Entrance to the Maverick Writing Studios and new snow.

I’ve been fighting a damn cold since, if you can believe it, the day I left San Francisco.  Its timing was impeccable.  I managed to stave it off with homeopathic syrup and tea infused with garlic, lemon, and ginger, but it’s trying hard to take me under.  I slammed Tylenol PM last night and woke up just in time for lunch today at noon.  I considered my studio afterwards, but decided to head back to bed with a dose of DayQuil and The Best American Short Stories 2013.  I slept all day.

Last night there was a reading at the Red Mill.  Poets, creative nonfiction, and fiction writers who have been here for two weeks read from their work and it was fantastic.  So talented, their work so brave.  There were poems about love and post-partum depression, prose about a mother’s suicide, a lesbian murder mystery, and an ode to VSC.   A few readers thanked the crowd for helping them finish something they hadn’t been able to back home.  I am still contemplating if I will read next week.  Of course, I hear my own advice to our students, “Read!  It’s muscle memory.  Practice!”  I will keep you posted.  

The common area at Kowalsky House.  My painter friend, Esmerelda, and a night cap.

I sat with a wonderful group of women last night at dinner.  My original group from the airport has grown to include another poet and sculptor, one from North Carolina, the other from Pennsylvania.   Have I mentioned the food here is delicious?  I’ve already had to change my eating habits from the first few days because I was definitely coming back home with an extra ten pounds.  The fresh baked bread and hunks of cheese get me every time.  Last night they served a seafood stew with mussels, shrimp, and calamari over rice (my wife would have loved it!), made even better when the new sculptor busted out a bottle of red wine and shared it with the table.  We spoke of home ownership and the trauma of selling and buying, Dutch tulips, homeopathic remedies, Brenda Hillman and Bob Hass, and of course, always, our families and creative work. 

Everyone here has left something behind.  Jobs, school, husbands, wives, pets, children.   Many are current MFA students or recent MFA graduates.  Many are university teachers still grading papers before being able to fully commit to their Vermont experience.  The artists with families really inspire me.  They talk about balancing their artistic lives with their parental duties, about their children and spouses encouraging them to pursue their dreams, about how doing so actually makes them better parents.  I think of my friend Sara and all the other artists with children, young and old, and have so much respect for their dedication.  Couldn’t it all just slip away in the bustle of other commitments? 

Not really. 

These artists are 100% dedicated to their work and it is a magical thing to be in conversation with them, to discuss their artistic goals, to share mine, to believe that I belong here among them.  Here is another gift of being at a residency.  To understand the kind of commitment we all have to our art and the professional level to which it is (or will be) achieved blows me away.  It is this community building I imagine the people who create and support these types of environments want to encourage.  It lifts us up, makes us believe it is all possible, demands that we keep going.  

The Mason House Library

The Mason House Library where the writer's craft talk will be held on Friday.

My day started with a beautiful sunrise in Chicago.  Baby pinks and blues, a bone chilling nine degrees outside, and one airport closer to Vermont.  A tiny thirty-seat plane took me the rest of the way to Burlington.  I think window seats are the best for writers.  The expansive views remind me of our narrators painting landscapes on the page.  Did you know there are little lakes dotted all over Burlington?  My imagination thought the town would be surrounded by white-capped mountains and the ground covered in snow.  Instead, low rolling hills and clusters of barn-shaped houses, an even kind of landscape with fall greens and browns still clinging to the pines and not much colder than rainy San Francisco when I left yesterday evening.

Monica, A VSC shuttle driver, picked me and four other women artists up from Burlington airport and when I saw my group for the first time the excitement finally hit.  All women.  All practicing a different art--a poet, a photographer, a painter, a sculptor, a prose writer.  A young Latina from Los Angeles, a woman who studied with Brenda Hillman in Russia many years ago, a teacher from North Carolina, an arts administrator from Oakland.  All of us virgins to the residency experience. 

The group immediately started asking questions about the projects they would work on while at VSC.  In my usual way, I start thinking of the end.  Would our goals be met by the end of the two weeks?  Would the reality of it be just as magical as the energy we started to create in the dirt-covered mini van that drove us an hour out of Burlington to the village of Johnson?

Then it was.

Red barns, wrap-around porches, steeped roofs, a quaint book and arts supply store, artists studios with huge windows and kilns and blank white walls, all within a stones throw of each other, finally some snow on the ground, galleries, and a rocky rushing river tearing right down the middle of it all.  An entire town supporting artists from all over the world--Vietnam, South Africa, Singapore, Argentina, Hungary, Korea, America.

I have only been here a few hours and it is dark, a quiet time of day, and still I can feel the talent pulsing all around me, like the Gihon River that runs through town.  An energy.  The excitement I have been waiting for.