One of the quiet things I have done in my years of teaching is make space for my students’ work, allowing them to experiment and play and push boundaries rather than craft various drafts of New Yorker-mimetic stories. Having a disabled child at home makes me an expert multitasker, but switching my brain off to my own work during the semester makes a palpable difference to my students. However, doing so is an unquantifiable, unrewarded, and often unrecognized practice.
That’s why I was so grateful for The Conjunctions Residency, which by chance or design is in May, around the time when people who teach must turn in their grades. I looked forward to it through the latter part of my semester, which was so packed with events that once I got to the Hemlock Neversink, it took me about a week to settle down. Then there was a palpable switch.
Instead of having to be a busy bee like the actual bees on the property, all my daily needs were taken care of, which meant I could stop pushing my writing and allow myself to receive it. Like magic, the writing project that I wanted to work on was waiting for me. Not just during my routine 4 a.m. writing, but also walking barefoot in the woods, hanging with Hemlock’s goats, doodling with art supplies cadged from the craft room so for once I did not have to bring my own or wonder what I might need. Even the journey up from NYC, from Port Authority to figuring out in a Lyft-less place how to traverse the final forty minutes to the Hemlock Neversink, only emphasized metaphorically how completely I was getting away.
I also enjoyed doing the events at the Catskill Arts Space and the local library and meeting people who are themselves writers or who support the arts—when I mentioned in a talk that the results of this residency might not appear for years, they saw it as perfectly natural, which, in this AI-obsessed get-it-now atmosphere, gave me plenty of optimism to take from this residency, as well as the momentum to continue, once back in my life where magic skillets do not appear at my request.
As writers we all strive to pierce the veil over our quotidian lives and access the place where creativity lives. I’m grateful to be the inaugural Conjunctions Residency fellow and excited to see what the next fellows will do! (And yes, sorry, the work is in too tender a place to discuss, but you can get a preview in the upcoming issue 86 of Conjunctions, Anew.)
