Creative Writing Ibiza’s Residential Retreats are Ibiza’s only creative writing holiday. Led by award-winning essayist, journalist, critic and fiction writer Cila Warncke, each retreat will help you develop your skill and confidence as a writer.
The retreat comprises guided writing practice, one-to-one workshops, inspirational readings, and plenty of free time and privacy for writing. You will also enjoy guided excursions to some of Ibiza’s most exquisite beaches and fascinating historic sites. In the evening you will have the option of dining out, taking a paseo through the old town, or simply unwinding and enjoying a glass or two of excellent Spanish wine.
Residential Retreats are designed so all you have to think about is writing! The £350 course fee includes:
Accommodation
Airport transfers
Workshops & one-to-one sessions
Course materials
Excursions
Home-made vegetarian meals featuring local produce
Water, wine, tea & coffee
Flights, travel insurance and optional evening meals & drinks are excluded.
The next Residential Retreat will take place 1-4 September 2012.
Hotels cling to the cliffs at Portinatx like acrylic nails, a perfect backdrop to sunburnt kids and beery parents. A small brown sign points the way out: Sant Joan. Sharp right, down-shift. The road lifts you above the roofs of the holiday apartments and turns its back on the dive school. Flirt with third, settle for second. No need to rush along the ribbon of asphalt unwinding in a haze of pine boughs. You’re following a track carved out over centuries by peasant feet and donkey carts. Only the surface has changed. Above you, a jewel-bright sky. Pull over and inhale the silence. Beyond a shimmering basin of green, the Mediterranean gift-wraps the view with a band of silver.
Posted byCila Warncke
As usual, I’ve been in Ibiza about five minutes and am already bored to the back teeth. Nothing and no-one, has changed. Walk into a bar and the same drunks are propping it up, the same coke-heads are rambling to anyone who will listen, the same high-pitched squeals are coming from nondescript women in too little clothing. When I bitched about this over dinner my friend pointed out that, by and large, the expat set isn’t overburdened with education or ready cash. Hence the tendency to sit in the same places, repeating themselves, like parrots on perches.
It’s a plausible theory, but wrong. Money is no no object when it comes to being interesting. I’ve spent some of my happiest hours drinking gut-rot wine in unheated houses, never caring that my friends and I were flat broke. Being penniless with the right people is a wonderful aid to conversation. Without the distraction of the things you can do with money, you make your own entertainment.
The notion that the well-educated are automatically delivered from dullness is equally nonsensical. Education can’t make anyone a jot more interesting than their nature dictates. Where education is telling is the lengths to which fascinating people will go to pursue it. The difference between stultifying and intriguing boils down to curiosity. People who are restless to learn, see, experience, discover, discuss and explore are never, ever boring.
Poor doesn’t matter, educated doesn’t matter, age doesn’t matter, location doesn’t matter. All a person needs to be endlessly, intoxicatingly interesting is to be full of questions, and always seeking answers.
Ibiza’s 10 best budget restaurants/snack bars/soup kitchens
1. Comidas San Juan, Calle de Montgrí, 8 – Ibiza Tel.: 971 311 603
They don’t take reservations and there’s always a queue. That’s because you can get a hearty meal, with wine, for under €10. Croquettes or calamari are a good bet.
2. Bon Profit, Plaza del Parque Ibiza Town
Don’t let the chic bistro vibe fool you. Food here is ridiculously cheap. Huge hunks of lamb, fillets of fish and hearty paellas all for around €6 a plate.
3. Jamal’s Bistro, C/General Prim 16, San Antonio, 971340117
Just off the West End, Jamal’s has a winning combination of classy looks, great food and alluringly low prices. It’s been voted the worker’s favourite restaurant.
4. Croissant Playa, Pais Vasco, Figueretes
The best breakfast/lunch/take-out place in Figueretes with amazing pastries, vast bocadillos and delicious homemade quiche. Works equally well as a breakfast spot or a morning-after comedown hideaway.
5. Casa Ana, C/. Ginebra 8, Ses Païsses (San Antonio) 0034-971 80 36 13Cheap With homemade pizzas, bacon cheeseburgers for under €5, roast chicken and take-aways Casa Ana is just the place to soak up the booze after a night on the town – or line your stomach before you get started. http://casa-ana.ibiza-restaurants.net/
6. Fisherman’s Kitchen, C/Madrid, San An10 971 34 57 72
All the stodge you need – but nicely made. Homemade pies, chilli, bangers and mash and lasagna will set you back around €7, a full English €5.50. Its sister bar down the road has wi-fi and TV sport. http://www.digitalibiza.com/fishermans/rest.html
7. Il Veccio Molina, C/Navarra, 12 Figuretes 34971305520
Gorgeous homemade pastas in huge quantities – €6 or 7 euros will fill you up quick plus cheap, decent house wine. It’s just up from the Figueretes taxi rank, making it easy to hop to your next destination.
8. Chill Cafe, Ibiza Town Via Punica, 49, Ibiza Town
Chill Café has internet, printers and a fax machine, making this the perfect spot to sort yourself out if you’re looking for work or want to catch up with folks at home. Great coffee, homemade baked goods, vast bocadillos, quiche and salads.
9. JDs, Playa d’en Bossa promenade, 971 307 062
Run by English expats Jo & Darren this popular beach-front hangout does everything from bacon butties to Sunday roasts to cheese & Branston pickle sarnies. It has wi-fi and a shelf of English newspapers and magazines to pass the time.
10. Can Joan, Playa d’en Bossa C/Murtra, 10, 971 30 66 93
Proper belly-filling fare but a cut above the plastic-chair-and-tablecloth competition. Homemade pizzas and pasta, paellas, grilled meat, and plenty of hearty breakfast options. http://www.ibiza-hotels.com/restaurants/canjoan/
I just finished Peter Chapman’s excellent expose Jungle Capitalists about ruthless banana baron United Fruit Corporation which ran Central America as its private fiefdom for most of a century – casually killing off unruly workers, uncooperative heads of state, uncharted jungle and anything else that got in its way. It got me thinking about the antidote to brute free market economics. Given that we live in an anxiety-riddled, security obsessed, paranoid late-capitalist society there are limited alternatives. You can’t drop out and live off the land anymore unless you’re rich enough to buy the land in the first place, and our high-tech culture makes it difficult to live a private life. It isn’t easy to shape your own existence, given the physical, legal and ideological constraints on personal freedom. There are people, however, who take on the challenge and look for creative ways to address the ever-present imperative to pay the rent while doing something that is personally meaningful and socially beneficial. These unsung freedom fighters fuck with the system by surviving within it while doing what they want to do – and by using their skills in constructive, cooperative ways. In a perfect world, it’s what everyone would do.
This is the first instalment of what I hope will become a long series of blogs profiling individuals and businesses that operate outside the prevailing paradigm. First up, Algo Mas – a 100% Fair Trade shop in Ibiza.
Thursday evening in the tiny village of Sant Miquel and the plaza below the Iglesia is full of children, music and the scent of home baking. On the corner, door and sky-blue shutters flung open, sits Algo Mas. This small Fair Trade shop has just celebrated its second anniversary and judging by the stream of locals who stop to say hello, it is firmly cemented in the community. Italian expats Valeria Cova and Aurietta Sala run the shop, along with Blanca Llosent. Aurietta and Valeria are Italian, but have each lived in Ibiza for more than 30 years and have fond memories of the days when visiting friends meant half a day’s walk through the countryside and dinner by candlelight. They are not hippie dilettantes, however, or airy fairy idealists. Algo Mas is the product of hard work, common sense and a firm commitment to the principles of Fair Trade. Click here to continue reading
Blogging is like exercise: addictive, once you get the hang of it but dangerously easy to leave aside when life gets hectic. There is little to say about my several weeks’ hiatus apart from: stuff happened. Mexico. London. Ibiza. Plans made and then unmade for journeys to Ireland, the States, Mexico again. There were patches where I was seriously considering going to the nearest airport and buying a one-way ticket on the first flight to someplace I’d never been before. I got a little caught up in the idea of someplace new. A succession of adventures, coincidences, gin & tonics and long conversations with friends nudged me into the realisation that the ‘someplace new’ I need to explore is Ibiza – and my own motivations.
Home to Ibiza
Jumping on planes is A) more fun than jumping off them and B) only very occasionally an antidote to chronic discontent. I tried it with Mexico and couldn’t, at the end of 14 weeks, figure out why the hell I hadn’t learned anything there. Why I had come back as bored and irritable as I’d left. A few weeks rattling around in the Mediterranean sun, making fantastic new friends who kickstarted my brain from its tropic slothfulness into frisky, if somewhat tentative life, suggests that my problem wasn’t where I was but how I was thinking. Somewhere between Ibiza, E17 and Merida, I completely lost my bottle. Not that you’d have noticed, necessarily. I was still walking around spouting opinions, still capable of summoning enough bravado to actually get from E17 to Merida, but there was something missing. The best lack all conviction.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, how I wanted to live or who I wanted to be. I was stumped. Then I got the following advice from a smartarse filmmaker:
Whatever you decide, feel good about it. Feel amazing about it. Feel as if you couldn’t have made any other possible decision. As long as you do that, everything will work out exactly as it should.
When I started to think like that suddenly the stubbornly wedged pieces began to fall into place. The decisions I fight the hardest are usually, in retrospect, as easy as falling over. It’s like standing at the top of a high dive. Turning, fretting, pawing at the board to buy time. Praying for a heavenly waterslide to appear. It never does. So I jumped. And my fear-hazed, pinched-in little world bloomed. There is much to be determined, questions to be posed and answered, work to be done, but it’s okay because life is exciting again.
It seems there is a segment of the population who think women who have tattoos are white trash hos. I refuse to take this personally since, on principle, I disregard the opinions of people whose IQs are lower than their waist measurement.
Tattoos 1 & 4
Anyway, I love my tattoos. They each have a very specific and personal meaning and I remember with what is, for me, uncanny clarity the situation and circumstance of each one. My first was 6 March, 2000, my bestest friend and biggest crush Andy’s 21st birthday. Partially out of bravado, I think, I went to Camden Town with my friend Miranda and had an Aquarius symbol tattooed on my right shoulder blade. It cost £55. I was petrified, but I survived. That night I went to Andy’s birthday drinks wearing a hot pink Oasis vest. I have no idea if he noticed my tattoo.
Giddy with my own courage I went with my friend and drinking buddy Lucy to get my second, at the end of term that year. We went to a place on Berwick Street, Soho, that was roughly twice the size of a phone box. I went first, getting an infinity symbol tattooed on my left hip. It was a blazing hot day and I remember looking over at myself in the mirror. I was literally as white as a sheet, sweat pouring off my face. Agony.
The next time the impulse took me was back in Philadelphia, the following autumn, during my final year of university. I persuaded my two roommates to come to a dingy little tattoo place on 43rd and Chestnut. They were good middle-class girls and didn’t take long to refuse to get involved with ink and needles. I wanted a tiny crescent moon on the top of my right thigh. It was a Saturday night and the parlour was full of West Philly hoodrats, goofing around. I had to drop my trousers and sit in the middle of all that, trying to look nonchalant — which at least took my mind off the pain.
After that I eased off. Three seemed like a nice number and I didn’t have a blinding urge to get any more work done. Then I moved to Ibiza. Surrounded by gorgeous bodies adorned with stunning tattoos I started to crave another. One of my all-time favourites is DC10 DJ Tania Vulcano’s tattoo. She is one of those striking woomen who don’t mess with makeup, hair fripperies or, heaven forbid, dresses. She’s always in jeans and a tee-shirt, with just this fabulous tattoo around her right elbow. I wanted one too. My first mission to find the right artist didn’t go well. Inkadelic is the dudely tattoo parlour of choice in Ibiza, where I met Luca. I told him what I wanted and his reaction was: “if you were a big hairy lesbian I might do it, but I think you should have something more feminine. How about flowers?” I could hardly speak for scraping my jaw off the floor and, needless to say, never went back.
Then I happened across an article about Tahiti Tiki Tattoo founder Sandra. She talked about the spiritual and emotional significance of tattoos, how each one she creates is designed for the individual. Curious as hell, I wandered up Calle de Virgen one night, about 1AM, and leafed through her booklet. Unlike Luca who was rude, combative and arrogant from the moment he opened his mouth Sandra projected tranquilty. Ibicenco tattoo parlours at 1AM are inherently hectic, but hers was a sacred space. I felt safe, welcome and understood.
A couple of weeks later I went back for the tattoo, equipped with a mantra to get me through the pain. It’s a line from Lawrence of Arabia…
“The trick is… not minding that it hurts.”
Armed with this wisdom, I lay down, took a deep breath and let the needle sink in. After about five minutes my hands went numb. After half-an-hour I started shaking involuntarily. Sandra very calmly told me to relax; somehow, just hearing her say it helped. We talked about Ibiza, about her daughter, about tattoos. Then, before I’d dared hope, she said, you’re done. I walked the two miles home in the warm Ibiza night, elbow sweating in clingfilm, goofy on adrenaline and pride.
This was more than a tattoo, it was an achievement; my gift to myself for surviving my first summer in Ibiza, for daring to leave London and everything I’d called my own for five years to start somewhere new. Sandra designed it on the spot, drawing freehand onto my arm as we talked. The pattern unites Tahitian symbols for freedom and creativity. It is my badge of courage — and an invocation for the future.
My most recent tattoo is another of Sandra’s masterpieces, done in spring 2008. Once again, it’s an affirmation of what I choose. This time, borrowing the lyric ‘like a rolling stone’ from Bob Dylan. Only, as it’s an Ibiza tattoo, it had to be in Spanish. Sandra’s first languages are French and Italian so we spent a week or so settling on the right translation, eventually agreeing on: ‘rodando como una piedra.’ It’s a literal, rather than a literary, translation but the sound and feel and freight of it is exactly right.
Sandra creating tattoo 5
Kat was visiting at the time and sat by me, bless her, for over an hour while I went pale, fidgeted, gnawed a lollipop stick to a pulp and talked utter nonsense to take my mind off it. When it was done I had that now-familiar rush of delight. It’s dangerous to get addicted to the adrenaline hit, but I’m hooked on more than that. My tattoos are precious because they mean something. They remind me of where I’ve been, how I’ve felt, what I love, who I am and what I want to be. For me, at least, a little ink goes a long way.
Christmas is a very special time in Ibiza. Local municipalities have gotten splendidly into the spirit, decking the main streets and town squares with fairy lights and fir trees. The annual Christmas Fair is in full swing on Vara de Rey, in Ibiza Town, with handcrafts, gifts, sweets and mini-fairground rides for the kids. And the famous hippie market at Las Dahlias, in San Carlos just around the corner from Can Curreu restaurant, has gone all Christmassy, too, and is a perfect place to find unique gifts like handmade jewellery and leather goods.
Christmas shopping is a relatively recent invention on the island, though. Historically, winter was a lean time, so Ibicenco tradition focuses on family and faith. Impressive midnight masses are sung in Ibiza’s churches, and the real joy of the season is spending time with friends and family.
The holidays are bearing down with freight-train inevitability so naturally, I’ve been thinking about food. My national origins call for turkey-gobbling in November, but here in Ibiza the sun is still shining and the emphasis is on fresh, organic food. Our neighbours have orange trees sporting fruit the size of softballs, a few late figs are ripening and my daily run takes me past fields of flowering potato plants and rows of ruby red peppers.
Among the best places to taste the island’s delicious home-grown vegetables are traditional Ibicenco restaurants like Cami de Balafia…
Cila Warncke 