CREATIVE NONFICTION 81This was Art Farm. I found myself
there almost by accident. In the whirl
of applying for jobs and fellowships
for post-MFA life, I had included a
handful of funded residencies, to which
I applied both because I thought I was
supposed to and because the idea of
escaping from my mundane and hectic
everyday life to focus on writing was
romantically appealing.
At the beginning, I tried to embrace
the sparseness of Art Farm—the alien
landscape, the heat that lay on the earth
like the hand of an angry god, the rustic
living arrangements. Maybe something
beautiful would come from the
nothingness. I thought of Art Farm as
a kind of vision quest, where personal
agonies ripped the curtain between
consciousness and subconsciousness and
the wellspring of creativity would lie
before me for the taking.
But a week in, unable to nap in the
afternoon heat, I realized that I was
discouraged. Discouraged by the loneli-
ness, the heat, the flies, the landscape
without anywhere to walk, my fellow
artists who I tried, tried talking to.
I thought about how I had to drive
into town to be around people and air
conditioning and normal life. I decided
that I needed regular life to steel me
against the aloneness of writing, to fuel
my creativity, to prop me up for the
long, lonely hours at a desk.
residencies are highly competi-
tive among writers and other artists,
who see them as a refuge, a place apart
from everyday life. The idea is you’ll
be able to be more productive in a
magical place where you can create for
weeks on end, without interruption.
Composer and writer Jan Swafford
wrote about his experience at numer-
ous residencies for Slate in an attempt
to illuminate what it’s like to actually
be in a sought-after place like Yaddo
or MacDowell: “So all day you make
art. You are alone with your words or
notes or images, your heart and soul
and whatnot.” Who doesn’t want that?
It sounds perfect. Even now, even
after the disaster that was Art Farm, I
can easily imagine myself in a castle in
Scotland writing all day long.
Of course, artists were not the first
to retreat from society to be alone
with their work, with their heart and
soul and whatnot. Every religion has
its ascetics. Some early Christians left
human society altogether, living as
hermits. Monasteries and nunneries are
less extreme expressions of the sameprinciple. Even common believers may
take refuge in temporary retreats.
And what of science and other studies?
Academia is seen as occupying a privi-
leged space disconnected from everyday
life— the “Ivory Tower” even connotes
a physical separation. Besides being
considered elitist, academics’ research is
assumed to be isolated from the practical
problems of regular on-the-ground life.
But to what extent do isolation and
solitude actually breed creativity or
purity or deeper thought?
Colin Wilson’s 1956 book, The
Outsider, asserts that creative geniuses
(van Gogh, Nietzsche, Kafka) more
often than not live as outsiders—separate
from everyday life and alienated from
their peers. This idea still prevails in
Western society: The Outsider has never
been out of print, and numerous other
books (Quiet) and articles (“Outside
Advantage: Can Social Rejection Fuel
Creative Thought?”) have focused on thealienation and isolation prevalent in the
life of creative types. But there are also
those who challenge the idea. A 1995
paper in the Journal of Humanistic Psychol-
ogy, “Deconstructing the Lone Genius
Myth: Toward a Contextual View of
Creativity,” argued that individuals can
never be entirely separated from social
and historical contexts and that “creativ-
ity can be sparked by interactions.”
For me, the whole point of Art Farm
was the chance to write as much as pos-
sible with as few distractions as possible.
Biting horseflies are a distraction, I assure
you. I began toying with the idea ofleaving early. That meant giving up, ad-
mitting defeat, not being able to hack it.
Damn it, though—I’d given the place a
fair chance. I’d been there a week, during
which I’d struggled against the isolation,
the nothingness, the sparseness, the insect
infestations... and what I discovered
was that the Art Farm’s particular variety
of monasticism was not for me.
My boyfriend was flying into Omaha
the following weekend, when my
two-week Art Farm residency would be
at an end. The plan was for me to pick
him up at the airport and we’d road trip
back to Pittsburgh together. I drove to
Omaha a week early and checked into a
La Quinta. I felt guilty when I left, but it
didn’t take long for that guilt to dissipate.
I was still devoting a week to my writ-
ing, I reasoned, just in an air-conditioned
hotel room. In addition to writing at a
small desk connected to the wall, I read
and napped and did exercise videos—
venturing out only for food. In essence,Do isolation and solitude actually
breed creativity or purity or
deeper thought?