I’m going to Mendocino, again.

Finding Voice, Community, and the Story of Tara

Each summer, I return to Mendocino. Not just to the town, but to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. It has become a pilgrimage, part craft, part community, and part creative renewal.

I go for more than workshops. I go to hike along cliffs brushed by fog, to let the wind quiet my mind. I go to sit with poets, editors, novelists, and dreamers. It is where I allow myself to slow down, breathe, and focus on storytelling.

And I go to the bookstore.

A Bookstore with a View

The Gallery Bookshop has a table at the conference, but visiting the store itself is part of the ritual. I stroll through its shelves like wandering a familiar forest, pausing to discover new voices, old favorites, and unexpected treasures.

Then I look out. I am not aware of any other bookstore that offers such a stunning view. The Pacific crashes just beyond the glass, wild and endless.

From the Classroom to the Page

During one of my first visits to the conference, I was told something that resonated with me: “Stop lecturing.”

The words had a greater impact than I anticipated. As a tenured professor, I was accustomed to guiding students through complex texts with confidence. In the company of fellow writers,; however, that approach felt rigid and misplaced.

Her comment prompted me to pause and think, both as a writer and as a professor. I needed to step back. I needed to listen more carefully to my my readers and my students.

That moment served as a reminder to relinquish my authority. It encouraged me to embrace vulnerability.

Where I had often relied heavily on analysis and intellect, I needed to let my feelings mold my words. I had trained myself to avoid this and now I had to un-train myself,

Telling the Story of a Divided Self

That summer, I wrote a personal essay about the village of my childhood in Pakistan, of cane fields haunted by wild boar and reshaped by British colonial canals. I wrote about Lyallpur that bore the geometry of empire, its roads arranged like the Union Jack.

My prose, like me, was caught between academic distance and personal truth.

Inventing Tara: The Girl Who Spoke Back

Then came Tara.

She appeared in fiction, a girl abandoned on a train and raised by villagers who remembered how to care. Her village resembled mine, but it belonged entirely to her. At its center stood a shrine to the keeper of flies, a symbol of myth, memory, and resistance.

Tara did what I could not. She questioned authority. She crossed lines. She lived boldly. Through her, I unearthed a courage that I didn’t know existed.

Finding Joy in Creation

What surprised me most was the joy I found in creating her.

Tara cooked over a dung fire. She stirred goat meat and spinach in battered pots. She let the daal simmer on the side. These acts grounded her and grounded me. They were not dramatic, but they were alive with meaning. Through them, I evoked memory, culture, and identity without explanation.

I stopped lecturing. I let her speak.

Through Tara, I began to trust my readers to find the humanity in the unfamiliar.

A Shared Creative Journey

Last summer, my sister Selma joined me in Mendocino at the conference. We focused intensely on our shared travels through Spain. This revisited the creative spark that brought us closer.

We grew closer as artists, sisters, and seekers. We were in search of Don Quixote’s windmills, and in the process, we found reflections of ourselves.

A Writing Life Re-imagined

Through Tara’s life, I found my voice.
Through Mendocino, I keep returning to it.

Back in the Bookstore

One year, I had the honor of reading from my book in that bookstore with the views of the rolling waves Pacific. I stood among shelves portals to otherworldly worlds and light.

I told Tara’s story.

I was in a community of storytellers anchored by land, sea, and imagination. And I felt alive. I also began to trust my readers to understand—to find the humanity in the unfamiliar and to enter the world I had created.

In a few weeks, I will return to Mendocino to nourish my imagination and build the community I need to write.

Read Wild Boar in the Cane Field here or explore more writing on memory, food, travel, and creativity at Tillism.com.