This is a picture from my last day in Puycelsi. I know because that was the day I turned my phone back on. For the entire month previous I had lived without it, telling time from the chimes of the clock tower, waking up in the morning with the first light. In this way I settled into one of the most productive writing routines of my life. I completed a long project which I’d been struggling with for years, began another, and filled a large notebook with miscellaneous thoughts and poetry inspired by my time in the Midi-Pyrénées. Funny thing, though, I don’t remember that time as a “writing retreat,” so much as a series of walks. These walks were so stitched into the routine I developed that I retrace them whenever I revisit the pages from those days, until it feels like the writing took place on the trails themselves. There were several paths out of the village, and each seemed to possess a personality of its own. I would choose which to take depending on the work at hand. If, along the way, I chose to explore a new trail, it often signaled an invitation to myself to think new thoughts and make fresh discoveries inside the world of my story. Once, an unfamiliar path I was on opened up onto a clearing where an old church stood beside a small cemetery in the middle of the forest. I feel now like I can point to the exact moment inside my play where I found that church.