trees host a constant stream of insect visitors, how the slightest breeze redirects the trees’ falling petals, to lie on the grass. There is a reference book in the library, and I could image search the leaves, and flowers on the internet, but this is not the sort of knowing I seek.

Each morning, Amanda sets out the yoga mats on the daisy lawn. After breakfast, the bedroom upstairs is a quiet place to listen to music and read. An older man comes by once a month to flush a strong current of water from the hydrant through the drain. He has on an orange boiler suit which flatters him. A man in a green boiler suit and ear bafflers comes to cut the daisy lawn. A few days after they’re cut the first daisies are back. Daisies have a short growing season, so they flower hard. It’s Sunday again. The single tree at the hill summit is blotted out by mist.

Villa Lugara is an old place with a connection to people. Both the house and its connection to the people of the village, seem to have been restored. Several people who have lived there come by to tell its backstory. Our callers always bring a touch of the unexpected with them.

‘I was born here, in the room at the back,’ Ellis says. ‘Signora, sono nati qua.’
Ellis touches my arm as if to make sure I am real.
‘Well done, you chose a good place to be born, I say.
She replies: ‘My mother did all the work.’
I put Ellis in her mid 60’s, but I don’t know how old she is. When Ellis leaves, she blows a kiss.
‘Arrivederci!’ I say.
I’m envious when I meet people who are still in the place where they were born. I notice how I’m creating a story of a person who is tied to place but I’m sure Ellis has her own story. Perhaps like me, she left and returned and will leave Lugara again.
‘Guess how old I am?’ the butcher says.
‘Sixty,’ I guess.
He laughs loudly and twirls his walking stick.
A small brown dog trots down the path between the orchard and the outbuilding.

Each day is a chance to practice feeling deeply, noticing, and bringing those experiences to the writing. On plunging into the pool, I feel the shock of cold water on an overheated body, and am reminded of myself aged ten, in the outdoor pool of the Senior Service Club in Victoria, Cameroon. Within a few strokes, I find a familiar rhythm in breath and movement, hear the splash, push at the enveloping fluid, feel held in a liquid casing. Test the expanded range of motion which water offers. Feel the body’s buoyancy while thinking: This is how it felt then, and this is how it feels now. Hold the past, while the mind and body encode the pleasure of the present experience. Imagine: This is how it felt to be held by my mother’s body. Know: I will never be held by my mother again.

Over Days Eleven and Thirteen the flowers are knocked down by heavy rain and strong wind. Only the bare stems remain. The next time I look at the trees properly, the insects are gone. The trees are quiet.
I didn’t expect the time at Villa Lugara to demonstrate the importance of collective care for my own creative life, but that’s what I take away from the residency period. It’s easier to write with others. Seeing people work creates a companionable environment for working. A glimpse of someone asleep on the sofa in the library makes me feel tender. I care for their rest.

I leave Villa Lugara on Day 25. At home one of my family members is locked in the toilet. The grub screw on the doorknob has worked its way loose. The knob spins uselessly. The kitchen tap still leaks a series of water drops at a rate of one drop per second. The succulents might need water, or they might need a dry period.
‘Is there mustard?’
I don’t know.
‘Is the milk on the turn?’
I’m not sure of the answers to any of these questions. This is the re-entry into life outside the envelope of the residency.

Now I think understanding Audre Lorde was never a question of grasping with the mind. It was a question of feeling, while doing. The Erotic connects to our deepest feeling, and then it’s up to us to perceive the experience as acutely and sensitively as we can. A poetics of the Erotic makes everyday experience into a wellspring. Over time, the care I experience at Villa Lugara permits a new writing practice to unfold. Taking in the world through the senses, feeling and responding to the world becomes a source of creative force.

The acacias I left behind at Villa Lugara belong to the same tribe of pea flowers as gorse, and broom, which I know from the Scottish hills. They were brought to Europe from the Appalachians around the time the Puritans took ship for the New World. Over that time, although some would like to contain the acacias’ spread, the trees have become a familiar sight on all five continents.

It’s Day Zero at home. Sometimes it’s hard to live, let alone write. I think about care as a collective responsibility, feeling as an antidote to numbness, play as a remedy for overwork, pleasure and sociality as an answer to working in isolation. There’s a jar of acacia honey in the kitchen.

Clementine E Burnley

Born in Cameroon, Clementine E Burnley now lives and works between the UK and Germany. She has an MSc in Applied Linguistics from Manchester University and is a practice-based student at the Research Society for Process Oriented Psychotherapy, studying the links between trauma, conflict mediation, and group facilitation. Her work has been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Magma, and The Poetry Review. In 2021 her poem ‘How to Eat Frogs’ was selected by Hugh Macmillan as one of the Best Scottish Poems. In 2021, she was the RSL Sky Award Winner for creative nonfiction. Clementine’s first pamphlet, Radical Pairings, was published in 2023.

© Clementine E Burnley