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. 

This feels like a dream.  Last night I packed long johns, wool socks, whiskey, snowshoes, and too many books into suitcases, held back tears, and tried to still my guts that vibrated with an emotion I couldn’t exactly locate.   Everyone asks, “Are you excited yet?”  I don’t think it was excitement I felt last night, all month.  A mix of fear, disbelief, and utter gratitude gets a little closer to a definition.  Fear that I won’t be able to focus on my writing the way I see it in my minds eye; disbelief that I am deserving of this gift; utterly grateful that it is all actually happening. 

Emotional.  This is me.  Always.  Probably forever.  I wear my emotions on my sleeve, I am obvious, my raw nerves sense every brush of feeling well before I am able to articulate the why and how.  I yell, scream, curse, cry, sometimes in the same breath, because I am overjoyed, because I am mad as hell, and everything in between.  No matter what the occasion, a well placed “fuck” gives me great satisfaction and over the years I’ve come to accept, even treasure my emotional outbursts.  I can’t be so certain for those who share my company.

Still, deep down, I know writing is a way for me to channel all this and it is no surprise that I’ll first feel this Vermont experience in my body before being able to put it into words.

I spent the day with my English bulldog, Girly.  We took a walk around the Lafayette Reservoir with a good friend of ours, who inevitably asked, “Are you excited?”  Yes, of course…and scared.  "Scared of what", she asked.  Once more, a rumbling in my gut and tears.  I don’t know. 

The truth: scared that I will, that I am, actually accomplishing a dream.  I think of actors and musicians, the rare artist, who work their asses off for years and finally, totally, arrive and it is beyond anything they ever imagined and they spend the rest of their days living the cliché…doing what they love.  To have even found what I love, my passion, the thing that makes me spill over, is a gift.  I know this.  I know that people walk this earth for a lifetime and don’t find their gift or at least don’t have the courage or the support to go after it.  

For me, it is all happening.  Right now.  Yes, because of my hard work, but also something else, no?  Magic.  Timing.  Luck.  Others.

I have not arrived, but I am on my way.  Of course, I am crying as I write this so I know I am right where I need to be.

http://www.vermontstudiocenter.org/