Artist-in-Residence: The Reserve at Lake Keowee (Part I)

I've enjoyed a few artist residencies during my short time as a published writer, and they've all been different: located in different parts of the country, with varying lengths of stay, accommodations, perks, and expectations of the artist. Certainly, my own creative output during each has varied. During one artists' residency, I began a new novel; at another, I researched that novel and wrote poetry; at yet a different residency, I wrote an essay that actually won an award that ended up covering the cost of a rental car and plane fare to and from that residency.

 

At my most recent gig as the very lucky Artist-in-Residence at The Reserve at Lake Keowee in Sunset, South Carolina, where I stayed for a week, I wrote five pages of what I imagine will be the sequel to Keowee Valley.

I know what you're thinking. Five pages--only five pages--in a week's time? Let me explain: my family was there with me. Yep, the husband, the (newly-turned) 4 year-old, and the 12 week-old. Only one absent was the dog.

I know there are writers out there who can write amid professional and familial chaos, but I am not one of them. My brain spins in overdrive and my imagination is as fickle and mercurial as an afternoon thunderstorm over the Southern Appalachians. And if you know nothing about the storms we get around here, they're moody, fast-moving, completely random, and often violent.

 

the Guest House (or, as my 4 year-old says, the "castle house")

So what I'm saying is, five pages is miraculous! Especially since the 3rd trimester of pregnancy and these first few months of my infant's life have been energy-sucking. Wonderful, wouldn't-trade-it-for-the-world wild, and exhausting. To feel inspired to write again was a blessing. And the impetus for the inspiration was entirely because of our gorgeous and peaceful accommodations at the guest house of a pair of incredibly generous members. (Who also happen to be HUGE Clemson fans. Go Tigers!)
 
 

The guest house was set away from the main house across a lovely bridge spanning a little

"our" bridge (my husband's got the infant carseat; my 4 year-old's the
tiny figure sprinting ahead)

mountain cove. Bubbling and gurgling (and full-on rushing, as it was after several days in a row of rain) down the back of that tree-filled cove was a series of small waterfalls. The creek rushed beneath the bridge just below the house, emptying into the lake nearby. Inside, the home was elegant, warm and comfortable--a combination I think can be sometimes difficult to find. Designed with rich wood, stunning stone and completely outfitted with anything a guest could need, it was the perfect place to get my groove back.

Yes, I just said that. Forgive me, Stella.

For most of the days we were there, if the baby and the 4 year-old let me, I would wake at 5 a.m., brew my coffee and head out to the screened-in porch on the second story. The porch overlooked the aforementioned bridge and creek, and so when I looked out all I saw were green trees--all I heard the rush of water through the woods. Heaven.

 

Kathryn Gravely, the Director of the The Community Foundation, had pretty much the absolute perfect week planned for me: one book talk to members of a couple different book clubs in The Reserve, two informal meet-and-greets with members outside The Reserve's Market, and one history talk at Orchard House, a beautiful room with a huge fireplace located at the Clubhouse. Orchard House reminded my husband and me of an inn we'd stayed in when we'd traveled in Scotland several years ago. With a kick of Southern style, of course.

The rest of the week, Kathryn told me, I was to relax with my family at the lake and by the community's fabulous pools (let me just say that there was a grotto), enjoy the natural beauty of The Reserve (the lake, hiking trails, orchard, views, etc), and to WRITE. What a gift!

As a bonus, I met some fantastic people during the week, at the informal gatherings, by the pool, at the Market, and at both my talks. Kathryn--who is as genuine, classy, cool, and savvy as they come (not to mention very, very good at her job)--had assured me at the beginning of the week that The Reserve was home to some of the friendliest people I'd ever meet, and she was right. In addition--and she'd told me this, too--the folks there were welcoming, very casual, inclusive, and fun. This was something I'd not necessarily expected from a place as "exclusive" as The Reserve. Meeting and talking with people from all walks of life is probably, besides the actually crafting of the story, my favorite thing to do as a writer.

In addition to all the good fellowship, let me just say that this was an incredibly generous artist residencies in so many other ways. And I'm truly grateful to have received it.

 
** Next time, I'll talk about some of the other things I got to do at The Reserve, including exploring a couple of early 19th century graveyards, hiking around an "Indian cave," and answering questions about local Cherokee history and culture. I'll also share my thoughts about how to best enjoy and utilize an artists' residency like this one.

My Post at the Bell Bridge Books Blog

My first post at the Bell Bridge Books Blog is up this morning! It's called "And So I Did," and it's about the things that shaped me as a writer.

Enjoy!

It's the Little Things

Many, many years ago, someone gave me one of those calendar flip-books of "Quotes from Great Women."

I have loved it, memorized it, and carried it with me from city to city, state to state, mountains to sea and back again. I think it's possible that the thing is 14 years old. Just this week, I decided that it'd had a good, long life, and was time to meet the recycling bin. But before it was laid to rest, I copied down every quote in a file on my computer.

I did this because those quotes spoke to me, and have (obviously) at different stages in my life. Since I got the calendar when I was in my teens and in college, had it has an early 20s outdoor educator sleeping in a cabin on top of a mountain, had it when I was single and in graduate school (the first time), and now as a married mama... well, the words and their meanings have certainly changed for me.

From imdb.com

Consider this quote by Bette Midler:

"After thirty, a body has a mind of its own."

When I was 19, or, heck--even 28, this would've meant nothing to me. Now, in my early 30s, boy howdy does it!

(I won't elaborate. But if you've seen this scene from the movie The Sweetest Thing, where Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate are in a dressing room discussing the effects of gravity on boobage, you'll know what I mean.)

Or, on a more serious note, this one from one of my favorite American heroines, Abigail Adams:



Abigail Adams
From Gulliver's Nest

"I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature."

The first Gulf War happened when I was in middle and high school, and we've been sucked into the sands of the Middle East ever since. But I never looked at international conflicts then the way I do now. This quote also applies, I think now, to disasters from oil spills to hurricane clean-ups, from a teenager driving while texting to a state deciding to pass a law.

As a mother, so much of what those great ladies said and wrote sings to me. Here's one from Jill Eikenberry. Though I don't have a child this age, I think this could be applied to the two year-old:

"You have a wonderful child. Then, when he's thirteen, gremlins carry him away and leave in his place a stranger who gives you not a moment's peace. You have to hang in there, because two or three years later, the gremlins will return your child, and he'll be wonderful again."

And so, for some Wednesday fun, here are 10 of my favorite quotes from that wonderful, ratty old flip calendar I've finally let go of:  (I wonder if the recycling has gone out yet?)

10 Quotes from Great Women

1. “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
~ Agatha Christie

2. “All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child.”
~ Marie Curie

3. “Ideological differences are no excuse for rudeness.”
~ Judith Martin

4. “We ought to be able to learn some things second hand. There is not enough time for us to make all the mistakes ourselves.”

~ Harriet Hall

5. “You can take no credit for beauty at 16. But if you are beautiful at 60, it will be your own soul’s doing.”

~ Marie Stopes

6. “Friends and good manners will carry you where money won’t go.”
~ Margaret Walker

7. “Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy fat women.”
~ (Sylvia) Nicole Hollander

8. “In the end, what affects your life most deeply are things too simple to talk about.”
~ Nell Blaine

9. “I want real things—music that makes holes in the sky.”
~ Georgia O' Keefe

10. “The true woman is as yet a dream of the future.”
~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I love quotes, so please share! Has there been a particular quote (by a great man or great woman) that has stuck with you over the years?

Shake Up

Life is moving along at the usual clip, we're living comfortably in our daily routines, cocooned by structure and need, and then: shake up. Something happens. Something small, like a low-magnitude earthquake that barely shifts the floor beneath your feet, subtle but odd enough to be noticed: a friend's odd attitude, problems with a car or an appliance, a forced route change on your way to work, a fender-bender. Or, something big happens--an illness, news of a divorce, a job loss, a spiritual epiphany--and this time the quaking lasts for minutes, knocks pictures off the walls and shatters dishes, cracks the street, warps foundations, the reverberations felt and suffered for miles. This is the inevitability of being human: at some point, we'll all get a shake up.

As much as I like to think myself a free spirit, I enjoy the comfortable rootedness of my life. I'm lucky enough to have a home, a family, a job, an avocation, a fairly healthy body, good friends and a great dog. My days are very much the same--something I'd always feared as a teenager and 20-something, when I thought I'd never be happy unless I was traveling the world, constantly experiencing new places and people--and, about 85 percent of the time, I'm okay with that.

There are reasons for this, not the least of which my brain is your basic constant whirlwind, like many writers', I'd guess. It's turbulent, messy, able-to-leap-to-anxiety-ridden-empathy-with-a-single-bound, and at times borderline unstable. The word maelstrom gets overused, but that's what my mind is (and my husband can attest to this). The word is from the early Dutch, its roots are Scandinavian, and since these folks gave us berserk and the Vikings, I think they know a bit about  insanity.

Here's the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definition:

maelstrom
        1. A great whirlpool, orig. one in the Artic Ocean off the west coast of Norway, formerly supposed to suck in and destroy all vessels within a long radius.
        2. A state of turbulence or confusion.

     

I've convinced that, over the years, I've kept my wild mind in check with reading and writing--solitary, focused acts that so engage me that the outside world melts away, and I'm just left with the page. And so routine and tradition can be comforting to me, instead of dulling. This always surprises me about myself.

What I'm trying to figure out is how, in the midst of a shake-up--whether it's the possibility of a move, my daughter suddenly deciding she won't nap on a day I desperately need it, or a critic hating my writing--I can calm the maelstrom of my mind, yoke that erratic, fearful energy and make it work for me. The last thing I want to happen is for my inspiration (and sanity) to be destroyed like the monster Charybdis in the Greek myth, who sucked in ships off the coast of Sicily. This is a possibility. My ship could be easily sucked.

So far, I've only found two answers:

1.) Be in the woods and alone (okay, so I'm not really alone because I'm always with my dog, Scout, but still). Whether it's twenty minutes or an hour and twenty minutes, being in the woods--anywhere outside and natural, really--soothes my mania. Tames the mercurial beast that lurks deep within my DNA. When it's just me, Scout, the trees, the creek, the thin winter light on the birches, the mud, my heart is free. I can't explain it. Call it time with God, sacred silence, whatever you want--it's a gift.

2.) Wake up early. This one's a toughie for me, because my husband likes to stay up late, and at times I get sucked into (see, the maelstrom again) staying up late with him. Also: there's always the chance that my morning footsteps on our old hardwood floors--and Scout waking and stretching when she sees me, her toenails clicking on the floor, and the creaky, clanky process of starting the coffee maker--will wake my toddler, early, and if it does, well, then... there's just no point. But, when I do set that alarm an hour earlier, when the house and the world are still completely dark and there is something akin to silence in my world, there's a magic there. A dawning.

Speaking of which, that's another word rooted in the Scandinavian:

dawning
       1. The beginning of daylight; daybreak, dawn; the east.
       2. The first gleam, the appearance, the beginning (of something).

So morning is always, for me, a beginning, especially when it comes to my storytelling process. Anything can happen. "Dawn," the Oxford English Dictionary again tells us, means "of the morning, the day, etc: begin to grow light."

I recently read Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James, and afterwards stayed up late to rewatch the Joe Wright (director)/Deborah Moggach (screenwriter) film version of Pride and Prejudice. The Keira Knightley one. (Which I think is a fabulous interpretation of the Austen, by the way.) One of the most gorgeous scenes in the film--and there are several--is of Elizabeth taking a dawn walk, like she always does when she needs to think, and, pausing in the between-light, she sees Darcy walking toward her, his coat tails billowing and his stride long and sure through the English heath. It's utterly romantic. And it's absolutely the beginning of something--something wonderful and promising and unknown. Something, to be sure, Austen fans have dreamt on over the almost 200 years since she wrote the novel.

I'm convinced: Mornings are magical. Beginnings are good, even when they shake us up a bit. There is, inevitably, a morning after a quake. Daybreak promises nothing but whatever we make of it, however we choose to respond to the actions of the day before--nothing but a beginning.

Which is quite alot.

Steady as She Goes

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

~ Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1474-1564

Sitting at this desk in a brown-tiled room, a fire blazing on a chilly—but not yet cold—November morning, it becomes apparent to me that I am a Spurter. One-who-spurts. Better yet, I should say: One-Who-Does-Things-in-Spurts. I’m certain that this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me; so indeed, it’s not really a surprise even to me. Recognition, however, comes a little slow for my mercurial and somewhat exhausted brain.

But it’s true: almost anything I’ve ever done—and done well—has been in a great spurt of inspiration or information or necessity: writing a college essay (night before, cram cram), reading a book (all in one sitting, no matter the tomb), writing a novel (I’m a sixteen-plus pages at a time sort of writer), cleaning the house (flurry of activity, Windex, Lysol, vacuum, oh my!), hiking a trail (turn around now, are you kidding?!), catching up with friends (all of them, all in one day), and even deciding to have a baby (okay, maybe I won’t go there.) “Slow and steady wins the race” has never been my adage of choice, and perhaps it should be. Perhaps those plodders, the successful, steady-as-she-goes types, are onto something. Maybe there’s a potion.

It can’t be easy to live with, this spurting tendency of mine. Since we dated for three years before becoming engaged, I think my husband may have had some sort of idea what he was getting into. But then, we’d never lived together before, so the day to day reality of this odd aspect of my nature may still be an annoyance… even after six years of marriage. Yeesh. As we’ve grown together, we try to plan, to budget, to make lists. These are all practical antidotes for the spurting. They help at times; at others they’re just stop-gap. My fifteen month-old daughter doesn’t seem to mind the spurting, though she may be too young at this point to recognize that Mama is a little nuts. Or maybe, heaven forbid, she’s a spurter, too. Maybe there’s a potion.

The dog is definitely a spurter: this I knew the day I brought her home from the breeder and she went skidding full-tilt around the hardwood floors of the beachhouse I was renting at the time; or, when she bounded—at all of six weeks old and about the size of a loaf of bread—into the rough Atlantic, only to be pummeled by a monster wave. She’s still that way, gazelling up steep trails in her late-middle-age, high on joy, then crashing on our couch for hours after. The lulls between spurts, for both of us—my dog and me—are getting longer. This does not bode well for future productivity.

At times I long to be one of the plodders, those whose houses stay clean for months on end, the ones who train for marathons a year away, whose lives are clear and unworried and neat, those steady, accomplished people. Michelangelo was steady. It took him four years each, give or take, to both sculpt the David and paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. During each of those times he was also commissioned for, and completed, other works—including architectural projects and paintings. Inspired? Surely. But also determined, prepared, steady. Most would say that Michelangelo was a master, a true genius. He felt differently: “If you knew how much work went into it,” he would say, “you would not call it genius.”

So there’s the goal: to marry the inspired, the passion, with the steady, the deliberate. In the meantime, I bow to you, Plodders. Keepers-of-the-schedules. Master Buonarroti, always. My elderly, across the street neighbor, who raises her American flag every morning at 7:35 a.m. You are the producers. That I may, one day, be one.