Vermont Artist Residency

A quick hello

On Saturday, I arrived at the Vermont Studio Center, where I’m doing a three week artist residency. Located in an historic mill town along a fast-moving river in northern Vermont, it’s cold here!

I got lucky and was given a great apartment, with my own kitchen and bathroom. All the writers are also assigned studios across from their apartments along the river. (Visual artists get much larger spaces to work in). It’s a really nice place to work— and fun to pack a bag in the morning and commute to my studio!

Like the Taos residency, the the real thrill is knowing that I am living and working in the same place where other artists have worked — VSC is known for having an international group of artists, and a few of my favorite writers have been here like Ilya Kaminsky, Porochista Khakpour, and Kazim Ali.

I am really enjoying meeting the current cohort. There are three of us working in fiction— and immediately during the first dinner, I was writing down book titles and ideas for my project. It is stimulating to meet artists! One of the nonfiction writers, did her MFA with a writer I met during the Taos residency. She is the great granddaughter of one of the Disney Brothers and is working in nonfiction. I’m definitely looking forward to reading her book.

From here, I will do a second residency in Virginia (also in fiction) and then Sewanee and Bread Loaf in poetry. I was waitlisted at Bread Loaf for nonfiction and because a favorite writer is on the nonfiction faculty (There are actually two writers I adore there) I kind of hope I get a nonfiction spot. But that seems unlikely.

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1. For anyone who loves Japan, I wanted to share an essay I wrote in 3 Quarks Daily about a book I highly recommend, called Things Become Different Things, by Craig Mod. It is one of the most moving memoirs and best books I have read about Japan. If you love memoir or Japan, I really recommend this one.

2. I have not read the winner of the International Booker Prize yet, but loved one of the short-listed books called Little Boat by French philosopher Vincent Delecroix and translated by Helen Stevenson. Highly recommend it.

So that is all the news from here. Regular posts will resume.