I am thick into the world around me. By vocation I listen, I go where my curiosities take me, I embed all over the place. Yet so much of the work and life of a writer is solitary--a beautiful aloneness--and one which at its best breeds both a secret life, and words that serve the needs and desires of readers. Just as important to the process is the occasional company of others who are similarly engaged. It is at the intersection of these values--amidst the quiet and the conviviality--that I am most able to recognize what I have to say and how I will say it. For me, it is not an overstatement to insist that an artist residency is a sort of Shangri-La--one which I can get to from here.
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The shining heart of the residency was silence and solitude; the opportunity to wrestle with visions and fasten them to the page, to face myself, reflected in a window opening into wildness. For me, this time was a turning point in a lifetime of writing. In the midst of struggling with the perpetual self-doubts and uneven leaps forward of every artist’s life, I came to a place of clear certainty about the power and trustworthiness of what I do.
— Aurora Levins Morales
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