Portrait of a well-fed Artist
Montpelier, VT
November
The heat hurts more now. Before I went north the heat just was; I’ve lived two decades in this swamp, and a hundred-degree summer must be either abhorred or accepted. Vermont poisoned my acceptance with century-old buildings and snow that falls like it’s alive.
I am not a sweet summer child. I am a rotten autumn soul, formed for a chill in the air and warm tea and sweaters with pants. I am the kind that hibernates in the warm; one that lives not for the weekend but for the months of boots and bloody noses; months where green turns gold and all feels in-between. I am a creature of dusk, of descending darkness, lover of cats October and Thursday, content in the breath before a word, in the peak of the wave not the crash, living in the space between light and dark where things are outlined, begun, and never have to end.
Maybe I haven’t wanted to write this because it makes my stomach hurt; because if I put these words on the page I am putting them on a tombstone. If I entomb what was in words, I will have to grieve it. I will have to accept that it has ended.
And this rotten soul does not do well with endings.
Call me dramatic, and I would agree. But what is an artist besides a dramatist? I am sad because my writing vacation ended, I could say. But why would I, when words can be panned and knitted; when words can become music, a picture – when you could sculpt something with them?
Vermont charmed me right away; with white farmhouses and weathered silos poked into the Green Mountains, dry air that smelled like campfire and felt like winter, and people who didn't expect you to smile or greet them when you passed on the street.
I first went north on Halloween, almost a year ago now, and caught the tail end of New England autumn. Every curve of interstate 89 revealed another quilt of autumn trees, a mountainside of trees changing colors in the cold. The post-sleet fog hovered over the peaks in clouds and I thought, this is a good place to be.
Everything in Montpelier was novel. Montpelier set a mood, and I was settled in the groove between deprivation and inspiration. I rented an attic room from Steve, a Welsh man from Penmaenmawr who works at home as a theatre programmer and on the street as the capitol area’s only Uber driver. He listed it on Airbnb as Cozy Room in Downtown Montpelier, and cozy it was; just four walls and wall-to-wall carpet. My portable fridge fit six cans of Diet Coke and a package of turkey and sliced cheddar, and I ate on the floor next to the space heater.
In the mornings I loved the ritual of bundling into my corduroy pants, button down and cream wool sweater, fleece-lined hat and Timberlands, and gloves. I packed my backpack and walked downtown, then spent the day working in Rabble-Rouser – the coffee shop – or North Branch – the tearoom. I’d pick up lunch from Wilaiwan’s, a window at the corner of State and Main that serves three things, all spicy Thai dishes cooked while you wait on the sidewalk and drink free hot tea. For dinner I went back to my Cozy Room to drop off my backpack and eat cold cuts and cheese, maybe supplemented with a croissant, or tuna and crackers, or kettle chips. I went out again after dark, dawning my red letterman jacket and walking through clouds of my breath to Charlie O’s or Bent Nails Bistro, depending on the night. Karaoke was Monday at Bent Nails and Tuesday at Charlie O’s. Pool tourney was Wednesday at O’s. Live music was Thursday at Bent Nails and Friday at O’s. Weekends were for exploring.
When I left Montpelier, Christmas was already creeping about. I spent a day in Stowe, a skiing village, and watched men on ladders attach garland to the streetlights and grieved the magic I would miss. Christmas in south Louisiana feels like a charade after that; in Vermont Christmas is always white.
I wrote 21,000 words in November.
I wrote 1,500 more in the first week I was home. I wrote nothing more during December and January.
Inspiration is, in fact, a spark, and in my hometown of Baton Rouge there are few things left to strike the steel of my brain. Northward, flint abounds: the gold dome of Montpelier’s capitol building and the cluster of friends outside Charlie O’s, clothed in hats and parkas and cigarette smoke; the absolute silence of winter that lets you hear the trees creak and the stoplight click from red to green; the constant slick of melted snow on the asphalt that reflects every light in a muddled mirror; naked branches with a film of ice turned pale purple under overcast skies.
At the end of January, I went back to Montpelier, where the Volvo was, and stayed for a week before I drove to Michigan. There was a snowstorm the night before I flew in, and this time I wasn’t charmed – I was beguiled. The plane flew over snow fields sown with boxy brick houses and miniature fences. I watched two dark smudges drift around and wondered if they were horses, residents of a red barn whose size eclipsed the nearby house. I felt light again. My mind emptied, and in the quiet, the artist returned. For the first time since November, I wrote in my head. The dramatist surfaced from the film of sweat she’d languished beneath and picked up her baton.
This is how the snow began its beguilement, from 30,000 feet in the air. I love snow, I thought. White, cold, simple. It fell without discrimination. It covered the sad brown landscape I watched beneath the plane when I left. Now those brown trees were all dressed up; a bride in white and sparkling diamonds.
After not writing for two months, I returned to my Cozy Room in Downtown Montpelier and took a really hot shower, so hot my skin felt like leather when I got out, and I let my brain dig deep into my fantasy world and plant some seeds. When I got out, I’d written something on the back of my eyelids.
Three days later, the snow was getting brown as the dead November hills. Three days later, my boots and gloves were trapped in a Volvo covered by two months of snow and ice. Three days later, I had felt the cut of negative thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. But I was enchanted.
When you’re from the rainiest state in the continental US, the way snowflakes dance and swirl is so foreign it feels like magic. It feels like science you pretend not to understand. I imagined that every snowflake was alive and choosing a unique path from cloud to ground.
That week in Vermont, I wrote 7,000 words.
Houghton, MI
February and March
Houghton, MI is on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which sticks out in Lake Superior like a shark fin. It’s pretty much as north as the country gets, and it’s got the snow to show for it.
My dad flew into Burlington so we could drive to Houghton together. He sat next to me in his burnt orange quarter-zip fleece, perfectly paternal hands resting on the stitched leather steering wheel of the Volvo, and drove us through a thousand miles of snow. I queued requested albums – mostly 70s, but with a dash of 80s and Lady Gaga – and typed and typed.
We slept in Ohio and then kept driving, and crossed the Mackinaw Bridge in early evening on the second day. Darkness fell upon us, and so did a snowstorm.
Steely Dan filled the silence in our car. Snow did fall indiscriminately, and the only way to find the road under the whiteness was the rumble strip on each side of the lane and the on-and-off assistance of taillights. The headlights illuminated nothing but a wall of swirling snow. We stopped under the bright blue and red blessing of a Holiday gas station’s neon sign for dinner, Andy Capp’s and a chicken salad sandwich.
Before Baton Rouge, my dad lived in Fort Collins, Boulder, and Ann Arbor. We made it to his sister’s house on Ravine Side Drive in my front-wheel drive SUV, through a snowstorm, at night, with no snow tires.
“You’re too close,” Beller would say in my writing critiques. He wouldn’t let me write about my brother, because everything I wrote about him was too soft. You need distance to be a cynic, to tear apart what made you feel something and sew it up anew. Whatever perverseness makes writers mock and overexpose the things that are meaningful to them is the secret to writing that packs a punch. "Write what you want to hide,” Lazar would say.
So I can’t write about Houghton. It was too perfect and I won’t try to spoil it.
In February, I wrote 15,000 words.
The first two weeks of March I took a vacation to visit Kayla, and then Renee. The last two weeks I was back in Houghton and wrote 18,000. I was a maniac. I did nothing but write.
I’m a focused person. Inertia constantly has me in its grip; I am languishing at the start of something, but when a job is begun I let all else suffer. I do not multitask and I cannot task switch. I do not begin or end. But in that sweet in-between, how the world hangs still: as time falls away so do the anxieties of what’s next, and what’s passed, and you are required to be and do nothing more than the present moment. In Houghton, I was unstuck in time.
I drove south, and it took me three months to write the next 10,000 words.
Baton Rouge, LA
April, May, June
Maybe I begin hibernating in April, when I drive south across the Michigan border and arrive one day later in the balmy spring of Webster Parish. I leap into the arms of my future husband and the northern things pass away.
I return to Baton Rouge, and months speed by in a haze of wedding planning, quidditch trips, and substitute teaching. My brain fills with third grade and pthalo blue; the difference between intercept and trees defense.
But still, I write.
June 1st
I am an artist. To me that means I’m emotional and forthcoming, I’m an organized mess, I’m creative and hardworking and I’m easily stressed. I’m not good at multitasking and I’m good at doing the same thing for six hours straight. It means I can’t cook or maintain a sleep schedule, and it means that I can always come up with at least one crisis that’s driving me to create art with a fervor. I am an artist, but who you are doesn’t usually matter as much as what you do.
What do I do? I write. Yeah, I write, even when it’s shit and I can’t sleep and I don’t eat and I’m planning a wedding and pissing off my parents, I write. Because I am an artist, and that doesn’t change, but to be a writer, I have to write. Even when what’s really just burn out and writer’s block feels like a fundamental deficiency that will cause me to fail at my career, I write.
June 15th
Writing is hard.
I could leave it at that, and that would be enough. But it would also mean I’m very bad at my job, and the whole point of art is to never just leave it at that.
This is why I’m at a loss for words when someone asks what my book is about. I have no doubt that if you read it, you could sum it up in two sentences. But for me, the whole reason it’s 68,702 words right now is because I can’t sum it up in two sentences.
To me, my book is about depression. But that’s a terrible way to describe it for anyone else that isn’t me. That’s what’s beautiful about art.
One of the first rules I learned in workshop was “let your writing speak for itself.” One of the most important rules I learned was “art does not equal artist.” I, the artist, take a bunch of shit from inside of me and outside of me, pile it up in the corner of my brain, and I squint at it long enough to see a shape. Then I do that over and over again for months, until that corner of my brain feels just as much like hell as like home. What comforts me is that when it’s done, it doesn’t matter what it’s about or how I feel about it. It will speak for itself, and the only terrible thing it can do is to say nothing. I’d rather a reader hate it than feel nothing about it at all.
So rest assured, that even though that corner of my brain that I go to for six hours a day is burning me alive, I’m making art that will say something. I don’t know what it will say to you yet, but I’m very excited to find out.
Because one thing is for sure — both me and my book are tired of hearing my own voice. When I’m finished, my book will be ready to speak to you, and to listen to what you say back.
Springhill, LA
July
On July sixteenth, I finished my book in Springhill, Louisiana, just three weeks after Nick and I were married.
Last July, in a cabin in the woods, I asked myself to be a writer. I was in residency at Studio in the Woods, and it was the first time I’d felt the lightness that followed me to Montpelier and to Houghton. I made my first blog post from the Writer’s Cabin, and wrote Was it the quiet, the darkness, or knowing that when I woke up no would expect anything except myself?
This year of asking myself to be a writer has come and gone. I was Cinderella, September, a potter. Sometimes I was magic, sometimes I was banging a shoe against my head. So much I have created, and so much I have destroyed. My words whispered and my words sang, and through it all I became what I had set out to be. Last July, I wrote:
It’s okay to write 3000 words to find 15 that really glow. Good news, because I’ve got nearly 10,000 words on my page and I think only 1000 glow.
This July, I’ve found 80,000 that really glow. They’re not perfect, no, but they’re a book. My book.
And I am a writer.
