Work in Progress

It is hard to explain what it feels like to know that when you get up in the morning you can just sit and write — a journal, poetry, prose — all day long until you are too tired to pick up a pencil or sit at a keyboard, until your ability to put words together cohesively slips from your fingers — not from the fatigue of a long day at a job but from a long day of words bumping up against each other as they struggle to get from your brain to the page.

— Valentine Pierce

Following the Alliance of Artists Communities’ newsletter series “Residency Experiences,” we’ve asked artists to contribute stories while in-residence, chronicling the creative process, the personal challenges, and the artistic discoveries during their residencies.

MacDowell Time

Posted april 14, 2008 by Anonymous

To the outsider’s eye, the day at MacDowell appears to be quite regimented: the breakfast bell, the dinner bell, the surreptitious yet punctual arrival of one’s lunch basket. Yet if life at MacDowell is ostensibly shaped around meals (the comradely quiet of breakfast, the solitary lunch, the often animated dinner), the days themselves, the hours around and between those meals, have a weird exhilarating elasticity. And time can, and does, stop at MacDowell: One morning in April of 1986, a small group of us sat at the breakfast table eating oranges and toast while huge clumps of spring snow fell outside, and we all swore it was 8:40 for about 20 minutes.

Work in Progress

MacDowell Time

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