For a week, I’m lucky to be staying at the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, tucked in Johnson, Vermont, with writers and visual artists. A word, first: like anyone in this culture driven to create art, I’ve been swimming upstream (clumsily) for what seems like most of my life. But this magical place offers notsomuch an antidote but an alternative possibility.
In one way, I feel like I’m a college student at tiny rural Marlboro College again, eating communal meals with the same cohort, attending presentations, talking and so much talking. How’s your book going? What are you doing with copper? So many interesting people writing and sculpting and painting. But, like everyone else here, I’m far beyond college age, using my studio hours fiercely.
In my studio building, a former resident wrote in a communal notebook about arriving worn down from the grind of capitalism, and how rejuvenated she left after her stay here. I’ve long realized that our capitalist model often draws out the mean and petty strands of us, like a competitive gardening streak that weirdly surfaced in a long-ago baby group I attended. Which serves, of course, exactly no one at all. For this bit of time and space, I’m savoring this dear space, where my back is watched, and I can do my work.
… Last, thank you all for your notes and emails since my mother’s death. My father recently uploaded his memoir, 87 years of his indisputably distinct life.
Stony Soil Vermont 
Enjoy your time there! Magic happens.
I will!
Sounds heavenly. Your dad’s memoir looks wonderful. Not that a gypsy visited me as a newborn but the general effects noted in Amazon’s summary are very relatable to me.
My dad’s had an interesting life, for sure. Some by his own doing, some not so much.
I too would prefer a reality that doesn’t include the mean and petty strands of competitive capitalism….how and where to escape it is the problem.
Let me know when you’ve cracked this problem, please…,
Sounds like a lovely place for an artist’s retreat.
It’s enchanting, really, and the meals are delicious.
This looks like a wonderful place to be.
Temporary reprieve from the rough world….
We all need that sometime or another.
I haven’t been to a writers retreat in–well, it’s decades now, but I remember it as supportive and wonderful. And noncompetitive. Wishing we could all have that at some time in our lives. Or at all times in our lives, come to think of it.
All times in our lives would be wonderful.