bad deed: on not writing at a writing residency

artist residencies are very lax affairs. it’s a bit like a meritorious old boy’s club. you submit your portfolio and if the mysterious gods of a wealthy foundation for frivolity like it, you’re in and no longer have to prove yourself. residencies are meant to give time and space simply to create, no expectations whatsoever (no presh). the mundane affairs of life are taken care of, where to sleep and what to eat, like you’re a teenager again, but the chef, unlike your mother, is very nurturing but hands-off, she knows you’re a self-directed nerd. you are given your meals and assigned a room that you can’t quite home-improve because it’s not really yours, and so ideally are not distracted by online shopping for new dresser knobs.

residencies are usually free, or sliding-scale, which means lawyers moonlighting as novelists might pay a lot for this time and space and the company of other artists who make less money, a.k.a. me. (they are basically paying for the privilege of spending time with ME!) though you don’t even need to participate in the group meals; you can request a plate of dinner to your room and not talk to a soul all day, which at least one badass is doing here on the regular. “i’m a friendly ghost,” she says, sparingly, in our Whatsapp group chat.

i have been living in a mansion in a suburb north of chicago for the past two weeks with eleven other artists who remembered the deadline for an application many months ago—mostly writers because we don’t need much studio space—and supposedly at least two real ghosts. the ghosts, everybody says in the letters to future residents they leave behind, are very encouraging of your creative endeavors. the mansion was once an architect’s summer home and the architect had a thing for artists: his mother was a painter, his wife a poet. their children ended up writers and sculptors; thank goodness for their generational wealth. he built his wife a tiny hobbit hole of a cabin on the property for her to write in and now i feel like i can’t write unless someone builds me a cabin.

i am envious of the people who request solo plates for dinner, or are even a bit brusque because 80% of their brain is taken up by their project and social niceties used to be part of the 80%. i linger in the kitchen, making tea. i want to walk on the surrounding prairie and pretend i’m in england (the architect was obsessed with england and created a bunch of “english country paths”). i want to either be a total ghost but feel no fomo or overdress for dinner. (residencies tend to be somewhere rural with no one to impress and not much going on, aka the ideal conditions for being crazy bored or making stuff.) i want to meditate all day, which is the productive way of being crazy bored.

the most enjoyable and prolific writing i’ve ever done was on a 10-day meditation retreat in which all reading and writing and even speaking was banned. they locked away your electronics at the beginning. you weren’t allowed to talk to anyone except occasionally the teachers and the retreat coordinator and of course yourself. you were left, simply, with your mind and its thoughts, and i realized, by day 2.5, that all my thoughts, without outside input or distractions, were basically the same, the same five worries, the similar odd desires that come and go (for me, often food and little luxuries—what can I say? besides I’m a taurus). i spent at least an hour at that meditation retreat crying on my cushion over how much i missed Chinese pork products: char siu, that perfect barbeque, and of course soup dumplings.

we weren’t allowed to write but i had snuck in a notebook and pen in the lining of my suitcase—the part that exposed the inner hardware—and i wrote in the in-between times, 350am before the gong rang to wake up for 430 meditation, during the lunch break, the tea break, by flashlight after dark, furtively in a corner, so my scrivening shadow would not be suspicious through the window.

we meditated 10 hours a day and when i had grown bored of my same old thoughts i started to have new ones. these i wrote down with increasing fervor. writing is so delicious when it’s forbidden; i imagine it must be what masturbation feels like for a monk. what the religions got right was the introduction of taboo: there needs to be boundaries first for those boundaries to be transgressed, secrets for the birth of secret titillations. elizabeth gilbert suggested in big magic, her manual on creativity, to treat your writing as if it were an affair: with an affair, you don’t care about the proper time and place of things, you can really work with fifteen minutes in a stairwell. sometimes i pretend i grew up a chasid so that, walking around the world, i can marvel at elbows and ankles, at the casual eye contact and handshakes betwixt genders.

i’m still not sure what i wrote exactly in those 10 days, what new thoughts i had, i remember only the delight of them and the fact that i filled a whole notebook. i am afraid, actually, to look, in case they are like the insights of drugs or dreams, flat without embodiment. i think i’ll have to go to a retreat where i am explicitly forbidden to organize things, perhaps a retreat where you can only create new things, soul furnace for the old.

i am meditating here, in lieu of writing, and maybe it’s not so bad, but it feels a little bad, a good kind of bad. i’m doing much worse things too, like watching netflix late at night on volume 1, so no one passing in the halls will know i’m being unproductive. a korean dating show in which all the candidates have the most incredible CVs in addition to being hot, confirming my worst fears that my mother’s right. and here i am, writing about not writing. here i am, taking naps and in that mysterious realm between sleeping and waking, feeling like i will be found out, someone will barge in the door at 3pm and catch me not working, but maybe i could still defend myself to the residency police: i’m meditating, i would explain from my prone position in the sheets. no one truly knows what’s happening inside, though i would still know. i keep wondering if other people are being good. i keep wondering what it is about me that has me perpetually looking for the opposite of should.