writewrite

A few days ago I came back home after a three week stay at Yaddo, the swanky artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. There are many good things to say about Yaddo — it’s a beautiful place, smart and amazing people go there, as a “guest” you are treated like artistic royalty. There are less than good things to say about Yaddo — every lunch contains carrot sticks in a waxed paper bag, carrot sticks that appear to have been prepared with an ax; there are deer ticks everywhere, which became a subject of conversation at most dinners; and … well, actually those are the only less than good things to say about Yaddo itself. To have been there was a real gift. Three weeks to simply work on my own stuff, to be fed three meals a day, to have an attentive staff fend off intruders, to have a huge studio all for my own work — and to have absolutely no expectations of producing anything.

That was the most amazing part. Yaddo opens its doors for artists and writers to come and spend time and never expects anything in return. You don’t have to “prove” you’ve done work. In fact, if you want to, you can sleep in the sun for your entire stay. I readily admit to doing some of that when the sun infrequently appeared. When I got to Yaddo I was exhausted. Two years of film work, school work, the work of life itself — I was tired. I found myself sleeping a lot. Ten hours a night, a couple naps during the day. This, apparently, is a common Yaddo phenomenon. You arrive, feel surrounded by incredible kindness, good food, good will, and you promptly fall asleep.

Finally, when I got over being tired, I began to write. It went as it always does — false starts, moments of inspiration followed by hours of self-doubt, a couple of good sentences followed by pages of crud. Or as a breakfast pal, a painter, called it: “dreck.” Lots of dreck. If I were working on my own, I would have been groaning and miserable. But at Yaddo? In the morning I had breakfast with the few people who got up early. We would chat about ordinary things — the fantastic Yaddo grapefruit served every morning, the pileated woodpecker in the woods, the deer ticks, the inconstant sun — and then we would gather our lunchboxes and go off to work. Go off to work knowing that everyone was going off to work — on a painting, a series of drawings, a musical composition, a novel, a play, a film, poetry. From the window of my studio I would see my Yaddo friends pass by off and on throughout the day: Denise the poet walking to the Yaddo library to look up a word, T. the composer driving her jeep to the music studio deep in the woods, E. the journalist perpetually on her cellphone, talking to her sources in the Sudan. Just seeing them was reassurance enough. And I didn’t know this until the end of my stay, but they would look for me at my desk, writing. We were all at work, and we all quietly looked for one another, working.

Then, at the end of the day, we would gather for dinner. We usually didn’t talk about our work — that was a Yaddo rule: if someone doesn’t want to talk about their work, they don’t have to. But we did talk about art in general, making art, reading, writing. Some of the best conversations I had were finding out how a painter thinks, or a composer, or a journalist. And realizing we are all doing the same thing, in a way: with each new work of art, and I include writing as art, and good journalism too, we are charting new ground. I know how to write, a painter knows how to paint, but each new piece is a new exploration of the craft. That’s what makes what we do art, I think. If it’s not new ground, it’s not art.

Should I mention I had Sylvia Plath’s studio? I did. She was happy at Yaddo I think. I like to imagine her happy — happy in the way artists are when the work is alive and vibrant and with you, really with you. That’s the Yaddo energy. I hope to keep that with me now, back in Richmond, back in my home studio. Here’s hoping…