How to write at a writing residency
3 min readSep 21, 2022
- Don’t
- Talk to the other writers about how they are also not writing but see their printed pages and discuss their book contracts
- Order a pair of expensive walking shoes
- Check for the package every few hours and see that one of the other writers has also ordered a pair of expensive walking shoes
- Walk to the ocean and think about how that writer was asked what she was looking for on the beach when she was, as she explained it, just trying to look at the colors
- Walk to the ocean and compare it to a different ocean you loved six years ago
- Get very, very angry
- Paint with watercolors you didn’t expect to use
- Photocopy half the filled pages of a notebook in case it gets lost in a fire
- Envy everyone else’s studio
- Borrow another artist’s studio
- Talk to a visual artist about how she ran up the far hill to get cell service to place an order for lumber and how the call dropped and now the lumber is coming late and wish your work involved ordering lumber or even making a phone call
- Feel bad about yourself
- Feel bad about yourself
- Feel bad about yourself
- Suggest one of the other writers name the spider in the window of her studio
- Feel good when a dancer offers you a glass of the bottle of red wine he’s brought to dinner
- Spot a goldfinch and cry
- Watch a falcon hunt
- Wish your house was the one a family of raccoons broke into
- Drink so much coffee you have to order butt cream
- Listen to birds and debate if they are arguing
- Count pelicans until they take flight and then count them again in the sky
- Debate writing an essay about the possibility of being in a stand-off with a turkey
- Tell a sculpturist that no, writing is not easy, but how is making sculptures?
- Eat community leftovers with your hands
- Leave a mug on the highest bookshelf in the library to remind yourself to take care of things
- Convince yourself that you have never, ever loved anyone
- FaceTime with your cat
- Touch another artist gently on her elbow and say you’re glad she’s here
- Go up for seconds at every dinner
- Leave the table when people begin to ask the chef if he believes cooking is an art form
- Become so familiar with the ways the buildings rattle throughout the day that you begin to imagine the buildings are a mother
- Rescue a salamander from the toilet at 6:45am
- Miss several people you have not otherwise thought about in years
- Decide you need to move from where you live
- Decide you need to stay where you live
- Lie to the park attendants at Muir Woods that you accidentally ordered a parking pass for the next day because you are too embarrassed to admit you bypassed the four signs you saw that read RESERVATION REQUIRED and thought you’d figure it out when you got there. Lie again that you don’t have wifi to pull up the confirmation. Drive to Muir Beach instead.
- Pet other people’s dogs
- Make eye contact with the dogs but not their owners
- Take one rock from the beach and bring it back the next day
- Think about hooting back at the owls when they wake you up at night. Think about really learning to sound like one.
- Tell everyone you’re tired when they ask how you’re doing
- Sneak drugs
- Check your mailbox every day and remember, viscerally, what it was like to have a classroom cubby
- Count white trucks
- Will the person who does not stop talking to stop talking
- Visit the website of your old school district to see if there are any photos of your elementary school cafeteria
- Compare nightmares with your housemate. Joke that you are passing them to each other. Find out that he yells in his sleep and then apologizes. Tell him you haven’t heard either and you don’t mind. Smile. Mean it.
- Accept the pencil a visual artist from Prague offers because he has too many.
- Accept you are writing.
