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.

Oregon, December 2008: I brought all this paper. Crazy. But this residency was such a precious time, I wanted to do it all. When I arrived at the Sitka Center on the Oregon coast, it took me hours to unload and arrange the bushels of writing drafts, reference books, computer equipment, and office detritus I had brought with me for a two-month residency. My plan was to complete my novel, finally-and put together a poetry manuscript-and make progress on a book of essays. I dithered with my stuff. Where to begin?

To the outsider’s eye, the day at MacDowell appears to be quite regimented: the breakfast bell, the dinner bell, the surreptitious yet punctual arrival of one’s lunch basket. Yet if life at MacDowell is ostensibly shaped around meals (the comradely quiet of breakfast, the solitary lunch, the often animated dinner), the days themselves, the hours around and between those meals, have a weird exhilarating elasticity. And time can, and does, stop at MacDowell: One morning in April of 1986, a small group of us sat at the breakfast table eating oranges and toast while huge clumps of spring snow fell outside, and we all swore it was 8:40 for about 20 minutes.