Excerpts from
In a Wild Pit of Sanity
Raw notes from writing retreats deep in the woods and lost in the soul
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
I opened the door and everything stood idled and ready, just as I'd left it a year ago. The writing muse ticks warm. The cabin smells like mid-sentence.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
Fall is in full bloom. It is 59 degrees today, and colors seem a day away from peak. They are throttled up and not yet dropping. This was the day upon which I arrived. As I unloaded, low clouds scudded in, dark underscores to the fall brilliance. Halfway through unloading, the sky was mottled gray and thickening. Breeze picked up. Just as I finished, the sky was charcoal and thunder announced itself through the woods. Rain began to hiss into the beautiful almost-full bloom of foliage, ripping the curtain to the ground, shredding the colors to gray. November arrived here, right when I did. I couldn’t be happier.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
Opened an IV directly into the computer. Drained my thoughts directly into type. Me, just a blank vessel. Nice progress on Horace (Sweet Angus). He checked out of his open house story a little more than I’d expected, but then again, that would be him. He took a nap and the rest of the townsfolk were more than ample to carry the plot along and dump it in the shrubs.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
My bones are loose and I am happy.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
Tonight is a gluttony of dark. The stars, paled and half-lidded. The vague hills, steamed with dusk and hazed with moon.
I followed the trail at purple dusk to the railroad tracks. The train came with light screaming and dragging 1000 mad nights behind it. It shook with a tremendous cold wind. Then it was gone and there I still stood, unmoved in the deafening aftermath of absence. I stood awhile in the dark, in the hole the train left, seeing empty tracks going dark in both directions.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
I have been writing hard and lost for several hours again. The cabin dark, except for one lamp on the far side and I am illuminated by laptop light. That is all. Dog is asleep on my jackets next to me. She smells like grass and leaves. She is beautiful. We have had some week. I have accomplished nothing and feel I am at the start. Not one thing is finished. But I have burst open a great many and spent hours upon hours deep inside the novel. There was very little downtime from the moment I came, and there is little now. I could go forever. It is something to be alive.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
it is cold out and the wind is sideways, ground level like an animal running through the woods. above it, totally calm, the stars. millions of them above the hardness of this night. they are egregious stars. i submit to them. the stars are egregious and i am small.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
i have burned through another pencil. they have no stamina for this, but in their defense, this night is absolutely destructive. there is much that is badly damaged
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
Large brown ants are all over. The floor churns with them. I can no longer wear socks—they get too embedded with bodies. I keep my flat-bottomed slippers on, as it’s easier to crunch them when I pace. The ant hill of carcasses is piled admirably by the oven wall—many others are scattered dead on the floor. I will clean later and pyre them with their dead brethren.
Day 3. I awoke this morning and the ant pile is gone. Every carcass. The live ones too. Every trace of the living and the dead, disappeared.
I don’t want to return to the broken head of reality. I like it here, with poems spilling off the shelf.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
I do not like this late-winter weather. Unseasonably warm with no anger to it. The squirrels are well rested and cocky. But writing comes with spring tenacity, I am mad busy, and dog and I scarcely have time for walks. It is still effing windy and hot, and a haze creeps in like skin. Maybe a storm is coming, though I can’t see the sky through the smothering of trees.
The storm is here! It arrived in the dark. I stayed flung wide open—the writing spirit, the doors and the windows— and took the storm. She swept through the cabin, cowed the fire, blue-lit the windows, tossed my manuscripts, and flapped the doors like broken wings. It owned the room. It was god damn beautiful.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
It is a winter morbidity of grays and browns. I am struggling to evict stubborn concepts from my head. Instead, all I see is Old Dog, darkening out with time.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
Things are not what they are. Sun is out blindingly but temps have been -20 to -40 this week with wind chill. The cabin lost heat. The water is frozen. No firewood. The fireplace is all cold stones and darkness. I just spent 10 minutes leaned over the open oven door, hovering in the mouth of heat, wanding my frozen fingers over it, lifting my shirt so a bit of warmth can touch my skin like a lover. It feels like we are all animals here—raw and rare. Everything—the computer, the countertops, the furniture—is frozen into impassion. Yet stories are moving like colorful fish beneath the ice. This is raw bliss.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Copyright © Greg Philby
Most nights I walk through a crypt of lifelessness—frozen trees and brittle footfalls. The moon and stars, if they exist, fail to heat through the black ice of sky. They are only faraway wonders, like dismissive thoughts. I hear a distant howl of a coyote pack, a flicker of life lifted against the night palette. It brings me relief, brings me joy, that something else exists out there in the winter woods and I am not alone.
Every retreat has periods where I get lost in characters, where I open up things too deep perhaps and lose my context to the demons. It is different every time and it always comes. Writing this novel—built on the bones of my own truth—opens more portals. Winter retreats, too, bring more icy dead dark, a severity of realization that I am only a quiver of life in a completely blotted, frozen soundless world. But that is not it.
I feel a dark coming. Night 3. Night 4. Perhaps Night 5… This brutality of empty is deeper and darker than I’ve known. Sometime when I’m lost within my work, I will crack another level, and fall. I’ve done this time after time after time, but this one will reel me and not be like the others. I sense it now, lying atop, and I fear it some. I am curious and interested—but also worried. I have the need for nearness. Of a clutch of life. I guess it means it is up to sleeping Dog. She is the only heartbeat here with me.
And I hope for the thin ragged cry of coyotes.