By way of explanation, I described the circumstances of my present life, circumstances that became clear to me today:

“My world now consists of only three places: my bedroom, in a converted garage/carriage house behind a 19th century town house (not a row, but a structure that is neither mansion nor farmhouse) where Pearl Street becomes Clay Hill Road in Johnson; the dining hall, one block south and across the bridge, where I eat three filling but boring meals a day and work ten hours a week (four dinner shifts) wiping tables and dishing up the boring food; and my studio, another block south, a narrow room about the size of the desk half of my Aerie. I feel like no part of me exists except the writer who moves back and forth from one of these places to the other. I don’t remember what my life was like before I got here. I am not at all sure what it will be like when I return.”

At left you see the Maverick Writing Studios building on the campus of the Vermont Studio Center, on the south bank of the Gihon River in the town of Johnson. It was built only a few years ago, designed to blend in with the old millworks buildings that comprise the original campus, and is well-appointed. Each room has a large desk, an adjustable office chair, a reading chair, a bookcase, adequate lighting, and wired high-speed Internet service. Each of the sixteen writing studios has a view of the river. My room is on the second floor, the fourth one in after the window in the stairwell that is obscured by the tree.

From this angle, it does look a little like the chicken houses you can see from I-283 in Lancaster County at home. Or like a cell block.

This is my third writer’s residency. Each facility and each program has had its own personality, and I have been a different person in relationship to the work that got me there for each one. This place is the biggest on terms of how many people are here — sixteen writers and thirty-seven artists. And it has the most programming — a nonfiction writer was here last week to give talks and read manuscripts, and fiction writer Antonya Nelson, who was the draw for me, will be here next week. I am in the middle of more creative energy than I was at my other two residencies, I’ve made some tentative friendships (at my other two residencies, both with only five or six other people, people rarely talked to me, and one was openly hostile, rolling her eyes and making sarcastic comments on much of what I said or did), and I’ve been enormously productive. And yet I feel isolated and on edge.

Maybe it’s the nature and the intensity of the work I have been able to do. Last week I arrived at an expanded and improved draft of a story called “Bad Girls.” Yesterday I began work on a story that I have always considered my best work-in-progress. It achieved its present form in 2004 and hasn’t changed much since. I pulled it apart and started writing into it, adding dimension to the characters, tension to their relationships.

For me, writing fiction means not just writing about my characters, but becoming them. I’ve been working an aggregate of seven or eight solid hours a day on the fiction. Last week I was a twelve-year-old girl who fears the changes that she is stepping into. This week I am a forty-year-old math teacher who has every happiness he ever wanted, yet is putting it at risk to pursue a long-ago relationship that never became what he wanted.
Maybe that’s why I feel disoriented, not myself, and a little lost.

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