Sweet Briar High

My six week residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) this past winter was out of this world, deserving of its own blog post and more (including two fat albums on flickr for Jan-Feb and for Feb-March). This is the second residency I've attended. The first was the Saltonstall Arts Colony in the summer of 2009, amidst the woody waterfally lands of Ithaca, NY. It was luxurious and inspiring and enabled me to write a fourth draft of my memoir in one month flat. The previous two drafts had taken over a year and half (the first draft 2 years).

This second residency was smack dab in the middle of Virginia at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains (I had to look it up when I found out I got in, because I actually had no idea where it was). VCCA is set on acres and acres of woods and trails and meadows, with a pond and horses and cows and dogs - pastoral and perfect. Twenty five artists, writers, and composers are invited at a time, to spend anywhere from days to weeks to work on their heart's arty desire.

My stay was funded by a NEA fellowship for "Artists of Limited Economic Means" - an obviousness if there was ever one. Other fellows were funded by different fellowships or grants, or they paid sliding scale according to their means. And half of the residents were returnees, so some knew each other from previous years.

I arrived in Sweet Briar in late January after an epic journey that started in New York City 13 hours earlier, after yet another snowstorm that had blanketed the eastern seaboard. (Hello beast coast winter. I remember you less insistent.) The snow plows hadn't gotten going yet in New York that dawn, and so the sidewalks were piled high with snow. I had to drag my carryon down the centre of six city blocks, in the wake of crawling cars and their barely passable tire tracks. Two subways, one very slow bus, two flights, and a taxi ride later, I was finally there.

The first three weeks of my residency, the remodeling of the visual artist studios and maintenance in the main kitchen meant that we had meals in a makeshift dining room with paper plates and plastic forks. More troublingly, our half strength numbers were all writers, with only one composer and one visual artist. Don't get me wrong, I find it fascinating to talk about plots and writing routines and character motivation and word counts. But it can also get rather tedious.

This is why I adored my immediate friendship with the lone artist among us those first few weeks, the fantabulous and thoughtful painter Ken. Ken's work deals with beginnings and endings, with the underneath, and what happens when you leave aside that garish fellow, colour. He generously lent me a few of his paintings to beautify my writing studio, and eventually be inspired to write one of the first poems I've written in years (and to think I did an MFA in poetry). It doesn't come close to capturing the restraint and spirit of his work, but here it is:

something feral
underneath its skin
behind the masque
empty eyes
blood lines mark
the old map
that used to be

now it's moving
now it's morning
a state between
then and after
a place of its own
holding its own
the feathers fan
the feathers close
painting space
where there was no space
once upon a time
once
there was something feral
underneath

For more of his work, visit kendubin.com, and you'll also see (writer) Tyler's beautiful prose poem which touches on Ken's work and aesthetic and also a bit of what it was like to be at VCCA.

We were fed three times a day, by gourmet chef Sara, and despite a daily routine of yoga and pilates, I gained weight because I cannot refuse free food when it's in front of me. Especially not when it's delicious, organic, and freshly made (with plenty of vegetarian and fish options). Even though I'm hohum about the dessert thing, I missed not a one. Raspberry pie? Cheesecake? Sundaes with homemade fudge sauce? Strawberries dipped in chocolate? Lemon cake? And how. Maybe I've spent too long as a starving artist/student. Maybe it was just awesome.

All the fellows got private bedrooms in the main residency building, and shared a bathroom with one other person (though I had mine to myself for half the time). But the prize was our work studios, a few minutes walk across a couple of fields. The writers got big desks and comfy chairs and shelves and lamps in our studios. The visual artists got lots of space and open walls and light. The composers had a grand piano each and their studios were set at the ends of the building for sound proofing. Everyone got a twin bed in case you wanted to sleep in your studio after working late. (The bathrooms had showers, so you essentially could set up shop at your studio if you wished, and some people did.)

Mine was the BEST studio (obviously). It wasn't part of the long snaking ranch complex like everyone else's, but was an elevated stand alone one room house (it used to be a corn crib) in the middle of a field, like a bird house. The inside was tiny, carpeted, with skylights, windows, little blue and white curtains, and a robust set of heaters. I also requested and received a drafting table (see above) so I could write standing up (better for posture and for impromptu dance fests). It was an absolute haven and from the first day on, I was already afraid of missing it when I left.

My days began around 9am, just as the breakfast hour was ending. I'd grab half a grapefruit and some cereal, and then do yoga or pilates. By the time I showered, checked email, and packed my bag, it was time for lunch (11:30am). The lunch room was near the studios, where many did take away so they could keep working uninterrupted. Winter in Virginia is mild. We had a few bouts of freezing weather, but most of the time it was nice, sometimes even balmy. I had a number of my lunches on the picnic table beneath the curly branched tree, drenched in sunlight.

I wrote from about noon til 6pm, during which time I tried not to use the Internet (the bane of my productive existence) (it wasn't that hard b/c wifi access across the residency was spotty at best).

If I were done a bit earlier, I'd walk one of the trails through the woods back to the residences, usually with hottie writer-artist Theresa, a joy to wander with, not least because she wears little dresses and big boots, and talks about the most serious and silly things in a baby doll voice. Dinner was served at 6pm, after which I'd work another 3-4 hours, and then meet up with others in the living room by the fire for a rousing game of Bananagrams (I got a tidy crew addicted to my current word game obsession).

When some fellows heard I was doing yoga in mornings, they asked to join, despite the fact that my schedule (morning workout, later workday) wasn't quite right for most people. Thus I ended up leading yoga classes for most of my time in Virginia (good practice for my upcoming class in Dhaka in May!). Other exercise junkies went to nearby Sweet Briar College's gym (we had free access to their library and other facilities).

One of my favourite parts of VCCA, and there were so so many, was the composers. The Saltonstall residency had writers and visual artists, and that in itself was amazing. Rachael (who I met at Saltonstall, and whose two person show I just went to in NYC in January) is a painter who talks about  art in a way that is both relevant for writers, and also out of the writing league. And because it's art – i.e. doesn't necessarily have a narrative or a linear theme or even a subject sometimes – it can allow me as a writer more rein to play, to experiment, to be a little crazier. Writers are so often beholden to that dictator, narrative.

So Saltonstall had already opened that window, but VCCA’s composers blew the roof off. I met six different composers and every one of them as different from the next as you can imagine. Andrea and Gina were two contemporary concert music composers (aka classical music but not tied to that old time period) - both beautiful highly accomplished women. Chris was a flautist and found sound composer (a long haired Chicagoan who also does theatre, and who built a lovely installation in the woods - see his seed pods pictured just below). Walter was a ukulele and trombone player who played twenties style jazz and blues, and was composing a space opera (and he was one of my favourite midnight walk companions). Patricia was an electronic music composer who used hand made, technologically complex instruments to create sound installations (and she was a sexy thing living in Paris). And Alan was a composer from Hong Kong who created eclectic pieces for even more eclectic bands.

Andrea kicked off our weekly open studios (these were all informally organised and completely voluntary, both for hosts and attendees). (She is also a yogi, and holds music salons in her house in Philadelphia.) I remember sitting in her studio listening to her talk about the piece she was working on, for a 100 piece orchestra with four part voice harmony, and playing bits of it for us. I've sung with large choruses accompanied by an orchestra, for years, and I had never thought about what it might take to make up the music. Through the successive weeks, I listened as the other composers talked about their processes, played multiple instruments with aplomb, sang, held impromptu gigs, mixed traditional and electronic technologies, and in general left me dripping with awe.

And this is not to mention the hottie tomboy graphic novelist who was also a horse wrangler (Danica), or the sound engineer turned writer who also made her own fabulous jewelry (Louie), or the artist who was fashioning the most delicate and dark doll dresses (see right) out of bones and branches and mud and leaves (Annie), or the hilarious memoirist who grew up on a miniature golf course and used to be a standup comic (June), or the sweetly spoken Kansan writer who was never seen without a tumbler of whiskey (Andrew), or the cutie Russian painter whose portrait of Osama Bin Laden was in the White House earlier this year (Darina), or the writer with the porn star bod and the most grief stricken novella (Stacy), or the poet who had taken decades to come back to writing while she raised a family and worked, and thank god she did because her work is gorgeously nostalgic and precise (Kitty), or the artist building exquisite light sculptures (Wendy), or the only other POC at VCCA while I was there (represent!), who filled in some other diversity quotas with his wry writing about growing up gay, black, and Latino (Charles).

My residency was one of the longest, so I saw many more lovelies come and go than those I've listed. There is so much talent in the world. The down side is that most artists are struggling to make ends meet. I realised I have to stop whinging (so much) when it comes to the financial travails of the writing life. I'm actually lucky to be a writer and a digital photographer. I have no expensive supplies to continually replenish. I need no special equipment, instruments, or tools. Even a computer could be considered a luxury (and used for free in a library). One could make do with paper and (Muji) pens and sit in a coffee shop or even on one's bed. On top of this, as a visual artist or composer, you not only have to shell out for rent, you also need a studio, which you will probably time-share with someone else but still pay through the nose (especially if you live in NYC like a dozen or so fellows I met). Not an easy life.

But art colonies like VCCA make it worthy, and could give you enough space and solitude to get a tremendous amount of work done in an incredibly short time. People left their children, partners, jobs, flats, countries, for as long as they could - sometimes only days could be spared. They came brimming with ideas, open to possibility, pressed for time, no matter how long they had (there is never enough time). In my six weeks at VCCA, I wrote 40 pages and finished a first draft of my novel. It's flawed, incomplete, and unpresentable, but I loved the writing part and my companions, and the second draft will fix some of the problems (I hope). It was a gift, and a sensate treat, my time in Virginia, and I hope I am lucky enough to return.