We watched movies together and went on adventures into town.

The group was talented and funny and kind, and I loved gathering together in the evenings to drink wine and talk and gossip and complain about our projects. We were a motley crew of writers and visual artists and composers at every level of career and age. The space and company were also full of little pleasures and joys. In the Dream House staggered to its feet. The final revision of Her Body and Other Parties came together. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and read, and took walks. I woke up at 5am, had my butt in my chair by 5:30. The day after the election, one resident told the more distraught among us that we all needed to calm down, that we’d all be fine, and I came as close as I ever have in my adult life to hitting another human being.īut I was ridiculously, disgustingly productive. People bickered about Bernie and Hillary at every meal. Mostly, the stressful part was the fact that it was happening at the same time as the 2016 presidential election, which meant that everyone was on edge. That residency was magical, strange, stressful. I was about to start my first full-time teaching job. I was not a known quantity in the field that has since become my career. I was also in the early stages of drafting In the Dream House, which I’d sell a few months later. I’d sold Her Body and Other Parties to Graywolf and was finishing up its edits. I attended this residency years ago, in the fall of 2016. This is the beautiful, rarified, privileged moment in which I write this essay about how much I am sucking at this process right now. (Every lunch, somewhat famously, includes a tiny bag of raw carrot sticks, a snack I normally have no patience for but do my best to eat.) Other than dinner’s reprieve, we are undisturbed to make, or not make, whatever we want. We get three meals a day, one of which-dinner-is a brief moment of socialization. We are staying in and around a mansion, once owned by the family who founded and funded this place.

And I guess it makes sense, if you live in a country where we do not collectively give two shits about art, that the idea of anyone being paid or otherwise supported to make it seems laughable.īut here I am, in a studio on a beautiful piece of land in upstate New York with a collection of poets, essayists, novelists, painters, composers.

He said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” I’m pretty sure he still has the vague sense that the entire enterprise is a scam. When I told my scientist father that I was going to school for writing and they were paying me to do it, he simply did not believe me. The thing about residencies is this: if you tell a non-artist about them, they make no fucking sense.

Carmen maria machado the resident