On Monday night, my last night in Texas, lying in bed reading Carolyn Forché’s eye-opening book What You Have Heard Is True, and my head spontaneously jolted up. I saw nothing. I looked back to the page. Once again, my eyes raced up. I went to the window, and outside, a flash of light. Then another. A lightning storm had begun. I couldn’t tell how close or how far away it was. I felt wracked in fear and excitement. I crept outside. It was warm and humid. Due south, I could see nothing in the darkness, but slowly, a battalion of dense clouds flashed into view with a series of lightning strikes. The lightning had no sound. Sometimes a bolt was buried behind clouds, and I didn’t see its shape, just the heft of cloud leaping forward. Sometimes the lightning bolts flew between clouds like telephone wires. Sometimes a bolt was a doodle of no distance, a half-assed scribble. Sometimes it came like animation, over and over, tracing similar but different paths. I mused to myself: Whoever said “lightning only strikes once” has never seen a lightning storm. I have almost never seen a lightning storm. I determined that the clouds were moving slowly and methodically to the east. I stood in my t-shirt and boxers, barefoot in the dark-then-bright night, watching for an hour, my mouth agape, wanting a break that might let me go inside to grab shoes or a sweatshirt, but too riveted to move.
It was a fittingly dramatic finale for what had been eighteen intense and wonderful days on a solo writing residency called Oatmeal Creek, an hour or so north of Austin, Texas. My companions at Oatmeal Creek were the land owner, Kerrie Richert, who founded the residency and keeps up a beautiful garden that he regularly shared harvests from; a little donkey who liked to keep me company but from a small distance—I named him Hank Jorden, yes, with an e; a very polite emu who scared the literal shit out of me on my second day by running towards me and then to the side like in Get Out, but afterwards, behaved with complete aplomb; a little armadillo who lived under my house and looked like the original piglet of Winnie the Pooh if he were dressed Tina Turner Mad Max-style, all in armor; a lot of cardinals and other birds; many excitingly large insects; some possums rehabilitated from rescue shelters and released onsite; deer with adorable white butts that ran piyong-piyong through the small live oak copses; a family of black feral pigs with two little piglets; tiny frogs; fishes that started as translucent inch-long needles with big eyeballs and grew and grew each day until they were solid little dudes; and many many other creatures. I was, in theory, alone at Oatmeal Creek, but I was not at all alone.
In my first week there, I wrote with more focus and speed than I had ever written in my life. It was intense, exhausting, electrifying. A few times, I had to sit and weep unexpectedly and was glad that only the emu checked in on me. At the end of that stretch of writing, I was manic as hell, running and stomping all over the property, but I slowly came down, with a week left of the residency, and felt a kind of pride that I don’t expect to feel very often. I wanted to be embarrassed by it—this awkward pride—but for a few days I wasn’t, not even a little. I couldn’t help but laugh at the impatience that surged up in me, knowing the writing I did during these weeks won’t be published for two more years, and by then, it will have evolved into something connected but new.
Oatmeal Creek was the third official residency I’ve attended in my life—the kind where you apply, someone reads your writing and decides if you are a “fit” with their program, and you go to a new place to write. The first time I did this, in 2019 at PLAYA Summer Lake, it felt outrageously luxurious to me. Until that point, I hadn’t been working on any of my own writing for a long time, but I knew I wanted to, and this residency allowed me the space to experiment. I ignored my insecurities nobly and did my thing as best as I could.
Right now, I don’t anticipate applying for more residencies for some time, but they served me invaluably. When my book comes out in the spring of 2024, it’s possible that up to 80 percent of the chapters will have been drafted on some kind of residency because I cannot integrate writing into my work life. I’ve tried. I can’t. And so I have to escape. It doesn’t always need to involve a Dr. Doolittle of the Desert-style animal menagerie, but I do need solitude and time, and I’m glad I have figured that out. I want to encourage you, some of my friends, to consider them, if you haven’t. This might not be something you’ll like—one close friend described her time on a residency as productive but lonesome, in a bad way. But if you are curious, check some out, whatever your art medium. They seemed out of reach to me until I started applying and learned that most residencies really are for up-and-comers. The people who write professionally and make a living at it might apply here and there, but that’s not really most residencies’ target. They are for newbies, experimenters, dreamers, us!
Last year, I applied to eight residencies. I got into two: Oatmeal Creek and Hedgebrook (more on that below). I found them a number of different ways: a stray Poets and Writers magazine laying on a coffee table in some random office; Bomb Magazine Fellowships and Residencies List; The Big Artist Opportunity List; maybe some places I’m forgetting. I made my own list (feel free to use it if it’s helpful), narrowing based on my criteria, which might be different than yours: was it rural and in a beautiful natural place? Did they cover the cost or come with a stipend? Was the duration no less than two weeks, no more than three? Some of the residencies require a payment to apply; some do not. If you are low-income and cannot afford it, push back on them. Ask them to waive the fee!
Before Oatmeal Creek, literally the two weeks beforehand, I was at a residency called Hedgebrook, up on Whidbey Island in Washington. It is a storied, old residency for women and women-identifying writers only. A huge component of the experience is interacting with other women writers, although because of COVID our first five days we quarantined in isolation. We each got a little cabin that was so darling I felt I was living in a fairytale. At first I didn’t like this feeling, this overt whimsy and magic. Honestly I didn’t. It was too sweet, too quaint, too special, like we were some special breed that needed to be spoiled. I know this is the wrong kind of whining, but my gut reaction was to feel icky. Having someone cook for me, clean for me, clear paths for me—I felt like the owning class. Is it really so great to not have to lift a finger except for a little tippety-typing? Click click click, I must deserve to be served.
Looking back, I realize I was seeing this experience from a decidedly contemporary and particular view as a woman without children and without a traditional family role. I don’t have to do manual and emotional labor everyday. I live in a communal setting and am often treated to meals and joined in cleaning. These activities aren’t a burden for me; they help me break up my time. But that isn’t true for many women, and the level of care that Hedgebrook provides allows them space and ease that they may not have experienced in ages.
What cracked through my cynicism was first getting to spend time with the other writers, once our quarantine was lifted. We talked about obnoxious craft questions and other things I would rarely vocalize and it gave me rich camaraderie with people whose lives I might never have encountered. And second, my spirits changed once I spent time with the journals in my cabin. Since the residency began in the early 1990s, hundreds of women had left entries in a series of around eleven journals documenting their experiences in the very cabin I was inhabiting. Many of the entries were filled with platitudes about gratitude and the “magic” of the place, but my favorites charted the changing eras and the residents’ own grappling with privilege, frustration, confusion, anger, and tenderness. A Black women wrote during the Rodney King riots trying to express what it felt like to be in such isolation, how little she thought the other residents could relate to her sorrow and fury, how instead of writing she worked on a quilt and this felt like a kind of wordless writing. A young woman whined that everyone there was trying to outdo each other: “who’s the most famous basically, also who’s the most+biggest dyke… Anyway to the next person this is a sweet smelling cottage. Just say fuck em all when it comes to the other writers.” Ha! Someone wrote the day after 9/11. Another wrote an entry as a young mother and almost a decade later, having returned, as someone going through a nasty divorce. One woman wrote in a drunken stupor, scrawling across the page. I loved when women tried to untangle their writing problems in real time in the pages in ways that seemed so far from my own work—“I wanted to deal with the puritan undertow of the American psyche… I had already been writing about sheep and eventually had one of the characters impale himself on the American Music Award… interested in something about our awards obsession.” Hm. I loved the long and funny entry by a women I’d never heard of before named Ginny Foster, who I learned died in 2012 but was a playwright in Portland, a mother of five, blue collar all her life, a civil rights activist, and completely and totally distrustful of the ease of Hedgebrook and the inherent classism she felt from other residents, and also absolutely enamored of her time there, in the same breath. Because it’s not always one thing.
Overtime, my little cabin began to feel low-key sacred to me. I was “sharing” it with the women who came before and after. We were in lineage with one another. It didn’t make me feel like I had a standard to live up to, but more that I was part of a continuous wave of feeling and experience. I found entries from Ursula LeGuin (I screamed!), Nisi Shawl, Ruth Ozeki, and Carolyn Forché (whose book I just finished and was reading as the lightning came striking).
Why do some people get these experiences and others don’t? The journals were littered with women telling future residents: Don’t doubt yourself. You earned this. You deserve this. It was a collective scream against women’s imposter syndrome. And still! I just don’t like the word “deserve.” What does it mean to deserve anything in this particularly unjust world where we live? The hierarchies that the idea of “deserving” elicit are problematic. Hedgebrook sits on Whidbey Island. The land is surrounded by homes inhabited by ultra wealthy people living in their own false utopias, imagining themselves gurus (sometimes quite literally). Do these people deserve this place because they can afford it?
Sometimes, we rightfully should step aside and make way for someone else. Sometimes, we need to be brave enough to step up. I do believe in trying, against the odds, to learn about yourself, to meet yourself, and to empower yourself, not at the expense of others, but in service to something mysteriously larger than yourself. I believe in seeking opportunities that challenge you and investing in your creativity, because it may not lead where you think.
In Carolyn Forché’s book, she writes about the time she spent in El Salvador with a mentor named Leonel Gómez Vides. He sought her out because she was a poet. I suspect something in her poetry spoke to him, although she doesn’t say that outright. He was seeking an American witness who would express to fellow U.S. citizens the truth of people in El Salvador living under crushing poverty and brutalized by a military funded by the American government. He also wanted an accomplice in his wild explorations of truth and fiction. Leonel, who would later help broker the peace accords in the nation, didn’t approach a journalist who would tell traditional factual stories. He wanted a poet who might grapple with terrors and beauties bigger and deeper than dancing facts.
I am still trying to make sense of the five weeks I have just returned from. I have come up against a different kind of imposter syndrome than I think the Hedgebrook journals were trying to address. I do not fear that someone else—say a famous writer or a man or someone dealing with “more important” issues—is more worthy than me, per say; I question how U.S. culture decides who is worthy at all and remind myself of my belief that everyone deserves time and space, security and confidence to navigate their own curiosities and creativity, to tangle with the gucky stuff of the world and discover what electrifies them. I wish it for myself and everyone, especially those people who have had the least access. I’m curious what it looks like in my life to hold that wish and walk, or maybe wiggle, or maybe bolt towards it.
Now I am home. I am back to the noodles, back to the grind, no longer outside of reality, but never fully in it either, sheltered as I am. I am honestly glad to be home. I am thinking about the little donkey, Hank Jorden, glad he and I chewed the cud side by side for a few weeks. It was awfully sweet.
I'm with you, Kristin! I love your writing in so many ways. Watching you again after many years of having no contact as you mature from that little 5 year old and through high school with Minna and the gang gives me lots of joy. And just a day or two ago, the wonder of "I wonder what Lola is up to?" came to the surface. And here you are, sharing your world with other worlds. I do not feel guilt for the privilege I experience reading your work. Maybe eating your noodles, but not your words.
I love this Lola. Eager to read your book.