Residency Notes: the third time around

On the trail today I met two men well into their sixties, one with a collie puppy on  a leash, the other with a walking stick, a hat and a rather frozen grin. “Warren Wilson College?” asked the one with the leash, gesturing to my shirt. “Where’s that?” North Carolina, I told him. “Well! you’re a long ways from home!”

Such volume! Such friendliness! Before eight in the morning. I explained that I go to residency there; I live here.

“Residency? Like for doctors?”

I said: No, writing. His friend’s expression was one of those kind older men looks that’s so full of sympathy it borders on patronizing. Is it only directed at women? Or those younger than them? The talker, however, came to life. Eyebrows rose, back straightened. His face lit up as he said, “Oh! Are you writing something?!”

It took me fifteen years to be comfortable saying, I’m a writer, and I still think this is the easy part compared to what comes next. Questions. Generally asked with a mysterious blend of awe and mistrust. I don’t envy poets. “I’m a poet,” sounds like the worst kind of asshole. Then again, where I grew up, artists (writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, the lot of them) were snots or hippies. Or both. You’d do best to shut the hell up.

But sometimes the questions can come with remarkable excitement. This guy’s eyes were dancing. He really wanted to know. So I said, “Yes I am! I am working on my third novel!”

He straightened further and tucked his chin towards his throat, the gesture of a proud father speaking to a toddler. Or a clown. “Well!” he grinned. Nodding, I inched up the trail but before I could make my escape, he slapped me three times on the top of the arm, shouting, “GOOD FOR YOU!” I took several steps away, exiting in earnest. He called after me, “You keep up the good work!”

I’ve just returned from residency, where it rained every day at least once, the kind of rain that ruins your shoes. Soaks your underwear. It gave the whole endeavor a closed-in, almost clandestine feel, which I preferred to the sweat bath of last summer. I also showed up with a different mindset, and the experience was one of the best of my life. Here are a few notes on what worked and why.

I didn’t:

Get drunk and stumble to bed (more than once); hide in my room wondering why everyone else was having such a good time; sweat while sitting still; eat dessert every day; say anything stupid to a poet (Your poems feel like a novel!); say anything stupid to a fiction writer (you have some great turns of phrase . . . I am forgetting them right now); hurry to the dining hall for breakfast (ate fruit in room instead); take a bus to town; go to the bonfire; skinny dip in the lake; drink moonshine; write three page responses to lectures (a solid paragraph will suffice); sleep without a fan; count on anyone else’s coffee.

I did:

Bring my own coffee; attend Zumba classes; swim in the pool; talk to people I didn’t know; deliberately ask questions, that is, I cared about the answers; consult David Haynes for dessert advice at graduation dinner; disappear when: a) I had to shout to be heard b) I found myself standing outside people-circles with no expression on my face c) guitars made their appearance.

Two more “I dids” that require further notes:

• Watch Reed Turchi play music. I went to school in Athens, Georgia, a place similar to Asheville; I spent a lot time in clubs made of cinderblock  listening to music. I fell in love with a tall, lanky singer whose band included a guitar prodigy like Reed, only shorter, but with similar big hair that fell in his eyes, very skinny and able to create a sound that felt like whiskey. I don’t know Reed Turchi, except as a guy who plays music that I recognize. The music, I mean. He’s been at every residency, and even the first time I saw him play a year ago, at a bar in Swannanoa, something happened to me. Something unlocked. I ended up at midnight on the soccer fields telling stories and laughing like I haven’t laughed since I was eighteen. This year I watched the other listeners and confirmed: it’s not just me. Reed’s song “Mind’s Eye” put the audience into a head-nodding-pleasure stupor. Some couldn’t help dancing, though this is not dancing music. Well, it isn’t “dance music”. I said it feels like whiskey. Bourbon, to be exact. Slide guitar, muscle-y drums, and a charging bass. The bassist wore an unmovable grin for most of the set, which added an element of strange that you’re not going to escape in this neck of the woods. It’s part of the sound. The music is young and mesmerizing, and unquestionably southern. It matches the landscape, which is probably why Reed calls it kudzu boogie. It brings out a side of me I used to know and rather like, a long time ago. Listen:

http://turchi.bandcamp.com/album/my-time-aint-now

• Jot down all ideas that came to me in workshops, classes and lectures. Here is the list of what to write about, in no particular order: 1. a novel set in a house or an inn that features voices/stories in every room. The wandering eye. This has been done before and I’d like to try it. 2. The sound a woman’s body makes when it falls in the river, especially a deep, swift river after weeks of rain. 3. A woman who relinquishes custody of her children. 4. Evil—I’ve been avoiding it for years. 5. Children, especially children in peril, which is pretty much all of them. 6. Any kind of fiction that bothers the reader so much “it changes how she thinks about herself.” Yeah. 7.  Quiet strangeness. As opposed to loud strangeness, like the belligerent homeless man who sits by the stop sign near my house. Quiet strangeness is more like what passes between people at a breakfast table, a child and a mother, say, especially when the mother is facing hours alone and the kid wants to know what’s next. 8. An old narrator, like in her nineties, housebound. The boredom in that; the secrets kept.

Why was it a success? Because all of it, as a package, made me want to come home and write.

A postscript on those WWC t-shirts: Who designs them? Certainly not a woman. If you get them to fit the shoulders, they don’t fit in the hips. I cut the bottom off mine and now it looks like one of those white trash halter tops, lacking only beaded fringe