Things I'm Bad At: Residencies

Also: relationships, eating carrot sticks, being grateful, writing.

The thing about residencies is this: if you tell a non-artist about them, they make no fucking sense. The same is true of MFAs. When I told my scientist father that I was going to school for writing and they were paying me to do it, he simply did not believe me. He said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” I’m pretty sure he still has the vague sense that the entire enterprise is a scam. And I guess it makes sense, if you live in a country where we do not collectively give two shits about art, that the idea of anyone being paid or otherwise supported to make it seems laughable.

But here I am, in a studio on a beautiful piece of land in upstate New York with a collection of poets, essayists, novelists, painters, composers. We are staying in and around a mansion, once owned by the family who founded and funded this place. We get three meals a day, one of which—dinner—is a brief moment of socialization. (Every lunch, somewhat famously, includes a tiny bag of raw carrot sticks, a snack I normally have no patience for but do my best to eat.) Other than dinner’s reprieve, we are undisturbed to make, or not make, whatever we want.

This is the beautiful, rarified, privileged moment in which I write this essay about how much I am sucking at this process right now.

I attended this residency years ago, in the fall of 2016. I’d sold Her Body and Other Parties to Graywolf and was finishing up its edits. I was also in the early stages of drafting In the Dream House, which I’d sell a few months later. It was an entirely different life. I was not a known quantity in the field that has since become my career. I was about to start my first full-time teaching job. I was about to get married.

That residency was magical, strange, stressful. Mostly, the stressful part was the fact that it was happening at the same time as the 2016 presidential election, which meant that everyone was on edge. People bickered about Bernie and Hillary at every meal. The day after the election, one resident told the more distraught among us that we all needed to calm down, that we’d all be fine, and I came as close as I ever have in my adult life to hitting another human being.

But I was ridiculously, disgustingly productive. I woke up at 5am, had my butt in my chair by 5:30. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and read, and took walks. The final revision of Her Body and Other Parties came together. In the Dream House staggered to its feet. The space and company were also full of little pleasures and joys. We were a motley crew of writers and visual artists and composers at every level of career and age. It was autumn, my favorite season. It snowed just before Halloween. The group was talented and funny and kind, and I loved gathering together in the evenings to drink wine and talk and gossip and complain about our projects. We watched movies together and went on adventures into town. We killed at trivia. I accidentally ordered and drank a $27 pour of whiskey and then had to just own it, like I’d meant to do it, like I did stuff like that all the time. It was lots of little things, but it added up to something perfect: the joy of creative community and fellowship and the satisfaction of getting to devote yourself to creative practice in a world that made that incredibly difficult. So many times I thought, this is exactly the sort of life I’ve always wanted to live. Look at the life I’m about to live. Look at the life I’m living.

Since then, I’ve done countless other residencies all over the country. I’ve developed a whole set of preferences around their minutiae. What sort of natural setting do I prefer? (Forest.) What part of the country do I want to be in? (Somewhere within driving distance of where I live so I can pack, conservatively, every book I own.) What about food? (I need to be fed, full stop.) What about social time? (I need there to be one point in the day where I see the faces of other human beings.) And so on. It became an indelible part of my process. I joked to people that I’m not just good at residencies, I’m great at them. I always get so much done.

The summer before Dream House came out, I had a foot surgery that kept me home. Before that I’d attended at least one residency a year. But I figured, it’s fine. I’m about to go on tour, and then in 2020 I’ll take some time off from teaching and do one or two so I can jump into my next project. Of course, 2020—well, happened. And 2021. Now I’m here, in the very place where all of these preferences came together six years ago, and I am fucking struggling.

In my defense, there’s a lot happening in my life right now. Chief among which is, I’m in the process of separating from my wife. It’s been such a slow and tender and loving process that I only realized about two hours into the drive here that—between coming up here, and her travel plans, and my moving plans—we will probably never share a bed again. I cried at a rest stop somewhere in New Jersey. My year has also been filled with other little wells of grief and fear and loss and pain. I separated from my partner of two years a few months ago. One of my nephews is extremely ill. I had a terrifying medical scare in May and June, which is partially but not entirely resolved. A relationship that meant a lot to me ended abruptly and unmoored me in unexpected ways. I’m in the process of moving to Brooklyn—just for now, just to get my head on straight—and I’m scared. I feel like I’m 22 again. Just absolutely and utterly lost.

Each thing feels hard but manageable on its own. But put together I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I am depressed. My appetite is weird. My attention span is shot to hell. I am struggling to get out of bed in the morning because sleep feels easier than anything else. The easiest way to sum it up, I guess, is that I know people care about me, but I don’t care about me. I just have this deep urge to lie down in the grass and not get up.

Depression is new. I’m used to anxiety—it’s my lifeblood at this point—but I don’t know what to do with all this sadness.

So, the residency. It always takes a few days to get into the groove, but I’m doing that thing where I sit and stare at my computer and re-read my pages and putter and, eventually, panic. I’m almost certain I’ll never be able to write again. It’s so dumb because I always feel this way, because everyone always feels this way at some point in the process. When things aren’t flowing it sucks and feels permanent; that’s a pretty universal artistic experience. But I’m finding it hard to untangle the normal struggle from… whatever this is. I worry my brain isn’t working anymore. I worry I’m wasting something precious and I’ll never get it again.

I have always been afraid of scarcity, ever since I was a kid. Food, time, love, it doesn’t matter. I worry that I will run through the finite supply and be left wanting. Every time I’m in the presence of someone I care about, I think: what if I lose them, to death or circumstance? What if this is the last time I ever get to hold them or kiss them or talk to them? Every time I write a story, or an essay, or a book, I think: what if that was the last one? The last opportunity to scratch my presence into the earth? Because there is always that moment. There is always a last bite, a final conversation.

I thought I was going to die in May. I kept thinking: I have so much I want to write and so many things I want to do and now I just have to update my will and fucking pray. And here I am in July, distinctly alive and in a beautiful place with all the carrot sticks I can eat and all the time in the world, and yet I feel paralyzed. And then guilty that I’m paralyzed. And then paralyzed even more completely.

I’m not sure why exactly I’ve chosen to make this the first thing I write about on this platform. I think I had the idea that this would be a nice substitute for Twitter, a place where I got to talk about things on my mind—personal, professional, etc.—until it used up all my patience. But this actually, mercifully, seems closer to my Livejournal days. The place where I learned how to write essays, and how to write for strangers. It felt like every day handed me a bit of clay and all I had to do was figure out where to put it. I’d give anything for it to feel that easy again.