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.
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Something special happens in these places. At times I come with an empty slate; I cast aside every preconceived plan and just see what happens. In other instances I come with deadlines. Always I come away with something beyond what I could have imagined.
— Andrew Ginzel
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