The wind is wild outside, though it was a quite perfect day, warm and breezy, the cottonwoods starting to turn yellow, the formerly muddy paths now dusty and easily navigable. I’m at the Ucross Foundation, a writing residency in Wyoming, back after a year and a half when we all had to leave due to this mysterious Covid thing that was just beginning to make a name for itself. My fellow residents and I, gloved and masked to the hilt, braved the airports and the long journeys home—we had to, as Ucross, along with everything else, had closed down.
For the last fifteen years, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been awarded fellowships to various residencies, time that has given me both a much-needed creative tribe and protected space in which to dream, read, ponder and write in sheltered sanctuary free from all distractions. Those months have helped me generate much of my published and even more non-published poems and prose, but more importantly, they have sustained my singular self, the one not subsumed, however happily, by marriage, home ownership and maintenance, gardening, medical appointments, politics, the internet and all the other flotsam that arrives with daily life as a human in this world.
An oasis.
I crave this ability to move to my own rhythms, not those dictated by the needs and demands of others. I want to see what I’m blind to in the rest of my life. As a writer, I know there’s nothing I need more.
I spread the books and notebooks, blank pads, a glass of water, pens, on the big coffee table by the couch in my old studio. Yesterday was somewhat of a wash, taken up by settling in and computer and printer problems. Ryan, the wonderful staff support person who picked us up at the tiny Sheridan airport, spent hours trying to solve them, finally bringing me his own printer, coming back later to struggle with the mouse that refused to work. Ryan warns us to wear fluorescent vests when we go out hiking as rifle season begins Friday, and will be bringing me tomorrow into Sheridan to get my Covid booster shot. Melissa, the housekeeper, just brought me new dish soap for our little kitchen and summoned Mike, the maintenance man, to figure out the lack of heat in my studio. That’s the way it is here—everyone on the outstanding staff is devoted to taking care of us, supporting our privacy and comfort.
It’s like having a mother again.
Today I dig in, reading a bit from one book, then another, jotting down quotes, words. I think of including a poem in this post and get sidetracked looking through old poems, seeing them anew. It still amazes me how I can strike half of the words I thought the poem first needed and come up with a much stronger version of what I was trying to communicate. “Kill your darlings” is one of the mantras we poets—sometimes unwillingly—try to live by.
Staring out at the cottonwoods, I wonder what words will fill these empty pads, what new darlings I will create, which ones discard.
Later this afternoon I will put on my hiking boots and down jacket (today it’s 55, yesterday it was 90, almost too hot to walk) and head up Coal Creek Road into the wild open space of this place so far from New England, where I’ve spent nearly all my life. I love its vastness, its complete difference from what is familiar to me, though most assuredly not its distinction of being one of three states with the lowest vaccination rates. We here are all vaccinated, and do not leave the campus (22,000 acres!) except for the rare trip into town like tomorrow when I will get my booster and others will pick up a few necessities, fully masked. We know there is still a raging pandemic in the country and are both grateful and a little anxious to have braved the travel that brought us here.
I’d love to tell you about the very cool, talented and totally diverse group of nine who gather around the table every night to talk about their day, their work, their lives, while eating Cindy’s glorious food, but out of care for their privacy I’ll just say we are both women and men, writers, performers, and visual artists of all ages and colors. What a welcome change from Lakeville!
I have so needed this.
Already I feel suffused with peace, with acceptance of what is, what is to come. With freedom to create, to rest, to give the monkey always on my back pushing me to do more, do it faster, better, a rest. With tenderness for the suffering world and its inhabitants but without the need to give it and them constant moment-to-moment attention and judgement.
Can you feel it?
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The Glass is Already Broken
I’m thrilled to give you this preview of my latest full-length collection of poetry, The Glass is Already Broken, with gorgeous cover art by Jarrod Beck, a brilliant sculptor and artist I met years ago at a writing residency. It will be out soon, and I’m pretty excited about it! More to follow on details about the collection and how to purchase a copy.