A residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

This past week I’ve been at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a colony for writers, artists and composers.  What an amazing experience!  Ten days — 240 glorious hours — to write, think, read and daydream.

Writing patio behind the Studio Barn. Smells like rosemary.

But now that I’m sitting down to write about it, I hesitate.  Not because it’s some big secret, but because not a lot happens on a residency — nothing external, anyway.  There was a meteor shower.  Someone carved some pumpkins.  A poet tipped me off to a nearby roadside barbeque stand and I ate a really intense pulled pork sandwich.  A filmmaker played classical guitar in the evenings.  One artist showed work from her loom, another intricate sculptures made from sticks, another collage, another prints, another huge paper drawings on a wall.  One of the horses tipped over his water trough.  The resident groundhog ate a bunch of greens and then ran away in ripples like a shaken fur rug.

Most of the things that “happen” on a residency are

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Intellectual puttering

Around three o’clock this afternoon I posted a question on Facebook:

How long CAN you fool around on the Internet before settling down to work?

The answer is (unsurprisingly) quite a while.

At first I was groaning that I had spent so much time poking around online, but then I decided to rename this rudderless surfing “intellectual puttering.”  I haven’t done any formal reading or research, but I’ve learned quite a lot of stuff.  For example:

• Goodreads has a lovely list of books about shipwrecks.  I’m interested in shipwrecks and plan to read the most accurate version of The Swiss Family Robinson that I can find (not one of the highly-abridged children’s versions), as well as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex in the very near future.

• In other news, I also learned that conjoined twins Chang and Eng married a pair of sisters and, evidently, had quite a lot of

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“Memento Mori” up at Propeller Quarterly!

Ten years ago today the DC snipers were arrested after three long weeks of shooting and fear.

“Memento Mori” is an essay I started during those three uncertain weeks, and I’m so happy to see it at Propeller Quarterly today — ten years later!

“Memento Mori.” At http://www.propellermag.com.

You can read the essay by clicking here.

 

 

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On almost missing the Orionid meteor shower

Alas, another missed meteor shower.

Orionid meteor shower. From huffingtonpost.com.

I suppose I should forgive myself — as the mother of 20-month-old twins, sleep is a precious and often unpossessed commodity.

If the showers had been any earlier – peaking at 10pm, say, instead of after midnight — we might have had a chance with each other.  But instead I was fast asleep by midnight, and when I woke up at 6am on Sunday morning, a good hour before dawn, with plenty of time to go outside and lie down and look up, I thought, Do you really want to leave this warm and cozy bed and put on all kinds of layers and lie out in the damp grass? 

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A cemetery in the woods

Whenever I travel — and stay for a while — I like to visit the local cemetery.

Christian Aid Society Cemetery. Amherst, Virginia.

I don’t do this for morbid reasons.  I just like to know who’s, well, there.

One of many unknowns.

The first woodland cemetery I saw was the Indian Cemetery on Martha’s Vineyard.  Another was on a former plantation outside of Charleston, South Carolina.  Another was the slave cemetery on the campus of Sweetbriar College.  These woodsy cemeteries are much wilder than the newer, more carefully manicured, golf-course-like cemeteries in, say, suburban New Jersey.  But somehow

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Forthcoming work!

I’ve been working working working so hard lately that I haven’t had time to write a post.  However, some of my earlier hard work has paid off!

Later this month I’ll have an essay in Propeller.  Meanwhile, you can read these excellent offerings from their fall issue:

• Jessica Machado on rewatching the movie St. Elmo’s Fire
• Emily Burns Morgan on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on her Columbian honeymoon or, from their summer issue,
• Mary Rechner’s essay “Why I Hate Food,” which led me to wonder what Virginia Woolf would order at the Whole Foods take-out counter.

St. Elmo’s Fire. Did we ever really wear anything even close to that? From propellermag.com.

Then, in November,

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What to take to a writers colony

I’ve been preoccupied lately with thoughts about writers colonies.

The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

I’m going to a writers colony later this fall.  I’ve been making lists of things to bring and looking at lists of things I brought to colonies in the past, and then I started reading old journal entries and making stacks of books to pack, and then I started to read bits from those books and then I began finding things online to read like this terrific essay by Alexander Chee about the necessity of artists colonies.  It’s called “Go Away.”

Here are a few highlights:

I had organized my life so that writing was most important—but it wasn’t enough. I needed a particle accelerator, a mystical device I could use to step inside another world and finish the novel and return …

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A softball-sized eyeball washes up on shore

So an eyeball the size of a softball has washed up on a beach in Florida.  It looks like this:

A softball-sized eyeball. From http://io9.com.

A discovery like this really makes you think about things.

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Waiting …

I sent a bunch of stuff out recently — grant applications, a couple of essays, a magazine pitch — and now I’m waiting.  Show business is supposedly the hurry-up-and-wait industry, but writing is rather similar.  Although it’s more work-your-soul-to-shreds-and-wait.  There isn’t all that much hurrying involved.

I’ve worked my heart out, and some of my other organs — my stamina as well — and now I’m waiting.

Weird things can happen during this interval.  You become

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Cold front

After weeks of pussyfooting — Mid Atlantic autumns often cling to summer temperatures deep into October — a cold front finally came through.  Yesterday was chilly and rainy; today is chilly and cloudy.  It feels like October — the Octobers of my childhood — at last.

Cold front. From space.com.

A few years ago I was angry for the entire month of October.

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