Bookplanet: writers colonies - best work done at MacDowell, most sex at Yaddo

What I Did at Summer Writers’ Camp -- by RACHEL DONADIO

For writers, nothing compares with that rare feeling of isolation and immersion where work begins to seep into every corner of your life. Hence that most coveted retreat: the artists’ colony. Part monastery, part summer camp, colonies give writers a clean, well-lighted room of their own, three square meals a day and a few dozen creative types to share them with. It’s a strange chemistry — artists alone, together. And just imagine the possibilities for capture the flag! Abstract vs. figurative painters, writers of nonlinear narratives vs. composers whose chords never resolve, nature poets vs. urban photographers. Quirky and bucolic, artists’ colonies have given rise to friendships, rivalries, and more than a few torrid love affairs.

In the United States, the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., are considered the gold standard. With its 32 cabin-studios in the woods, MacDowell is said to foster an austere New England work ethic, while Yaddo, on a 400-acre estate not far from the Saratoga racetrack, has a more urbane feel. Both provide room and board for 30 or so artists, including writers, visual artists, musicians and composers at all stages of their careers. They are accepted for residencies of up to two months a year based on a sample of their work and letters of recommendation, and attendance is free. (MacDowell and Yaddo, like most colonies, are nonprofit organizations that rely on private philanthropic largess.) They have limited phone and Internet access and don’t allow guests, children or pets; significant others can attend only if they’ve also applied and been accepted.

“For me there’s no substitute,” the novelist Michael Chabon said in a phone interview, as one of his four young children screamed in the background. Chabon and his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, take turns going to the MacDowell colony for two-week stretches each year. “The work just becomes the center of your entire existence,” Chabon said. “You can’t be a good parent and have your work be the center of your entire existence. They’re mutually exclusive.” Chabon has written important parts of his last three books there: “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” “The Final Solution” and his forthcoming novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Waldman has been similarly productive. “The last time I was at MacDowell I wrote a 70,000-word draft of a novel,” she said, referring to “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,” which appeared this year. “I was completely inspired, I’ve never written like that before or since.”

The novelist Jeffrey Eugenides worked on “Middlesex” at MacDowell. “The first day or two, of course, all you do is sleep. You sleep and feel guilty,” he wrote in an e-mail message.“But then the solitude, the quiet, settles over you (especially in the woods) — and you get a lot done.” At MacDowell, attendees must get permission to visit one another’s studios. Jill Ciment, a writer who attended in the mid-80’s, said she came to believe the rule existed “not because we’d interrupt creativity, but because we’d find each other either sleeping or crying.” Indeed, some find the solitude jarring. “It’s like adjusting to a new time zone,” the novelist Roxana Robinson said. When she first arrived at MacDowell, she faced “a kind of frozen horror, the fear that I couldn’t do what I was meant to be doing there. ... With the absence of all the obstacles you’re used to, there’s a sort of existential terror. That can be alarming.”

Many writers say they like to bring work already under way. “I would never want to start a new project at a colony,” Alice Sebold, the author of “The Lovely Bones,” said via e-mail. “That would be too intimidating, as you are surrounded on all sides by other artists working. I find it best to be in the middle of a project with some issues to resolve.”

MacDowell attendees wax weirdly rhapsodic about the bag lunch that’s delivered silently to the studio door each day; its arrival becomes a way to gauge your progress or mark the passage of time. The day is “reduced to little things,” Chabon said. “Your lunch comes, maybe the hot water goes out in the shower, somebody sees a deer. These tiny incidents start to loom very large, even what’s in your sandwich,” he said. “Every so often we sound like a bunch of old people taking the water somewhere.”

Sebold found it amusing that some complain of weight gain. “If there is one place you might be able to leave that level of vanity behind it’s in the middle of the woods covered by long underwear and lumpy sweaters,” she said. “I do find those who come and try to use one of these places as a networking experience — sort of an N.Y.C. cocktail party but with duck boots — pretty hilarious.”

At Yaddo, the tenor varies with the seasons. In the summer heat it can become “like a Tennessee Williams play, where you just want to sit around and drink cold things,” said A.M. Homes, who worked on her last three novels at Yaddo. “The summer builds to a point in August at which it’s pretty social. Autumn is intensely beautiful; it gets much quieter and more reflective. I personally like the rainy season in May, when it’s raining and freezing cold and I get enormous amounts of work done.”

But we all know what else happens in a Tennessee Williams play, albeit offstage. There’s even a saying: the sex is better at Yaddo but the work is better at MacDowell. But attendees report plenty of intrigue at both. The writer David Leavitt said he struck up an important friendship with Jill Ciment at MacDowell in 1985. “We met because we were the only people there who weren’t having affairs,” Leavitt said. Eugenides met his wife, the sculptor Karen Yamauchi, at MacDowell. “It was difficult to get to know her,” he wrote. “For one thing, she spent most of her time working in her cabin. There was also another woman there, an experimental filmmaker, who wanted to keep us apart. This filmmaker hadn’t read my first novel” — “The Virgin Suicides” — “but objected to its title. She and a few other women banded together, telling Karen that I wasn’t to be trusted. This increased my appeal immeasurably, and we were married a year and a half later.”

Some writers have been known to spend months hopping from colony to colony. The novelist Elissa Schappell said she found the down-home Ucross Foundation, in Clearmont, Wyo., blissfully free of “that peculiar strain of male writer who seems to just bum from colony to colony like some 50’s-era Riviera playboy, reliant on the kindness of patrons and others’ praise,” as she put it in an e-mail message. “While he may write/paint/compose he spends long happy hours playing pool/Ping-Pong, reading his day’s work aloud on the porch, and attempting to ensnare others in romantic dramas and erotic flirtations, which may spark the creative flame but ultimately take up too much valuable work time.” Not that there aren’t other distractions. “One morning I was awoken at 5 by a bunch of renegade cows that had busted through the barbed wire. It was sublime.”

Colonies have also figured in some writers’ work. Lorrie Moore’s harrowing short story “Terrific Mother,” in her collection “Birds of America,” is set at a thinly fictionalized Bellagio, the Rockefeller Foundation’s study center on Lake Como. In “Envy,” an essay that appeared in Granta in 2003, Kathryn Chetkovich wrote about her fraught romance with a novelist far more successful than she — the unnamed but clearly recognizable Jonathan Franzen — whom she met at a writers’ colony. (“He played pool after dinner in the barnlike common room of the colony, and I would watch him through the window of the phone-booth door as I made my nightly call to my parents across the country in California.”)

Because children aren’t allowed, colonies tend to attract the younger and the older. “I was at Yaddo once with Robert Stone, who’d been there 25 years earlier,” Eugenides said. “He kept saying that, for him, it was like being in that James story, ‘The Jolly Corner.’ He kept meeting his own ghost.” Eugenides was at Yaddo in 1996 when the composer Louise Talma died in her sleep, just shy of her 90th birthday. “She was the meanest person I’d ever met, hugely talented, I’m told, and she died. After a reading by Sarah Schulman, and one whiskey,” he said. “She left all her money to MacDowell.”

(Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the NY Times Book Review.)