Waking Up in April
Last April, I woke up in Vermont. It was a confluence of generosity and good timing that I was able to spend a whole month at the Vermont Studio Center, an artist and writers’ residency. Waking up was so different there. My room was simple: a bedroom in a shared little farmhouse, with a twin bed, a bright green dresser, a school desk, and an armchair in the corner with a pilly, flat throw pillow. It lacked so many of the comforts of my apartment in Brooklyn: no girlfriend, no cats, no television, no couch to stretch out on. But immediately, I found that courting simplicity was intoxicating. My life was boiled down to quiet, creative work, and deliberate conversations with other creative people.
Vermont in the morning was cold but bright. I would pull on jeans and a sweater, wrestle my snow boots on, and walk the short distance to the mill where they served breakfast. There was always a thin crust of snow on the ground, that would melt by the afternoon, only to appear again each day. Outside there would be a riot of birds chirping against the stillness. It took an absence of New York noise for me to appreciate what true morning could be. In Brooklyn, there were birds on my block when I left for work in the morning, but they were layered against the traffic on Nostrand, the hiss of a bus kneeling at a bus stop, sirens competing over the din of a garbage truck. Vermont was quiet in a way that made my ears ring. And there was so much space in Vermont: space in front of me, space above me. I would stand on the porch for a moment before setting out and just be still. I had developed such habits of rushing and plotting in New York, agility a great asset. The first thing I did in Vermont was slow down. The second thing I did was repair my relationship to writing.
My destination each day was my tiny writing studio in a building overlooking the river. The building was library quiet, and I had filled my studio with books shipped from home, messy drafts, tin cans full of pens and pencils. The first few days in the studio, I opened my laptop and merely looked back at the documents I had been working on. I always kept a document called Notes, where I would write until I found the vein of whatever story I would work on next. For months beforehand, I had told myself I wasn’t writing. I berated myself. I complained bitterly about what a lazy writer I was. Depression had crept into my year, making it all the harder to write and all the easier to hate myself. By the time I got to that studio, I carried the deafening fear that I would waste the whole month. That I would fail. That I had lost writing. But what I found, in those still mornings, was that I had been writing. The short spurts, the hard-won half-hours of writing, the false starts - I had filled an entire document with stories I had forgotten about. Even as I told myself I wasn’t writing, in the attempts I made, I had been writing. I relaxed into forgiveness. My perspective was so out of whack.
Writing is easier to romanticize than it is to do. I like it more as a fantasy than as a verb. I make such little time for myself to go to my writing desk that often when I do get there, the books and the notes and the knick knacks are coated in thin dust. How do I bring Vermont back to Brooklyn? How do I filter the chaos out of my mornings?
Before I got depressed, my routine in the morning had always been the same: I listened to Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” in the shower, dancing and lip syncing my way through the song. The song was my favorite, and I could picture the album cover on a cassette tape in my childhood. But once depressed, I could barely drag myself to the shower, let alone enjoy it. I wanted a change, but I couldn’t name the change. I needed a plan but couldn’t imagine anything beyond each long, exhausting day. Friends helped me create a plan to say yes to the month long residency in Vermont. It would require time off, and fundraising to pay the tuition, and a huge leap of faith that time (and money) spent on being alone as a writer would benefit me. The train to Vermont was nine hours long. I sat by the window and watched the states change, the light change. When I arrived in Vermont, it was promising and dark.
Then I woke up there, and I was certain I had taken the correct leap of faith.
On the town’s tiny main street was a pizza joint, a wings place, a hair salon, and a karaoke bar. On Saturday nights, all the artists and writers jammed into the bar. By the second week, we stayed late enough to close the place down. On our way back to our houses, some of us went instead to the lounge, in the basement of the mill, situated so its windows overlooked the river. A hip fabric artist plugged her phone into the speakers of the small stereo and pumped up the volume.
The first song she chose was Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know.”
There in the lounge I danced in a tight circle with an exuberant bunch of artists, all of us singing along, waving our arms, hair bouncing, eyes closed. Someone brought a tray of glasses filled with water from the cafeteria and we cheered. It was after three in the morning. I felt light years from the girl who had struggled through fall, through winter and woken up in Vermont. You can never know what time passing will look like until it is gone.
Here is April, once again.
xoxo,
c
P.S.
* April 30th is Independent Bookstore Day! There are a ton of awesome things to do, including a special edition of The Hustle at WORD Brooklyn at 2pm. C'mon out for good writers, good conversation, donuts and mimosas!
* Today nominations are open for the 2016 National Book Awards (*book award emoji*). At 10am Publisher's Weekly will have the full scoop, including the twenty incredible judges who will be choosing this year's Longlist, Finalists, and Winners.
* A friend reminded me yesterday of this rosemary olive oil cake recipe, one of the first cakes I baked when I started baking. It's so simple and so divine.
* Speaking of writing: Mridu Khullar Relph's newsletter The International Freelancer is an excellent source of tough love and inspiration.
* I'm reviewing Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman for Lambda Literary, and it's the best book I've read so far in 2016.
* Here are two cats enjoying the company of a snail.