2023-09-27 - 10:00 a.m.

Every couple of years, if they let me in, I go down to an artist residency in the Virginia foothills. It's a lucky thing. Invariably, on night two or three, a conversation with a quiet poet about what's for dinner or the weather or the small town they're from and then the next morning, out in your studio, you look them up and they're a twice-nominated National Book Award finalist. Just back now and glad to be back to my life.

But you're there for the quiet and I got more fresh writing done in those eight days than I had in the previous half a year. So it's a luxury, and I miss it. The time but the people, too. The novelists, the poets, the composers, the painters, everyone at night going for a slice of the cheesecake and then in the morning off to their room where they dream up something that you might hear about later but also you might not.

And the one poet from New York but who taught in Pittsburgh for thirty years, who you last saw just before the pandemic, who's using a cane now, who's got hearing aids in now, whose thumbs and knuckles are a little more twisted now but who did that reading on night five, a little shaky, but she still did it, and how in a life there are many different ways to end up and why not that one?

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